Cost Price of Historic Strand Control Boards

[Alan Pickwick]

In November 2003 I bought a new Strand 300 Series board with 48/96 channels and an S72 demux. Total cost £4131.30.

 

I would like to collect the new prices for Strand boards from the earliest up to the Philips era.

 

There is nothing on the web so I hope you can rake your memories.

 

Many thanks in advance. Alan.

[paulears]

Your googling needs some work. Start here. Info price lists and other info. http://www.theatrecrafts.com/pages/home/archive/manufacturers/detail/?id=1

[Junior8]

I looked into this a few months ago - be prepared to be staggered. In 1973 a Mini 2 6 channel outfit would have cost you at today's values £2350 adjusted for prices £3510 for earnings. An equivalent Zero 88 outfit would be £834 today. (Pretty well the same price today as a Junior 8 in 1973.) Edited February 7, 2021 by Junior8

[Alan Pickwick]

Dear Paul,

 

Thanks for the lead, which I have examined. There are prices for the entry-level desks but almost none for the up-market ones. They are almost all POA. So I still need memories.

 

Regards, Alan.

[paulears]

Alan - the thing to remember is that there never were in those days off-the-shelf prices, not even guide prices for the top end controls because while the smaller venues would buy a new brand new semi-mass produced control desk, many of the larger ones were individually priced, and individually made. The most expensive had perhaps dozens of sales. The resource mentioned has the information on the controls used in many theatres I'm thinking JP, SP and LP - the LP range being the most sophisticated in the late 60s early 70s. Above that, made to measure. An LP80 channel was over seven grand in 1969. The average skilled theatre worker earned about £25 per week based on the average of different skill job roles I found on Government sites - so if you do the maths this equates to over a hundred grand now, for an 80 channel, manual control - seven grand was a lot of money, and look back to average ticket price and it's shock. what I find more interesting is the difference between manual controls and the new thyristor dimmer ones - a Junior Sunset - a massive and majorly heavy beast was 'only' £500.

 

Technology is now ridiculously cheap. A 1K flood was a week's wages. Wow!

[Junior8]

The complete installation at the Chichester Festival Theatre when it opened in 1962 was £18000 but this would have included the wiring (which as it happens is about twice what I paid for a house eight miles along the coast in 1977). That's around £400,000 (RPI) and £800,000 earnings. This stuff didn't get replaced often and the rest of us simply looked at the catalogue, drooled a bit and went back to what we had. In 1992 I did a show in the Kings Southsea where they'd still been using the Grand Master until it was replaced only a few years earlier by a dire numerical call up Berkey effort. But you see there was so much labour in manufacturing most of this stuff and old fashioned theatre managers wanted stuff built like battleships because they weren't going to buy it twice. Paul is right for the larger work there was no such thing as a standard product and bespoke work costs. If you have not read Fred Bentham's Sixty Years of Light Work you will find it enlightening. It wasn't until new entrants - like Pulsar - emerged that the price of even things like simple two preset manual desks were affordable for many but when they did it was curtains for both Strand and Furse in many market sectors. Edited February 7, 2021 by Junior8

[paulears]

I only remember using one Berkey control - the Channel Track (I think) that had been installed at the Theatre Royal in Norwich. It had a horrible crossfader - which was like visible PCB pads you moved your finger along - and I think my fingers must have been greasy, but every fade was stuttery and horrible. Mind you - while we're talking about the price for the old Strand equipment. My summer theatre still has the original 3 STM dimmer racks powered up and left on 24/7 and they've been on to my knowledge for at least 9 years, keeping them warm through the long damp salty closed season. Still 40+ channels still working out of the 60 that were originally put in for the SP60, that's in the 1969 catalogue. They may well have cost a fortune - but if you divide it by the lifespan, that's probably very good value!

[martinw]

I remember seeing a list price for a Gemini 2 of £12,000 in the early nineties. I find it staggering now that something that did so little could have cost so much.

 

M

[sandall]

Even our awful Duet cost about £6k in the early 1980s, about the same price as 72 channels of dimming (makes £12k for a Gemini look a bargain).

[Ynot]

If anyone is still interested in buying a used Strand 300, I still have at least one n our 'to sell' pile...

I can't actually remember if I managed to sell the 100% working jobbie or if I have the one that has a glitch...

But..............

[gareth]

Dear Paul,

 

Thanks for the lead, which I have examined. There are prices for the entry-level desks but almost none for the up-market ones. They are almost all POA. So I still need memories.

 

Regards, Alan.

 

You won't find 'list prices' for things like Light Consoles, MMS, Galaxy, DDM, etc. - they were all built to order, and each example was made to the customer's spec.

 

My summer theatre still has the original 3 STM dimmer racks powered up and left on 24/7 and they've been on to my knowledge for at least 9 years, keeping them warm through the long damp salty closed season. Still 40+ channels still working out of the 60 that were originally put in for the SP60, that's in the 1969 catalogue. They may well have cost a fortune - but if you divide it by the lifespan, that's probably very good value!

Theatr Clwyd in Mold originally had 180 channels of STM installed across the two performance spaces when it first opened in 1976 (120 main house, 60 studio). This has been expanded upon over the years with Permus dimmers and Strand/ETC touring racks to become more than double that number - but with perhaps 2 or 3 exceptions all 180 ways of STM are still doing their thing 45 years later, thanks to having been looked after properly over the years. I somehow doubt they'll be many LD90s or Sensors still working when they're almost half a century old!

