The MaxSpect Ethereal LED is a new flagship aquarium light fixture which reinforces MaxSpects strengths in design, engineering and innovation. It’s easy to give the Ethereal a cursory glance and lump it with the basic, square-designed LED lights, but there’s so much more to the Ethereal LED upon closer inspection.
The first big innovation of the Etheral LED is MaxSpect’s new cooling design which passes air through the top and bottom surface of the light, which together sandwich each LED cluster for a ridiculous amount of cooling potential. The patent-pending cooling design is so efficient that MaxSpect is able to load upwards of 200 watts of LEDs in the Ethereal design even though they’ll always keep it lower just to have a healthy margin of extra cooling.
The second major change in design being introduced in the Ethereal is the use of of a specially configured multi-core LED die with up to four channels of color control. The “multichip” used in the MaxSpect Ethereal LED is more like five discrete diodes placed very close together and since they are backed up with a reflector instead of a lens, the color mixing is nearly perfectly blended – no disco ball effect here.
Finally, we love the MaxSpect Razor and the color it produces but if there’s one thing really lacking is the access to more advanced controls, beyond the basic ones provided by the built in controller. The MaxSpect Ethereal will be endowed with wireless connectivity which is compatible with PC, iOS and Android platforms and will allow fast and intuitive programming using a modern graphical user interface.
What was most surprising to us when we visited the MaxSpect Interzoo booth is that all of the Ethereal LED fixtures looked really nice, surprisingly so, even though they were all prototypes and the final manufacturing finishes and touches had not yet been applied. The simple screws will be replaced with more decorative and smaller ones, the big wireless antenna will get transformed into a short attractive fin, and every aspect of the light will be carefully reviewed before a final fixture is released.
The build quality of the prototype Ethereal LEDs from MaxSpect already carry with them a look of a very solid build quality, not unlike a MacBook Air, even though this is not a unibody construction it sure does bear a lot of resemblance. Full details of models, LED colors, the mobile apps, availability and pricing are still very much up in the air but the MaxSpect Ethereal LED is positively an LED light to keep an eye on because if the MaxSpect Razor is any indication, the Ethereal LED is likely to spawn its own generation of imitators.
