At my high school we had an
ETC Acclaim in the blackbox theater my first year. That's where I cut my teeth on lighting. The Acclaim works equally as well as a two scene preset board and as a programmable board. It doesn't however store the fade times for each cue. You have to load the cue into the playback fader and then you set a separate time fader to the appropriate level for the fade time. Then you just have to slam over the playback fader and it'll fade in the cue at the appropriate rate. Having said that it's a pain in the butt. If I remember correctly, the Acclaim also won't automatically load the next cue. You manually have to press load and the cue number. It has been two years since I've programmed on the Acclaim, and it was an older 48/96 model. They may have changed since then, but that's what I remember. Hope that helps.