Edited February 8, 2021 by gareth

[David Ripley]

As Gareth says, all the Strand systems were bespoke in terms of many options

 

Often it would be number of memories/control channels (Duet/Gemini)

 

For the larger desks MMS (Modular Memory System, the clue's in the name), Compact (mni MMS), and Galaxy you could have range of different module that were added to the chassis.

 

I have a set of MMS cards from Strand showing the different modules, which were

 

Channel Control: K (Keyboard and Fader wheel) K@ (introduces Ch @ Level syntax)

 

Lamp Mimic (Shows Channels above 0 with an on/off illumination) Geographical Option also available

 

Button Mimic (As lamp mimic, but push the button and you have control on the wheel, via the B Channel Control Module)

 

Last Reference Store (primitive grouping)

 

Manual Playback

 

Rate (Timed) Playback

 

Pin Patch

 

Back Up masters

 

Memory selector

 

Core memory

 

Tape!

 

Blank Panel

 

As you can see a fully loaded system would be enormous and of course, once you had selected the modules, once it was built that was it. To add the fun, no screen with information on it until Duet/Gemini/Galaxy and that was pretty useless

 

I'd defend the desks though, we could achieve a lot on them with a skilled board op and designer who knew the desk with split fades and so on. We were one of, if not the first to use VL5s on a theatre desk (Gemini 2) in the mid 90's on Aspects of Love. It was what the desk was designed to do but using Move fades and so on we got the show without too much pain. People nowadays seem to think all lighting pre moving lights was a marmalade sludge that was either on or off, which is very far from the truth!

[paulears]

There is a history element to this evolution too. To view them as things that did so little, reveals a little misunderstanding of how controls evolved - especially in the bigger theatres.

 

The two preset desk was a huge problem solver. remember that before they appeared going from cue to cue was far from simple - even with the lowliest wall full of slider resistance dimmers. Let's say you had a wonderful installation of 12 resistance dimmers, and wanted to go from odd numbers on to even numbers on - impossible - so a patch could be done to put even numbers to one side, odd numbers to the other - so two bits of wood could do that cue - so real planning was needed. The thyristor dimmers and two presets was a HUGE jump forwards. The bigger theatres saw the advantages and upped the dimmer count. This came with a new problem - two presets became the limiter, so they tried 3 presets which worked for a while, and then as lighting possibilities altered the designs, even three became a bottleneck. Then each preset could have an A or B fader so channels were split further.

 

The new problem was simply time. Your cue sheet as an operator had grids - 1@3, 3@F, 4@2, 5 thru10 @F etc etc. The snag was time to set them up. With 24, maybe 36 faders, on three presets, it was doable, but 4 cues in quick succession meant sub cues - I remember a friend cutting little templates out of thick cardboard and then you could snap off the fingers of channels that didn't have to move and poke the rest with the cardboard. However, on 60 channels and above, even with three presets and subdividing these, setting up the next cue became a problem - sometimes an extra crew member was needed to help preset a series of complex cues. The ability to press record was a massive step forward. Being able to record a state by simply pressing a button saved such a lot of time. Controls had a new feature - the ability to run complex cues quickly. Nowadays we have massive ability to tweak and modify the cues, but it was, in theatre, for many years to build up lighting states from scratch, or to simply modify one cue into a new one. Even adding record cue 22 at 5 seconds was hugely welcomed. Most people who grew up on memory controls that can do so much forget the early radical evolution, and dismiss many of the early features as 'quaint' and unimportant.

 

These, by moderns standards, very basic memory controls were a game changer for the British larger receiving houses. The price - though maybe outrageous to us now, was simply good value back then. Maybe comparing out to wages is a bad move. After all, a Philips 550 22" TV was £269 in the late 70s/early 80s - at that time I earned £20 a week. A walkie talkie cost £169 for the cheapest one with 2 channels.

[David Ripley]

Paul is absolutely right about it being an evolution and with all things now, having moved from physical/analogue to digital, the changes have accelerated enormously

 

On manual desks I remember going from a JP desk here to an AMC was a huge leap in flexibility and control. If nothing else you didn't risk dislocating your wrists trying to do a smooth crossfade!

 

Similarly the change from our Gemini 2 to the Strand 520 and the revolutionary concept of just upgrading the software not the hardware was actually quite mind blowing. The fact that I could add more channels and functionality and keep the same desk took a bit of time to get used to but was really helpful as shows became more complex.

 

I also remember the Berkey Colortran desk at Norwich - nightmare desk that no one except the local crew understood.

 

Going back to the price though, you could get prices for the newer 'desktop' desks Duet/M24/Gemini and Galaxy 3 but before that, if you had to ask, you couldn't afford it!

Edited February 8, 2021 by David Ripley

[Junior8]

For me in the education sector at the time it was the price/feature point the Sirius24 hit around 1990 that made it possible to argue seriously for the extra spending in a new studio. It was just about within the same sort of admittedly stretched price range as the dearest 24 way 2 preset board available and certainly a bargain compared with the Legacy Furse stuff that CCT were still marketing. And 1990 wasn't that long really after we thought the 2 preset was a luxury. Edited February 8, 2021 by Junior8