Control/Dimming How do we feel about this? Philips Advantage DMX

Recall that Eos has no DMX ports on the desk, a gateway is always required. It will output 64 (?) universes inherently.

The Neo literature states it has 4 DMX ports on the desk and can support up to 100 universes, with the limit being that it only comes with one DMX universe enabled. You have to buy additional universes or use Phillips gear.

Annoying concept.


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Selling an license for additional parameters is done all the time. Chamsys offer you first for free, and charges for more parameters, vista is payed by pentameter count too, and GrandMA2 full size has 6 DMX outputs but processes 8,192 parameters, requiring you to use an Ethernet interface for your other outputs.
Thats not quite accurate. MagicQ free software offers you a single universe via a USB adaptor. If you want more outputs than that then you need to buy their hardware. Their entry level desk the MQ40 has 4 direct outputs which is okay I think. They then go up to 12 and on to 64 depending on the model. As for MA, how many 5 pin XLRs do you really want on the back of the desk? If you are in need of more than about 4 then ethernet makes far more sense anyway.
My point is that these desks are not gimped - The Neo is.
 
The output capacity of the Neo is based upon DMX universes. You will be able to purchase a Neo console with anything from a single universe up to 100 universes or anywhere in between. This is very similar to many other consoles on the market. If you want a 2 or 4 or 8 universe desk, then that can be purchased. If you want to start with 2 universes and upgrade later, that's fine too. A universe of DMX will be much more affordable than it has been in the past. The Philips Advantage is simply an advantage for those that have Philips Entertainment fixtures. Those can be patched to non-authorized universes and will output.
 
I'll bet licensing a couple more universes still costs less than a net3 node.

Licensing universes and/or outputs is the norm at this point. Even the Eos Ti consoles come in 4000-output increments with upgrade licenses -- outputs/universes you'll need Net3 nodes to fully tap into.

The issue I have with this isn't that you need to license universes, and it isn't that the base package only comes with one or two universes. My beef is more simply that it's a gimmick to sway you toward their control consoles that neglects the most fundamental decisions that need to be made during the console selection process. Getting a console for no or little other reason than you don't need to buy more universes if stay brand-loyal Phillips isn't the reason you should pick that console -- or vise versa if you already have the console -- shouldn't be the reason you choose those devices.

The flip side of this is that if ETC started doing this tomorrow with their Selador and Revolution series, or better yet their Sensor series -- everyone would be celebrating. Unfortunately I don't know many people who have had the kind of excellent experiences with modern Strand consoles to warrant that level of brand loyalty. Somewhat a double standard.
 
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I don't understand the difference. All consoles have limits to number of universes. The EOS-TI seems to be available for purchase with 8, 16, 24, or 32 universe capability, unless I'm totally reading this wrong. (OK - 32 universes worth of parameters over 200 universes is perhaps more accurate.) I'd like to know the cost difference between adding 8 universes on the EOS vs the NEO though.

The fact that Philips will give you the additional universes for free if you buy their units seems like a reasonable incentive and - ok - a marketing gimmick.
 
Thats not quite accurate. MagicQ free software offers you a single universe via a USB adaptor. If you want more outputs than that then you need to buy their hardware.

Your correction is not quite accurate. MagicQ PC software offers the first universe out on any DMX interface that has a programming interface we are able to connect to (from memory this is around 12 devices). The remaining universes and the first one, making a total of 64 are available via network using common protocols. You do not need to purchase anything from ChamSys to have a fully functional PC console. Without any of our hardware we restrict a small number of things....mainly remote control inputs; this prevents a third party manufacturing hardware control surfaces. Our $15 demo USB to DMX does not unlock these features.
(These are available free of charge to students...see ChamSys USA :: MagicDMX bottom of page on the right.)

If you purchase a wing then the DMX outputs on these can be added after the first universe so that third party adaptors can be fully used.


We give the fully functional software away for two reasons.

Firstly if a customer has purchased hardware from us then we want to make sure that whatever circumstances he ends up in, console lost, freight company spears console with forklift etc he can download MagicQ and locally find a PC and interfaces to run his show. He just needs a copy of his show file.

Secondly it is almost impossible to prevent the software being hacked. When it is companies put systems in place to restrict downloads of updates, want serial numbers before offering help etc.
This always makes the users life more difficult.......... just when things go wrong. By making it fully functional and free there is no incentive to hack it.



