Vintage Lighting Dimmer-per-circuit beginnings?

Scenemaster60

Scenemaster60

Well-Known Member
I am wondering at what point in history "Dimmer-per-circuit" began to appear?

I had always been under the impression that this paradigm shift occurred in the early 1980s and was greatly sped up by the introduction of modular dimmer racks such as the Strand CD80 and the Colortran D192.

This spring I am serving as the supervisor of lighting and sound for St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. Their current theatre building underwent a major renovation in 1976-77 and included an Electro-Controls Dimmer-per-Circuit lighting system! There were a total of 223 2K dimmers installed, 155 to the main proscenium stage, 54 to the Black Box, and 14 assigned to houselights. The main stage included a 40-channel 3-scene preset control desk with a pin patch matrix to assign dimmers to channels.

I have pics of much of this equipment and am planning to scan the drawings. Is anyone interested in seeing this stuff posted over in the vintage threads?
 
I think you are about right. I doubt many patch panels built after 1980. I never layed one out and I started in 1982. The Yale Rep was renovated in the summer of 1975 and did have a new patch panel.

Just recalled I worked at Colby College for a year - 1978-79 - and they opened a new theatre in I believe for the 1977 -78 school year and it had an EC slider patch.
 
I'd guess the shift can be traced back to the advent of electronic dimming which started seeing mass adoption in the late 60s and really gained market share through the 70s. I think in the 70s. By the time the 80s came around the cost per dimmer gave theatre designers the option of eliminating the patch panel. Modular dimmer racks and soft patching in the console probably killed patch panels since cash-strapped venues could patch in the rack.
 
sk8rsdad said:
I'd guess the shift can be traced back to the advent of electronic dimming which started seeing mass adoption in the late 60s and really gained market share through the 70s. I think in the 70s. By the time the 80s came around the cost per dimmer gave theatre designers the option of eliminating the patch panel. Modular dimmer racks and soft patching in the console probably killed patch panels since cash-strapped venues could patch in the rack.
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There were some massive dimmer-per-ciircuit installations (Strand Century CCR600) in the late 70s such as the CBN studios in Virginia Beach. I agree with you that innovations such as the Solid State Relay, mutliplexed control signal wiring and console soft patch began to make it economically feasible for dimmer-per-circuit to go mainstream for facilities of all sizes. In those early days, an empty CD80 rack cost something like $12,000.00 and that was before the costs were calculated for "wired spaces" and for the modules. Manufacturing efficiencies and competition soon solved that cost problem and patch panels became dinosaurs.
 
David Cunningham talks extensively about this topic in my book Let There Be Light (ISBN-10: 1904031242) Wally Russell pushed hard for the abandonment of patch panels and the SSR in the CD80 and the relatively few components in that dimmer design made it a reality. Van is right, the Strand projects he mentions were the precursors to this, but the CD80 design made DPC viabile.
 
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Scenemaster60 said:
Amazon's price of $1,881.62 was a bit steep.
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IF you call within the next thirty minutes, I'll let you have mine for the low, low price of 1800 USD, shipping included. Operators are standing by. But wait, there's more!

"Endorsed" by one of our own:
STEVETERRY said:
And while it's full of pearls of wisdom (even mine!), it sure isn't a $66 book. Look for a used copy.

ST
Click to expand...
 
Scenemaster60 said:
As I said, I have Inter-library loan working on it...
Click to expand...

Note that there is a kindle version available for just over $35 in case the inter library loan does not work out.

The binding on my copy was pretty sub par. It started falling apart before I had gotten through it once
 
Just throwing this out there... my building split this time period. Our larger room (still) has 70 6k and 12k dimmer telephone patched across 450 circuits. Original console was a 4 scene preset w/ matrix's. Building opened in '78, I have been told the system was designed in '75 and sat in state warehouses for 3 years. My smaller room was refitted in '82 (yes... 4 years after opening). It went CD80 rack w/ 108 2.4k dimmers all dimmer per circuit. Both projects were "state of the art" at the time. So, there is your line.
 
JChenault said:
The binding on my copy was pretty sub par. It started falling apart before I had gotten through it once
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That's a shame. It must have come from the first pressing. The publisher used a new paper and didn't change the glue. They got it right in subsequent pressings. You might want to contact ET Now Books. They may honour a fresh copy.
 
Rob said:
That's a shame. It must have come from the first pressing. The publisher used a new paper and didn't change the glue. They got it right in subsequent pressings. You might want to contact ET Now Books. They may honour a fresh copy.
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My copy was the same, the pages were falling out of it as I turned them. I wrote, then phoned, the publishers and their attitude was pretty much 'Oh he's phoning from Canada, tell him to phuque off.'
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard
 
Back on the topic of DPC, My primary years of operation were the mid 70's to early 90's. In the 70's, the early dimmers were large both in weight and electrical size. It was very common to use 6Kw modules. One of the reasons was that the price was so high and didn't really drop (per channel) as the power level dropped. Right around 1980 manufacturers started introducing 2.4 and 1.2Kw dimmers at reasonable prices. Those were the days of analog equipment so you would take a show on the road that was more-or-less DPC, but usually you ended up with a big matrix pin block (often called diode matrix) which allowed you to assign dimmer channels to board channels. Since these were the day when PARs were king of Rock-and-Roll, you still ended up with large loads assigned to each board channel, with the sole advantage being if you had a lamp go wild-focus, you could disable it by pulling a pin at the FOH matrix without shutting down the rest of the fixtures. True DPC didn't really kick off until digital boards and DMX (add predecessors) came of age in the later 80's. Now, instead of a "huge board" being 48 channels, you had 512 channels to play with! That is where I remember the concept of breaking out control for each individual fixture came of age. Of course, in each of these transitions, there were early adopters who pushed the envelope.
 
We are somewhat forgetting that the British installed a true DPC system(s) into the new National Theater facility in London, with the Lightboard control consoles handling the digital patch of upwards of 1000 circuit capacity.

This was 1976.

600 dimmers in the Olivier and 470 in the Littleton. Subsequent systems were installed shortly after in Austria, German and the UK.

Lightboard as a concept, became the Strand Light Palette, which brought digital patch to the US in a big way, taking over Broadway in short order. 192 CD80's was considered a big system at the time and was the limit of the control system (AMX 192).

It was nearly 10 years later that DMX was "invented", and anybody working at the time recalls well the difficult hodgepodge of control protocals.
 
SteveB said:
We are somewhat forgetting that the British installed a true DPC system(s) into the new National Theater facility in London, with the Lightboard control consoles handling the digital patch of upwards of 1000 circuit capacity.

This was 1976.

600 dimmers in the Olivier and 470 in the Littleton. Subsequent systems were installed shortly after in Austria, German and the UK.

Lightboard as a concept, became the Strand Light Palette, which brought digital patch to the US in a big way, taking over Broadway in short order. 192 CD80's was considered a big system at the time and was the limit of the control system (AMX 192).

It was nearly 10 years later that DMX was "invented", and anybody working at the time recalls well the difficult hodgepodge of control protocals.
Click to expand...
Sounds like digital audio today....

Sent from Taptalk for Android, this was.
 
Fountain Of Euph said:
Sounds like digital audio today....

Sent from Taptalk for Android, this was.
Click to expand...
Hello Mr. Euph!
One of the spaces in my area opened in the fall of 1991 and was equipped with an LP90 and four CD80 racks; racks 1&2 controlled via AMX192 port #1 and racks 3&4 via AMX192 port #2. Anne Valentino is my heroine!
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard
 
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