By Rob Halliday
It’s an interesting game, entertainment lighting control. In global terms, it’s not a huge market – it’s not the iPhone, you’re never going to sell a billion of these things. The range it encompasses is vast, however, from the biggest arena spectaculars down to a show in a school hall. The things they have to control get more complex every year – from dimmers to moving lights to media servers to LEDs – while at the same time the processing demands of the interface continue to grow with the expectation for built-in customisable displays and visualisers.
And while all consoles now are just computers (sometimes, just your laptop), running show lighting places enormous challenges on them, and it’s very obvious if they fail to meet those challenges. Get to that giant crescendo where you want all the lights to bump to full to bring the crowd to their feet, and what you really don’t want to see is the ‘spinny beachball’ while the device goes ‘ah, wait, let me just finish doing this other thing . . .’ Computers working in offices have a pretty easy life in comparison (they also tend not to get packed up and thrown into the back of a truck on a regular basis!).
Yet despite the technical challenges, despite the upper limit on the size of the market, people keep on making lighting control consoles – in fact, making knock-offs of them too! Even more surprisingly, even when it feels like two big players – ETC with its Eos range, MA with the grandMA – have the market somewhat sewn up, others just keep going. Some sit in a particular niche – small shows, or very portable controllers based on phones or tablets. But a few feel like the scrappy little fighters always ready to take on the big guys, maybe to pick up customers by offering something slightly different or better value to gain their own loyal user base. That also puts them right there if someone else stumbles. It doesn’t take much to mess up in this business: look at what happened with the Hog3, or with Strand.
Avolites is one of the players in this area, with a range of smaller consoles but also its premium Diamond 9 platform. ChamSys is another ….
Read the full review at Lighting & Sound International Magazine
www.chamsys.co.uk
Australian Distributor: ULA Group www.ulagroup.com