In our main market we are seeing the number of DMX universes used on shows doubling every three years. With the advent of movers with pixel mapped LEDs, more media servers etc this is likely to speed up. When we update MagicQ to more universes (it started at 6 then 12, 24,32,64) it is a free update, you just need to keep the processor reasonably up to date. Over the last 18 months we have added a full visualiser and media server to MagicQ that can run on the same PC or over the network, again at no extra cost.

George McDuff
 
Hi George. The way that ChamSys operate is one of the main reasons that their consoles have gained so much traction and built up brand loyalty. Giving users more outputs because they might need them as opposed to selling users more outputs to further milk the cow. The difference between gear designed by people that actually talk to their customers, and a corporation that has totally lost touch.

@Bill, "All consoles have limits to number of universes" - yes maybe, but none that I know come as standard with ONE. This is ridiculous for a modern desk.

"The fact that Philips will give you the additional universes for free if you buy their units seems like a reasonable incentive" - maybe incentive for beancounters, not for LDs or production and rental companies.
 
Hi George. The way that ChamSys operate is one of the main reasons that their consoles have gained so much traction and built up brand loyalty. Giving users more outputs because they might need them as opposed to selling users more outputs to further milk the cow. The difference between gear designed by people that actually talk to their customers, and a corporation that has totally lost touch.

@Bill, "All consoles have limits to number of universes" - yes maybe, but none that I know come as standard with ONE. This is ridiculous for a modern desk.

"The fact that Philips will give you the additional universes for free if you buy their units seems like a reasonable incentive" - maybe incentive for beancounters, not for LDs or production and rental companies.

Wouldn't the fair comparison be the cost of the console with X number of universes against the competition? Just because others come with two (element and others) or more, I don't see what makes this wrong. We would always spec the number of universes needed for the project. Perhaps you have no interest in the install market but in the US, the high school theatre is an important profitable segment of the entertainment technology market and many of the decisions are made by beancounters - whether school purchasing people, school board members, or contractors who don't know the difference between DMX and ethernet. It does seem you simply do not like anything about Philips/Strand, which is fine.
 
Hi George. The way that ChamSys operate is one of the main reasons that their consoles have gained so much traction and built up brand loyalty. Giving users more outputs because they might need them as opposed to selling users more outputs to further milk the cow. The difference between gear designed by people that actually talk to their customers, and a corporation that has totally lost touch.

@Bill, "All consoles have limits to number of universes" - yes maybe, but none that I know come as standard with ONE. This is ridiculous for a modern desk.

"The fact that Philips will give you the additional universes for free if you buy their units seems like a reasonable incentive" - maybe incentive for beancounters, not for LDs or production and rental companies.

I see your point about only one universe being in the base purchase, but many installs with all kinds of conventionals and LED's have their needs satisfied with as few as 2-4 universes. If more lights are purchased requiring more control, it stands to reason that the cost of an extra universe or two would be factored in during that round of purchasing. I'm not aware of the price point on this console or on the universes, but I'll bet it's priced competitively, and that you pay less for the console than you would if it came equipped with a bunch of universes to begin with.

As a business model, it's also a good method of distributing out costs while keeping hardware uniform. The fee-per-universe or fee-per-block-of-outputs model is a good way to cater to many users with different needs. The people that only need a few universes primarily pay for the base package, and the people who are really going to push their consoles to the max are going to pay for consoles that can handle many outputs -- it just so happens both classes of users are on the same hardware. It also stands to reason that it's a fair distribution of costs -- the users who want to push their consoles to the max, using 50 or 100 universes and using every feature in the console help pay to cover a larger chunk of manufacturer's R&D for all of those features, while the people who basically need a console just to turn 150 lights for a show every couple months pay a much smaller percentage of the manufacturer's R&D.

Ultimately, it makes much more sense logistically and financially for a manufacturer to provide unified hardware and software solutions with pricing structures to serve multiple markets than to create a unique product offering for each market (such as the 2-universe product for the community theater, and the 20-universe product for the tour). I'm talking everything from the less costs in software and hardware development, to better volume pricing on hardware components, to the resources needed to market a console to make a sale, and to provide tech support for a product once it's out in the wild.

Strand could offer the Neo with the vast number of universes you're talking about included in the console price, but to make any profit on the console they'd have to ramp up the price of the console. Makes the console completely inaccessible to entry-level groups that only need 4 universes of control.
 
