Let's first ask, what do you expect from a light?
Lighting should be: simple, powerful, and customizable.
With sliders and a lack of guidance, people resort to a variety of sources to tune their lights. This creates problems of its own as no two lights and tanks are alike. With enough variances at the LED level, variability can quickly turn "plug and play" into "slide and pray."
To mitigate this, we took away the guesswork associated with tuning the right spectrum by shipping each cluster with a set of spectrometer verified presets to help you make the most of the upgrades. LUX Engine is also built with tighter binning standards to ensure more consistency in spectral quality (every single cluster is tested for spectrum).
When people set their lights with the stock clusters, depending on the spectrum, a significant amount of power is lost to tuning. With red, green, and cool white sliders that get underutilized, a 55W AI Prime HD gets reduced to a 29W light when tuned to a mimic of the AB+ spectrum.
By unifying the whites in LUX Engine, we incorporate the benefits of red and green without delivering a distracting red “disco.” This also allows us to free up space on the clusters to incorporate more useful colors.
The updates to the clusters enable the lights to emit versions of AB+ spectra with ease without resorting to tuning sliders beyond 100%. But we couldn’t stop there. We made changes to AB+ to improve its spectral quality in ways that exceed many of the flagships, with broader blues, richer whites, and stronger violets that improve fluorescence. All of this is possible when our clusters sense they’re being driven at the same proportionate intensities.
Lastly, coral have a diversity of chlorophylls and accessory pigments. Creating a narrow band blue spectrum would rely too much on the specimens chromatically adapting. Thus, we chose to further tune our clusters to deliver our optimized spectra that blanket virtually all important pigments, exceeding the spectral breadth of successful T5HO arrays.
Two years of trials produced more options for customizability with not one, not two, but three color variants (Blue, Cyan, and Gold) to further tune the lights to your visual preferences. Whether you prefer more blue or more white, there's a cluster for you.
When you upgrade to LUX Engine, you get an improved color palette, more power at spectrum, and perhaps less "slide and pray."
