[Daphne Mir (@lekogirl) will be blogging for us all week while she attends the ETC CUE conference. Here are the rest of her posts: Welcome to Cue, ETC Introduces Gio Lighting Console, ETC Debuts LED Source 4, -Jacob]

As part of ETC's CUE conference, I took my first ever tour of the headquarters and factory in Middleton Wisconsin. First: WOW. I've heard so many stories and seen so many photos about the mothership in Middleton, but none of them could come close to preparing me for amazement. So to summarize: no, I cannot begin to do it justice, however this blog hopes to show a fascinating peek at the Electronic Theatre Controls world. And even if I tried, I couldn't begin to spoil the magic.

The headquarters' goal was to house everyone under one roof. With ETC's explosive expansion in 1992 with the Source Four, Sensor Dimming, and Obsession console, the employees were split to many different buildings across Middleton. With employees frequently driving 20 minutes to meetings, and departments fragmented in to collages, it made it hard on the most important part of ETC that's been repeated by many of the ETC team this week: the people. Groups of employees started to be differentiated by the floor of which building they worked, such as a "carpet walker" or "tile walker."

To remedy this and rejoin the community of ETC, they built a new headquarters, large enough to home all employees and any expected expansion for many years. It's located in Middleton, Wisconsin, and remarkably close to the garage where Electronic Theatre Controls started. Entering the front doors is just magical. A set of 1940s New York City engulfs you. The city, constructed from metal scrim serves as a façade for the many offices buzzing behind, a learning hall dressed as PS 8, accounting offices at the bank, and CEO Fred Foster's office on the balcony of the Empire State Building underneath a king kong stuffed animal and airplane. The reception desk is the diner bar from the iconic Hopper painting Nighthawks, and the city features many different pieces from other Edward Hopper paintings.

Stepping through town square (past many tables where ETC employees eat their lunches and meet over coffee) is the factory. Glimmering silver metal Source Four lens tube halves fly by and into the "easy bake oven" where they're baked with that smooth black paint we all know so well. Coils upon coils of dimmers are stacked, powerful orange-red cheerios awaiting processing. Over 90% of ETC's manufacturing is made in the factory, and yet it is unbelievably clean. The reason being--Fred Foster used to walk around bare-foot, and while now he wears the trademark Birkenstocks, the factory is nothing but safety and spotless squeaky-clean. In support of safety, HID Source 4s mark out fork lift and walking paths in colored dichroic gobos.

One person on my tour remarked that as soon as Source 4s were finished they were being bagged and boxed for shipping but was curious about quality control. We visited a large black tent in the middle of the factory, and while we assumed it was production for ETC's newest trick up their sleeve (see my posts on the new console Gio and the Source 4 LED just revealed), it's a dark room for testing each of the components of the Source 4s as soon as they're finished before compiled, yielding 800-1000 Source Fours a day at least. One of the largest manufacturing areas in the factory is dimming. 10,000 to 15,000 dimmer modules are built a month! When ETC surpassed the height of the Sears Tower by stacking dimmer modules, they began searching for new records to beat, but already they have surpassed one and a half times around the earth, and are now counting to the moon. Sensor dimmers stacked reach 1/4 of the way to the moon at this point, and growing fast! Speaking of, the fastest growing department in the factory is Selador, which has gone up exponentially both in manufacturing costs and income.

Other areas of ETC are just as exceptional as Town Square and the factory, but most importantly about the new headquarters? Every floor is concrete.