Wouldn't the fair comparison be the cost of the console with X number of universes against the competition? Just because others come with two (element and others) or more, I don't see what makes this wrong. We would always spec the number of universes needed for the project. Perhaps you have no interest in the install market but in the US, the high school theatre is an important profitable segment of the entertainment technology market and many of the decisions are made by beancounters - whether school purchasing people, school board members, or contractors who don't know the difference between DMX and ethernet. It does seem you simply do not like anything about Philips/Strand, which is fine.
Well some fair points and w do not know the cost of this thing yet, so if it is aimed at the install and school segment then it may all make sense although I maintain that "contractors who don't know the difference between DMX and ethernet" have no business influencing purchase decisions of this scale.
 
The issue here is "product tying".

The point of an open interface like DMX is to make it possible to buy your console from one company, and your dimmers/fixtures from a different one; a process which we have decided as a society is to be encouraged.

What this does is make it difficult to actually *exercise* this freedom, because people who make competing consoles can't in fact compete with you on price -- you're taking advantage of popularity at one end of the wire to sell stuff at the other end that people don't like as much.

Whether it's "unfair" advantage is the question.

Decisions like the Lexmark Toner case suggest perhaps it is.
 
Well some fair points and w do not know the cost of this thing yet, so if it is aimed at the install and school segment then it may all make sense although I maintain that "contractors who don't know the difference between DMX and ethernet" have no business influencing purchase decisions of this scale.
Welcome to public work in the US and low bid is all its about.
 
The issue here is "product tying".

The point of an open interface like DMX is to make it possible to buy your console from one company, and your dimmers/fixtures from a different one; a process which we have decided as a society is to be encouraged.

What this does is make it difficult to actually *exercise* this freedom, because people who make competing consoles can't in fact compete with you on price -- you're taking advantage of popularity at one end of the wire to sell stuff at the other end that people don't like as much.

Whether it's "unfair" advantage is the question.

Decisions like the Lexmark Toner case suggest perhaps it is.

So a coupon or a sale makes it unfair and difficult to exercise freedom? Really, is offering a couple hundred dollars off if you buy one brand over another that big of deal on 10 or 20 $1000 or $2000 units? Is it fair that one dealer gets a lower price than your preferred dealer from the manufacturer? I personally can't imagine the cost of a universe is going to sway any purchase despite how much someone at Philips hopes it will.
 
The issue here is "product tying".

The point of an open interface like DMX is to make it possible to buy your console from one company, and your dimmers/fixtures from a different one; a process which we have decided as a society is to be encouraged.

What this does is make it difficult to actually *exercise* this freedom, because people who make competing consoles can't in fact compete with you on price -- you're taking advantage of popularity at one end of the wire to sell stuff at the other end that people don't like as much.

Whether it's "unfair" advantage is the question.

Decisions like the Lexmark Toner case suggest perhaps it is.

The opposite case could be made that for the most streamlined support, purchase everything from the same manufacturer when possible. As opposed to fifteen devices in the same system by different manufacturers, and when something goes awry, every manufacturer blames the other manufacturers instead of helping diagnose the problems.

Another factor on the table against diversifying your product manufacturers except where necessary is cost. Some manufacturers offer a given contractor a rebate at the end of the calendar or fiscal year. Sell $xxx,xxx of their product, and they give you 10% back. Sell $x,xxx,xxx of their product, and you get 20% back. Another pricing incentive to stay loyal to a given manufacturer is if you order $xx,xxx at a time, they'll give you an xx% discount on the order. These pricing structures makes it more difficult for a vendor to be competitive if they sell a little bit of everyone's products, versus if they focus their offerings into a couple select manufacturers. It's easy to look at this as the vendor being unfair to their customers with their offerings and getting bonuses, but it's also easy to look at as so long as the vendors hit their sales goals, they can bid lower on projects knowing they'll get their money back.

As I digress further into the ilky underworld of discussing procurement practices, I'll say this -- when I talk to clients, integrators (bidders), and consultants, I almost never hear people begging for diversity in their systems' manufacturers. Due to price structuring, volume discounts/rebates, logistics, support, and so on, almost everyone I've encountered prefers the fewer manufacturers, the better. Projects that lack focus in the product selection end up more complicated and time-consuming to design, more logistically cumbersome to support, and more time-consuming for potential bidders to bid on (which translates into fewer bids, or bids are that intentionally marked up to cover the bidders' butt if things get messy later in the project).

