Hi Ken, I you are still interested....The original Avolites QM500TD No1 console is now sitting on the stage of Cargilfield Prep School in Edinburgh. It arrived today 18th October 2011 in a somewhat road worn looking flight case. [Relic guitar lovers would love it]. In 1985, not long after I took over as the Head of Lighting at Opera North, I commissioned Rick Salzedo at Avolites to design and manufacture a touring memory desk for Opera that would refuse to crash. Just before this, I read read a newspaper report on a riot at a Beastie Boys concert in Glasgow. A full size Avolite Diamond had been knocked off the front of the circle of the Glasgow Apollo [ around 20'] into the stalls. It survived and when plugged in worked. Opera North were only in their 7th year as a company and were already on their 3rd desk, a Strand Duet I think. After many journeys from Leeds to London and many meetings, we came up with the first version of this desk which was larger, analogue and with an external monitor. This arrived in Leeds in the summer of 1986. A year or two later, the DMX version was born as the QM500TD. This is the desk that arrived in Edinburgh today after having been in it's flight case for around 18 years. At 12.00 today, I took it out of it's case with help [it's heavy}, along with the Operators Book, gritted my teeth and plugged it in.................IT WORKS! Hope you are all well Ian Ian Sommerville ilumini@me.com PS. It never crashed!
