Control/Dimming GrandMA 1 in 2016?

[Amishplumber]

Hi internet,

Looking for some first hand accounts of folks programming MA1 consoles in 2016 (or 2017!). How are they holding up? How's the maintenance? How much does it suck to go hunting for personalities? Do you find yourself making a lot of personalities? What is it like to run multi cell fixtures on an MA1?

Personally, I've only ever had good experiences with MA1s, but I don't touch them very often and I've never owned one, so I don't know what the maintenance is like.

Been seeing a lot of good deals on MA1s recently. Mighty tempting! Been thinking about getting one, but I figured I'd ask around first.

 

[Pie4Weebl]

I got an ultralite to sell ya

 

[computekid]

We've been using GMA1s for quite a few years now. The rental/production house I work for has a Full and a Light, and we're in-house at a venue that has a Light. You asked about maintenance, and I'll tell you, we used to have another Light but we weren't able to get parts for it (top enclosure), so it's become a parts unit. There's precious few parts remaining out there. Like, I'm pretty sure you can count the number of new parts in North America on one hand at this point, so if you need something, you're probably getting it from somebody else's broken unit, and they'll just want parts from you too. People are still active on the forum though, so personalities haven't been a big issue yet, but if you needed something that wasn't there it's not too difficult to write one yourself. Multi-cell fixtures you can just patch as multiple fixtures in a row. So, if you've got an LED bar, and it has master intensity and then three cells of RGB, you'd just patch a master intensity fixture and then three RGB fixtures in a row. Make a group and you've got all three. It's not as nice having true multi-cell support, but it's the way we've done it since forever and it still works. Hit me up if you end up with any other questions.

 

[MikeJ]

Older consoles have less parts available now, but its in things like mother
boards. You can still find parts like ram on ebay. Old motorized faders will be worn and dirty, sometimes they will not pull up when you change pages. These faders are soldered tp a PCB, so they are difficult to remove and clean. Cleaning probably wont fix the problems at this age. They can be replaced, but they were expensive from ACT last time I replace them on a desk. You can also just turn off the motorized function(like the small desks that don't have motors anyway)

More recently built desk still have parts available.

Buttons are usually not a problem, and are common parts. Screens are a very common NEC, backlights can be replaced with LED. Hard drives are IDE; I recommend replacing with SSD or CF card with IDE adapter. Clone the original drive! Loading the OS with 6 floppy disks is a pain in the dick, plus the floppy drive in the console probably wont work, and you will probably need to order disks and a drive for your computer.

If you have your own "rig" and you mostly use the same fixtures or you have advanced notice of fixture types, making your own profiles is pretty easy.

If you want to take this on tour and find out what fixtures you have each day, than i would recommend this less, though this is basically the life of avo classic and hog 3 users.