Lighty Posted January 8, 2005 Share Posted January 8, 2005 I'm considering buying some Martin Mini Mac Profiles for install into a club with a very low ceiling height. Anyone got an opinion on the reliability of these fixtures? Are the units easy to service? I've not had a close look at the insides of one yet so I'm trying to ascertain any design flaws through other users' experiences. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mac500 Posted January 10, 2005 Share Posted January 10, 2005 I havent heard a lot of good things about them. Try having a look at the robe units not sure if they are better but they are the equvilant sort of range. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gareth Posted January 10, 2005 Share Posted January 10, 2005 As Mac500 said, consider Robe units as an alternative. Their Spot 170 units are on a par with the Minimacs size-wise, and are pretty good pieces of kit - but be prepared to spend a bit of money on some new gobos, as the Robe stock ones are a pile of pants. ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aevans Posted January 11, 2005 Share Posted January 11, 2005 MiniMac's are probably what you are looking for, although give em a few years they start to make a lot of noise and freeze up a little too much, nothing a service wouldn't fix, they are fairly easy to look after, clean etc. take up 9 channels of DMX or one moving fixture channel, as tested on a bull frog. I would concider Mac 250's/250+'s as they have more gobo's and seem to be a little faster. But price difference maybe an issue, all in all Martin have done well with their Mac's over the last years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul J Need Posted January 11, 2005 Share Posted January 11, 2005 Have to agree on the Robe route....... You'll probably save 40-50% on the Martin prices......... We sell both Martin and Robe, but have a guess which units comes back to us for service more often??? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Davwal Posted January 11, 2005 Share Posted January 11, 2005 Yeah, we stuck 6 of the small Robe 170s into a small club, complete with the little controller. Neat little package.....desk pre-programmed. That was almost a year ago, havent seen them since, even for bulbs.Havent heard good things about the small Martin MACs... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pscandrett Posted January 11, 2005 Share Posted January 11, 2005 I'm considering buying some Martin Mini Mac Profiles for install into a club with a very low ceiling height. Anyone got an opinion on the reliability of these fixtures? Are the units easy to service? I've not had a close look at the insides of one yet so I'm trying to ascertain any design flaws through other users' experiences.<{POST_SNAPBACK}> Having read the other replies, I'm not sure I can actually offer much helpful comment - but I'm going to try anyway. The thing is, I haven't used much else for any length of time (with the exception of some Ryger moving mirror types... ugh!), so a lot of my comments are a bit 'up in the air' without much of a yardstick. So apologies in advance. I got mine (4) from ebay so I don't know exactly what they've been used for - but they're generally OK. They work, anyway - you might like to read the thread I had about mini mac lamps on here at the end of last year for comments about, er, lamps. Since servicing them myself (trial and error!) over Christmas, and fitting the new lamps, a few things jump to mind... - whoever said they were difficult to colour balance on the other thread is right; I spent ages trying to get them similar in output.- the internal mechanics seems reasonably well made but I could see a couple of places where things might wear- they're not terribly easy to take apart once you've got the outer casing off! That might be just my experience and being idiotic but it seemed to me that there was only so much you could do without breaking things. That said, I'm happy enough with them, but if I were buying new I would certainly shop around. The default gobos are OK - standard Martin ones as far as I can tell; nothing special but varied enough. Control from my desk (Mambo Frog) is fine; they respond quite precisely (which I know they should, but you know what I mean!). I much prefer them to 4 MX4s we've got - OK, not exactly comparing like with like but for what I use them for (small gigs) they're great. So, er, hope that helps. Not sure it does, really, so if it doesn't... please feel free to ignore me :-) Any more questions, I'll see what I can do about answering them. Regards Peter <>< Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tomchennells Posted January 11, 2005 Share Posted January 11, 2005 heard nothing but praise for the robe units, and at that much less per head they have gotta be the obvious choice - I havnt seen the smaller heads side by side with mini-macs, but with the bigger mh's the robe heads appear to have much better optics than say the mac 500's and agin way less money - say no more - tom Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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