Hey, I got to see a demo of the new ETC Congo last week. It's quite the beast. An interesting hybrid of Theatrical and Concert control done in a European style. You know Conan O'Brien's "What if they made it?" bit... well it's sort of like if an Obsession and a Hog had a baby. It's actually not a new board. ETC bought a European company called AVAB. This is a remodel of a well known European board. It runs XP and when opened up it's just a PC so it would be easy to upgrade or replace things like CPU, Video Card, Memory.
I'm a small college and community theater guy so I'm not that familiar with boards bigger than an Express so some of these features may not be that cool to you but these were the things that stood out to me about Congo:
-It understands that intelligent lighting requires lots of DMX channels and doesn't penalize you by eating up dimmers. The salesman described it as each channel has "Width" so lots of information can go down that pipe. You could run 10 Martins on 10 dimmers.
-You can program magic sheets into the design and then select instruments straight from the magic sheet. You can grab all the lights coming from down left toward area 3 just by clicking on an arrow. Similarly, you can program what color gel is in all your instruments and then quickly grab everything of the same color.
-In the corner of the board is a set of knobs and buttons that are programmable to do anything you want completely independent of what is going on with the rest of the board. Turn work lights on and off, run a fogger or strobe, a special lighting routine. The buttons can be set to be on/off or intermittent.
-It uses the European programming language which is backwards from what we are used to. It's called "Reverse Polish", I'm serious, a Polish guy invented it. They say it's more efficient but I'm skeptical. Example: "1" "Channel" "20" "Through" "@"
selects 1-20 and puts them at a default level. Press @ twice to set them at full.
-Recording a show in stage mode is sort of like blind mode too. You can see it on stage but you don't have to send the stage into blackout to record blackouts. Didn't quiet understand how that worked but it was interesting.
-The guy who did the demo didn't have touch screens. I don't know if that was his fault or if it doesn't use them.
-It turns a corner of the fader panel buttons into a QWERTY key board to type text in. I was NOT impressed with that feature and say get a keyboard.
-You can program 999 different moving light routines. Each routine can have 999 steps. You can then plug these guys into the faders, which with multiple pages means you can have over 800 different lighting cues programmed on a fader. That's crazy.
-Price? The rep said it lists for $25k and the price to "anyone in the room" would be around $20k... so there's your price range depending on how chummy you are with your local dealer.
I'm a small college and community theater guy so I'm not that familiar with boards bigger than an Express so some of these features may not be that cool to you but these were the things that stood out to me about Congo:
-It understands that intelligent lighting requires lots of DMX channels and doesn't penalize you by eating up dimmers. The salesman described it as each channel has "Width" so lots of information can go down that pipe. You could run 10 Martins on 10 dimmers.
-You can program magic sheets into the design and then select instruments straight from the magic sheet. You can grab all the lights coming from down left toward area 3 just by clicking on an arrow. Similarly, you can program what color gel is in all your instruments and then quickly grab everything of the same color.
-In the corner of the board is a set of knobs and buttons that are programmable to do anything you want completely independent of what is going on with the rest of the board. Turn work lights on and off, run a fogger or strobe, a special lighting routine. The buttons can be set to be on/off or intermittent.
-It uses the European programming language which is backwards from what we are used to. It's called "Reverse Polish", I'm serious, a Polish guy invented it. They say it's more efficient but I'm skeptical. Example: "1" "Channel" "20" "Through" "@"
selects 1-20 and puts them at a default level. Press @ twice to set them at full.
-Recording a show in stage mode is sort of like blind mode too. You can see it on stage but you don't have to send the stage into blackout to record blackouts. Didn't quiet understand how that worked but it was interesting.
-The guy who did the demo didn't have touch screens. I don't know if that was his fault or if it doesn't use them.
-It turns a corner of the fader panel buttons into a QWERTY key board to type text in. I was NOT impressed with that feature and say get a keyboard.
-You can program 999 different moving light routines. Each routine can have 999 steps. You can then plug these guys into the faders, which with multiple pages means you can have over 800 different lighting cues programmed on a fader. That's crazy.
-Price? The rep said it lists for $25k and the price to "anyone in the room" would be around $20k... so there's your price range depending on how chummy you are with your local dealer.
Last edited: