So, a vendor is pushing very hard for accepting a Neo as an equal for an
Ion. Anyone want to comment? I guess I could live with it since they can toss the Neo and replace it - even if just with Nomad; but Visionnet instead of Paradigm is the harder one to accept, because there is no fixing it. I would love comments from users that have used both Visionnet and Paradigm.
Stay Away. It was the last significant
purchase made by my predecessor and its turned out to be a pretty horrid decision.
I'm in a medium sized regional
venue in Ireland. We do a mixture of
Theatre, Music, Comedy & Conference. For every 10
theatre shows that come through the door, 9 of them will totally bypass my
desk and an alternative will need to be hired - sometimes at our expense, sometimes at their expense - depending on the contractual situation.
First things first; its a decent
console, especially if your rig is predominately intelligent. With two touch
screen monitors it can be navigated in an instant.
If your rig is full of Phillips gear, they don't take up any channels - a nice touch.
The keypad is nicely backlit and well laid-out.
However, its not what clients want. In Ireland,
ETC has absolutely boomed in the last 10 years and most Venues (with a theatrical program) now have an
Element,
Ion or
Eos - a
Gio if the're uber Fancy.
Other problems with the Neo: It doesn't have a delete
button - not a big issue if they cared to include it in the documentation. Instead you need to battle the syntax until you realise that Shift-Edit equates to delete. Who builds a new
console but doesn't include a delete
button?
There's virtually zero help online with regard to troubleshooting and problem solving (there's a series of tutorials on Youtube produced by a man with the worlds most boring voice. I challenge anyone to get passed 15 minutes).
I emailed Strand->Phillips->Signify a few times about issues I was having. There's never an explanation about the issues, only a sequence of
button clicks to temporarily solve the problem. I'm pretty sure even they don't know the problems until someone finds them.
There's 4 Neo's currently in Ireland - 3 in Venues and 1 in Hire
stock - in the entire country!
Do yourself a favour, steer
clear.