It seems that several of you have a lovely argument going on, but it is based on incomplete information.
First: If you go to the Elation website, you will notice that they very carefully seperate the products that they
build and distribute through AMDJ and their professsional
line. The elation
line that is produced for AMDJ, is certainly of a "Bar/DJ" quality, and is serviced through AMDJ, who by the way doesn't make most if not all of what they sell. They buy from many manufactures and put their name on the product.
Elation professional on the other
hand is manufactured by Elation to their own design and has 24 hour service. It is very easy to confuse the two product lines, but they are very different with very different service. Chauvet, which is very similar to Elation is currently trying to make the same move to seperation of product lines as did Elation. New management has been hired from higher quality companies.
Having said the above, Elation has a few products in there lower lline that are pretty darn good. If you take apart one of their
DMX distributors, you will find all of the same components by brand as in the very expensive lines of
DMX iso/distributors.
As for your comparisons of dimmers. Modern solid state dimmers use one of three approaches that esentially are the same results. The first is to use two Slicon Controlled Rectifiers (
SCR)s back to back. In this case one switches the positive going half of a sinewave and the other switches the negative going half of the sinewave. Second is a
Triac. The
Triac is two SCRs packaged together and does exactly what two SCRs do, only in a smaller package. In both of these cases, the devices are controlled by an
Opto Triac. This little device is an 8 pin chip that has an
LED packaged with a low
power Triac and components to either detect "O" crossing of the sinewave or to be random. In the case of dimmers, it must be random. in the case of nondims or relays it is "O" crossing. The third type of
dimmer circuit uses a Solid State
relay (
SSR) this is a much larger device that contains two SCRs the
opto/
triac and some additional components that make up a "
Snubber". The
snubber is used to protect the
SSR when used with inductive circuits such as transformers (twinspins & low
voltage fixtures such as the microellips).
The Elation dimmers that you were discussing are made by a company in China that has very little to do with Elation and are marketed under many companies with with a slight facelift. To mention a few, AMDJ, Elation, Chauvet, NSI, Matrix and
Bulb America to name the ones that I know of. As a learning exercise go to the
Bulb America website and check out the dimmers that they sell. There will be many different brand names, but all the same chinese manufacture. Probably, but just a guess, the same company that manufactures the 48
channel console sold by ELation, AMDJ, Chauvet and several others.
These products are ok if you don't abuse them, but don't expect any service if they fail.
End the argument and educate yourselves on the subjects.
