Strand:
Note that a lot of my comments are somewhat opinionated and are certainly US oriented.
As others have mentioned and is seen on the website,
Strand merged with US Century.
Some important things about
Strand that still matter:
1) Mid/Late 70's -
Strand UK did not want
Strand US making a US only
console. UK wanted the UK style consoles used in the US. US went ahead and developed the very first US made memory
console (Multi-Q) anyway. It was widely successfull and superior to the UK MMS stuff.
Strand US, emboldened by the success, had Dave Cunningham develop the
Light Palette, itself influenced by Pilbrows Lightboard, that was developed for the Nat'l Theaters in London.
Lightpallette changed everything (in consoles - up to the development of ML consoles). The
Strand 300/400/500 stuff all derives from the LightPallette
tracking style OS (unless you spec. Genius), as does the
ETC Obsession, itself created as Broadway designers, for the most part, hated the
ETC Expression syntax. The
Colortran Prestige also derived from Lightpallette.
Strand also was very successful, early on in the US in developing and installing large numbers of high density dimming systems with its
CD80 system.
ETC was JUST starting with this stuff, having purchased
LMI. Kliegl was also following suite, as was C-Tran, which had the most technically superior systems (
IMO).
Kliegl is long gone.
Strand is now playing catch up with
ETC. They make very good gear, thought they have a rep. for terrible tech support. They are very strong in the Asian market, not as strong as
ETC in the Euro market. The 500 consoles are super consoles, seeing a lot of use on Broadway - due to superior ML plus
conventional dimming control, better then anything
ETC currently has.
Colortran is playing catch up, probably not enough people in R&D and Tech support to design state-of-the-art stuff as well as support it.
Strand also jumped right on the modern
ellipsoidal bandwagon with the SL fixtures.
Colortran has never updated from 6" stuff.
Not sure where C-Tran will end up, even though
Leviton seemingly has limitless resources, potentially more then either
ETC or
Strand. Not sure there's anyone at C-Tran to tell them how to spend the money, though.
Apologize in
advance if the tim-line's a
bit rough and feel free to chime in with corrections and any other tidbits of data from the past.
SB