D54

[jonhole]

Hi All

I was wondering if anyone could help me find out about the practical use of D54, as it's 'heyday' was well before my time, and I'm finding it very hard to find practical information and not just facts and figures. I'm writing an essay on advancements in control systems, and want to look into background information of the history of the topic. I'm particularly interested in:

 

Although Strand developed the standard, and appear to have opened up the licence to any manufacture, did the protocol ever catch on with other controllers / dimmers not released by Strand? How about equipment not manufactured in the UK?

 

Similarly, did this cause a problem by limiting the equipment you could use (for example, could someone who owned a Strand desk only work with Strand dimmers etc).

 

The wikipedia article suggests D54 'is still widely used in larger venues such as London's West End theatres'. Is this true? Which theatres still use D54? Any information on how this is set up would be great (eg is it converted from/to DMX?)

 

Were any additional D54 products made? (for example, DMX can be used to control shutters for projectors, scrollers etc, were there any D54 equivalents?)

 

Many Thanks in advance for your time and help,

 

 

Jon

[paulears]

In all honesty, it didn't catch on with other manufacturers because at theis time there weren't really any other serious competitors. I've still got a D54 dimmer system functioning, and interfaced to the current modern control - that doesn't have D54. There weren't any gadgets I'm aware of like scrollers at that time. I suspect there could well be some London theatre with old dimmers still working (like mine!) so it's quite possible they are still using D54, with a protocol converter to enable it to run from DMX - or a 500 Series Strand.

[J Pearce]

I'm sure I've seen some of the old strand colour wheels with a D54 interface. Or am I going mad?

[dbuckley]

Many manufacturers developed something similar to D54, an analogue multiplexed control signal, the DMX512 standard used to have the AMX192 standard in the back, which was an American protocol similar to D54. And, of course, all us Kiwi types still know venues that have TheatreLight "Serial" dimmers and desks in them. The TheatreLight is vastly superior to most of these protocols as it uses balanced data lines, whereas D54 is unbalanced and can buzz like a ###### (actually, like timecode!!!) through audio systems that are not quite there on their noise rejection.

 

Good heavens - the profanity filter is sensitive - '######' is the correct name for a lady dog...