By Rob Halliday
There are three key things you should know about Avolites’ new, flagship Diamond 9 lighting console. One, it looks amazing. Like the best big boards of classic days (many of them made by Avolites) you want to stand behind it and operate it; want to be
seen standing behind it operating it. A glance at the pictures tells you it’s cool. Real life is better.
Two, a phrase scattered through Avolites’ marketing material and used repeatedly by the company’s Andrew McKinlay and
Koy Neminathan in conversation: “visual designers.” This isn’t just a tool for those turning on and off lights in the traditional
sense, but one for those creating shows where there might be the lighting rig, the environmental lighting, video and
more. It’s all light, of course, but where traditionally different elements might have been handled by different people, there is
a sense that, increasingly, one person might be in control of all of it. That person surely deserves a more all-encompassing
title, and this is a pretty good one. That person surely wants a tool that integrates all of these elements together elegantly. Avo is well-placed to deliver on this through the decade it’s now spent making media servers alongside lighting consoles. The company’s ability to interlink these technically has been present for some years. Diamond 9, you sense, is a tool to achieve this
for an artist, easily accessible in the demanding environment of a live performance.
Three: a chance comment from Avolites’ technical director, JB Toby, talking about the design process behind the Diamond 9, and about how from the earliest moments they engaged with lighting designers about what they wanted from the console.
JB, I suspect, has been less well-briefed on this ‘visual designer’ term than the marketing team, but what struck me as interesting was that he spoke about designers rather than programmers when designing the console. Asked about this,
he was quick to sing the praises of the talents of programmers. But he also noted that generations of lighting designers who’ve seen the Diamond 9 talk excitedly of being able to run their own lighting again. “We are serving the creative market – let LDs
be LDs again, if they want to be” is how he puts it, noting that they want to be at the heart of the show, hands on, able to go with it. He also describes how this leads his work, and so the work of his team: “I keep pushing that we are engineers serving
a creative market. We should not impose engineering on creativity.”
Read the full review at Light and Sound International Magazine
www.avolites.com
Australian Distributor: Showtools www.showtools.com.au
