But that's not all. If you work in broadcasting, you might know of Orbital as a specialist provider of broadcast communications systems and expertise. If you're involved with museums, heritage and cultural sites, you may know of the company as a proponent of Sennheiser's guidePORT personal tour guide system: during September Orbital will complete a major guidePORT project for Chester Cathedral, which we'll cover in a future issue of L&SI.Chris Headlam, a sound engineer by background and the founder and managing director of Orbital, has a measured, open-minded approach to business that appears to permeate the company's activities. Yet he shuns credit, citing the team of people he has built up around him (something he can't avoid taking credit for) as the secret of Orbital's success.
That team includes Headlam's co-directors Jane Finlay (director of personnel and Orbital's hire manager), Dominic Rozendaal (commercial director) and Sebastian Frost (creative director). Of the other team members, sound designer Simon Whitehorn is currently spending much of his time developing the company's guidePORT operation. Technical support, a vital part of Orbital's service-based philosophy, is looked after by a team of four, Drew Mollison (a theatre sound designer in his own right, and the company's Yamaha PM1D specialist), Tim Sherratt (who heads up the communications division), Bill Addison and Chris Briggs. Stores is another vital area, bearing in mind the £12.5m worth of stock owned by the company, and stores manager Eric Simpson heads a team of seven who organize this vast asset. In all, there are currently 21 full-time staff at the facility in Brixton, south London.
It is a massive investment in stock, and despite the fact that Orbital was to buy its eighth Yamaha PM1D digital front-of-house console the week after my visit, followed by its ninth the week after that (some £90k each), Headlam remains healthily circumspect. He tries to predict what designers will be wanting to use two years from now, but it's not all second-guessing: the company also controls the demand to an extent by 'steering' sound designers in a certain direction, encouraging them to think along new creative lines, to push the envelope, and this has certainly assisted the arrival of digital audio in the West End, in addition to maximizing the return on Orbital's rental stock. Headlam says: "A designer might want us to buy a £5,000 tool for their next show - we might say we're not too happy to go that way, but we're willing to get this one for £7,500 because we believe we'll get far more return on it in the long run. The cheapest way is not normally the best. The designer will be more than happy with that."
Having such a huge stock-holding has presented Orbital with further opportunities. The company's FixIt operation (headed by Tim Sherratt), launched at the ABTT Show earlier this summer, was based on the idea that Orbital's own service and repair facilities (geared to handle looking after 50-odd shows simultaneously) could easily cope with servicing a few hundred grand's worth more gear. So FixIt offers equipment maintenance contracts to venues, rental companies, educational establishments or anyone who wants to farm out the maintenance of their audio stock. I visited Orbital less than three weeks after the launch of FixIt: "We picked up three contracts last week," Headlam revealed.
"I guess there are several reasons why we
