Earlier this year, Power Plus Productions (P3) of North County San Diego purchased the live production and equipment rental divisions of Salt Lake City-based Performance Audio, establishing the California company’s new satellite presence in the Intermountain West, and as part of the deal, P3 took on a sizeable L-Acoustics inventory and more than doubled its product count in becoming one of the latest L-Acoustics Certified Providers.
P3 is under the direction of President and Owner Lane Rickard who, in 1984, founded his company in Salt Lake City before moving its operations to San Diego five years later. Rickard stocked the location’s loudspeaker inventory with everything from compact X Series coaxials to medium-throw A Series enclosures to large-format K Series products. In total, P3’s growing L-Acoustics lineup now includes more than 100 enclosures in SLC alone.
“In addition to having a sizable K2 and Kara II inventory to handle live music tours and long-term summer rentals for music festivals at Deer Valley and Red Butte Garden, we also needed a diverse inventory of visually unobtrusive systems for the corporate clients that make up a huge portion of our customer base,” Rickard explains. “Conventions, theater, and streaming events require a very different PA approach, so having a deep inventory of A, X and low-profile K Series systems like Kiva II allows the sound to be heard perfectly without being seen. The smaller L-Acoustics enclosures also deliver highly intelligible, even coverage for audiences while staying out of the sightlines of video screens. We want our clients to be the focus of their shows, not our loudspeakers.”
Rickard notes that the products can be deployed in numerous combinations to suit a wide range of layouts and levels of production: “We do such a wide variety of work throughout the year, and our product lineup allows us to go from an intimate acoustic set for a small audience one night to a huge production for 20,000 people the next. It’s never ‘one box fits all,’ and our inventory gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility to accommodate either end of that spectrum as well as everything in between.”
Despite what might have seemed to be a risky financial move made during the global industry downtime, he reports that all of his L-Acoustics systems are presently staying busy, spending almost zero time in the shop. “For the five years prior to Covid, Power Plus was on a steep upward trajectory of growth,” he says. “We knew that L-Acoustics ownership would open the door to many more business opportunities for us, especially in the rapidly growing tech sector of the Intermountain West area, so we invested and even added more staff. It may have seemed crazy, but this summer has quickly proved that it was the right choice. We’ve been slammed since the beginning of June, and have more than doubled the amount of business we were doing back in 2019.”
