Strand consoles

[ghance]

Thanks JonH.. very helpful

 

Brain - I'd agree the SF is a sweet console. So your vote would be SF ML and maybe an EOS Element 40 in the main space? (I have to admit I struggled with speed of programming on EOS Ion with wing.. but then I'm out of practice)

 

Guys - anymore suggestions? Anyone got a Chamsys wing & laptop in a custom case?

 

Cheers

 

.gh

[IRW]

Another + point for the ETC Smartfade series- don't forget you can hook them up to a computer running SmartSoft- in my view a feature that makes the desk a lot more user friendly than just the console on it's own. I've used both a Smartfade and Jester ML, and would most definitely recommend the Smartfade over the Jester!

 

Ian

 

Edited to add:

Just seen your last post, if you've got the money available for an Element, this would be a good way to go, as anyone with any EOS experience would be able to use it.

[richard]

I haven't used the Smartfade for a while, but I know that when I have in the past I have found it really horrible for creating a cue stack - you seemed to have to undertake some magic to link scenes together and it was not at all intuitive. I believe it is very good for corporate type shows though (not linear)

[IRW]

Sounds like you were maybe on an old software version? I found the same until I updated the one I had in my venue at the time. Smartsoft also helps make the desk much easier to use by essentially providing a graphical user interface.

[alistermorton]

Couldn't agree more - a Gemini with intelligent fixture capability is exactly how I've described my ideal console. That utter simplicity and consistency of logic seems to elude all the manufacturers these days,

 

And, to be fair to Z88, a jester 48-ML and a GSX are roughly comparable in footprint.

 

 

 

[martinw]

It seems to me that lighting consoles are massively behind the curve compared to sound desks. Look what £2,000 will buy you in digital mixers - X32, QU16 - and then compare that with what that buys in lighting. C'mon Uli, how's bout it - the DM-X32? Posted Image

The market for sound consoles is many times larger than the market for lighting consoles, which helps drive down the price. Prices have actually dropped significantly over the past 15 years - a 360 channel Strand Gemini 2 use to list at about £12000 and a Hog 2 for about £18000 - what do you pay now to get that level of functionality?

 

Martin

[gibbothegreat]

The market for sound consoles is many times larger than the market for lighting consoles, which helps drive down the price. Prices have actually dropped significantly over the past 15 years - a 360 channel Strand Gemini 2 use to list at about £12000 and a Hog 2 for about £18000 - what do you pay now to get that level of functionality?

 

Martin

 

That's true but not terribly relevant, as it applies across all areas of tech. Arguably, a sub-£3,000 QU32 is vastly more capable than a Midas console that would have set you back, what, £70,000 in 80's money. The thing is that there are a lot of areas where there could be easily be technology transfer - moving faders, for instance: it's pure nonsense that changing pages of submasters means any that are live become unavailable on any other page. If moving faders are cheap enough to be standard on sub-£2,000 digital mixers, then they're equally affordable on lighting desks, no matter how big the market. You can essentially replicate the functionality of pretty much any medium-sized lighting desk on a £600 laptop and touch-screen combination: what possible justification is there for a £6,000+ price tag for an Ion? There's very little specialist hardware, there's no great or unusual computing input, much of it is Windows based. I was only half quipping about a Behringer lx desk, surely there has to be a market for exactly that approach: well-engineered, moderate capability, at a price that allegedly couldn't be done - before it was. The economic model is as stuck as the design thinking, and we pay the price.

[richard]

What people often seem to forget is the cost of developing the software. The hardware of the ion/eos is only a very tiny part of the cost of producing the desk - the bigger cost is the thousands of hours spent developing, testing and updating the software. The fact that ETC provide free updates for the consoles as well also means that the console stays up to date for longer.

 

The larger market for the sound consoles means that this investment in development can be offset over a much larger number of devices.

 

There are cheap lighting desks out there - someone posted about the Showtec avolites look-a-like, but the question is whether any of these will have had the time or effort put into them to develop the ease and speed of programming that something like the eos range has, along with the reliability which means that the thing won't fall over mid show.

 

The fact that ETC have now released the nomad dongle at (I think) about £300 is a great thing, and gives you a massively powerful bit of kit for pennies - obviously the output channel count for this price is limited to 256 and the price goes up quite sharply for more channels

[martinw]

If moving faders are cheap enough to be standard on sub-£2,000 digital mixers, then they're equally affordable on lighting desks, no matter how big the market

That's not the case if you're building 10000 sound desks a year but only 1000 lighting desks - the manufacturing and purchasing economics are completely different. That same motorised fader will be much cheaper for the sound desk manufacturer than for the lighting desk manufacturer. Behringer probably produce their own motorised faders because their volumes are high enough to justify spending upwards of £10000 on tooling, which gives them an additional advantage.

 

what possible justification is there for a £6,000+ price tag for an Ion?

Because lots of people are happy to pay that price.

 

surely there has to be a market for exactly that approach: well-engineered, moderate capability, at a price that allegedly couldn't be done

I'm curious to know what you think that price should be, given the costs of hardware and software development, along with all the other costs that go into sustaining a company to manufacture and sell it, given the number that you can sell.

 

Sorry for dragging this off-topic.

 

Martin

[dbuckley]

what possible justification is there for a £6,000+ price tag for an Ion?

Because lots of people are happy to pay that price.

This. This is "what the market will bear" pricing. There is no actual reason why the price should be what it is other than it is what it is.

 

Depending on your point of view, one of the nicest or most evil features is the ability to buy a "big" console with half the (software) features disabled, or the channel count restricted. Are these manufacturers heros for allowing you to purchase a something at a cut price, or, to be polite (ie avoiding a single word description), rip-off merchants because they are charging money for nothing other than a few bytes of an unlock code?

 

(And to be fair, this behaviour is not unique to lighting console manufacturers)

 

(Do I feel a topic split coming on?)

 

(Edit: missing word)

[alistermorton]

What people often seem to forget is the cost of developing the software.

 

Good software developers aren't cheap, either. Anyone can learn a bit of VB or C# and cobble together something that can waggle a few hundred data channel values up and down and spit them out down a USB DMX dongle and hey presto you've got a software lighting "desk". So why don't we all just do it?

 

Well doing even mildly clever things with those channel values is a bit of a leap, though, and doing really clever stuff with with several thousand channels of information, being driven by and staying synchronised with several real time external events where latency is to be avoided, all the while keeping the UI in step too is an entirely different prospect. That's where the developers start to earn their money (and push up the price of the console).

Same goes for developing the DSP and UI code for sound desks (and other digital processing tasks, such as video) - it's expensive to design and develop new features (even if you are able to re-use signal processing libraries and algorithms) and it's only by amortising the high costs over a large market that the end product becomes affordable.

 

Hobbyists write some incredible clever software to drive lighting and sound FX for one off projects, but abstracting the principles and generalising them across a control surface (real, virtual ro a mixture) is a completely different skill.