On the more technical side:
You have essentially 2 styles of
dimmer systems in use today, modular and hard wired.
A modular
system - such as the
ETC Sinewave,
ETC Sensor,
Strand C21,
Colortran or ET Capio systems have dimmers made up of paired 2.4kw dimmers on a removable module.
A hard wired
system, such as
ETC Smartpak, Dove,
Leprecon, NSI,
etc... has (typically) 12 - 2.4kw dimmers in a 19" rack mount case, complete with breakers, chokes and output panel.
Either can be used in a permanent install. The modular systems tend to cost more, but have the advantage of
ease of component replacement if something fails - I.E. you can buy extra
dimmer and/or control module components to have as spares. The hard wired systems involve some minor surgery to get a
dimmer SSR (Solid State Switching
Relay) replaced. If you are not comfortable opening up a hard wired pack, or have no staff to do so, then perhaps a modular
system is a better choice. In general though, all this stuff is very robust gear and failures are generally infrequent in a permanent install, if the folks using it know what they're doing.
As to consoles: The trend right now, among the higher end gear -
ETC,
Strand/ET is for the consoles to communicate to the dimming systems via
Cat5 Ethernet wiring using a proprietary communications
protocol over E-Net (as in -
ETC will not talk to
Strand, which won't talk
Artnet, or Hog or Grand MA,
etc...). All such systems allow the addition of Nodes, that
plug in to the lighting
network to
break out (or input)
DMX. This is the way the industry is moving and jumping on that bandwagon now is probably advisable. Somewhere down the
road, the
ACN Cat5/E-Net based industry standard lighting communications
protocol will see greater use and having
Cat5 gear now will make future expansion easier.
Or, going to a less expensive
system, such as
Leprecon dimmers and consoles, as example, will get you a reasonably priced
system with functional dimmers and
console. No real easy ability to expand towards moving lights and scrollers and similar toys down the
road, but a lot of bang for the buck (US slang).
Steve B.