What the argument of sole-sourcing more practically comes down to is one manufacturer's all-encompassing solution over another manufacturer's all-encompassing solution. Not one manufacturer's console driving another manufacturer's network protocol driving another manufacturer's dimmers and yet another manufacturer's moving lights, and yet another manufacturer is providing the architectural lighting system to be integrated with the performance lighting system, which is all controlled by yet another manufacturer's control system. Over time, some facilities end up with these types of systems as they progress because add-ons or upgrades are done in segments by different people over stretches of time -- but nobody on the front end is begging for these systems as their "ideal solution."

This is partly why manufacturers sometimes have robust Applications Engineering departments. So long as the bid process doesn't prohibit it, a bidder could show up with a consultants' ETC design, take it to Strand's application engineering department and have Strand "flip it" for them. Or vise versa. Replace ETC and Strand in that sentence with any other competing companies and you'll find it's a common practice when procurement practices are that open and non-restrictive.

In some regards, the sticker price of a console is among the least important of factors in sizable projects.
 
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So I haven't even seen the Neo console. What's so bad about it for all those who have seen it and decided it was not good that nobody will like it? I did think I heard another universe was a few hundred dollars - doesn't seem like much if you're buying a bunch of LED units.

As far as I know no one has seen it yet. I thought it was going to be publicly unveiled at USITT for the first time.

What is wrong with you people?
Agreed. Strand's been selling consoles with upgrade-able channel/universes for since the new Palette/Light Palette consoles came out like 8 years ago? This is hardly anything new.

I haven't used a Strand console in a long time, but I do remember it seeming a little backwards to use. I wonder if that's a sneaky linear encoder in the top right above the radial faders. That's always a feature I wanted for controlling pan/tilt.
That wheel on the other recent Strand consoles is actually fairly cool. You can either click one at a time on fixtures, click and drag across the screen, or use the keypad to select fixtures. Once selected you can scroll the wheel to increase or decrease the intensity of all selected fixtures in proportion. It's an awesome feature when your director asks you to take a cue with 40 fixtures in it all at different levels and make it a little brighter
 
As far as I know no one has seen it yet. I thought it was going to be publicly unveiled at USITT for the first time.

Agreed. Strand's been selling consoles with upgrade-able channel/universes for since the new Palette/Light Palette consoles came out like 8 years ago? This is hardly anything new.

That wheel on the other recent Strand consoles is actually fairly cool. You can either click one at a time on fixtures, click and drag across the screen, or use the keypad to select fixtures. Once selected you can scroll the wheel to increase or decrease the intensity of all selected fixtures in proportion. It's an awesome feature when your director asks you to take a cue with 40 fixtures in it all at different levels and make it a little brighter

It's what Eos does with "Select Active, Enter", then wheel up, or add 20% with "@, /, 120, Enter". Very useful, when I can remember it !
 
I got a chance to play with the Neo back in May when I was at Strand for agent training. Being newer to the theatrical side of things, it's hard to say how good it is vs consoles X and Y.
It's a very sexy piece of hardware and the features seemed quite impressive for a console of that price range.
Yes it only comes with 1 universe, and that's a complaint I've already heard from a few people up here, but even if you've got a few Philips products on your show, you may only need 1. If a job specifies minimum 2 universes, then a 2nd universe will be sold right off the bat.
Everything about it impressed the hell out of me, even with the beta software it was running. First batch of units were already sold and should have shipped to their projects by now. I'm hoping to persuade the boss to loosen the purse strings and get me one to play with as a demo model.
 
So, yes, this Phillips Advantage thing is a marketing gimmick, but that doesn't mean that the console should be written off. I'm not sure where all of the vitriol is coming from. I have seen the Neo in person and talked with Bobby about it a bit during a demo here in New York. I am a professional EOS programmer and I was impressed with the NEO. Yes, it is different, but every console will have a learning curve. For those of you that suffered from the Pallete catastrophe, don't worry, this console is bringing it back to Strand's roots. It is much more like the 500s of yesteryear, but of course, much more modern, with all of the bells and whistles. I would be more than happy to get to use this console sometime soon. I'm not sure why you all are hung up on the 1 universe thing. The basic ETC Element can only control 250 channels. If you need more, get more. Every console produced today has upgradable output counts.

If you all want to know something about the console, please ask. I don't know everything about it, and I don't work for Strand, but I seem to be the only person in this thread who has actually seen one.

-Tim
 

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