Ideal House Boards

[adoublearonn]

I'd like to get some people's thoughts on what boards work best as a permanent house board. I'm looking to upgrade my house board from an old Obsession II. We are a 1250 seat venue with all conventional lights. That's right, we don't own any movers - we make people rent their own - but we do have an endless amount of conventional lights. We mostly do rentals for dance recitals, community theatre, corporate, and a lot of touring shows. Usually corporate and touring bring their own boards, obviously, and everyone else settles with what we have. Most of our events are one-off's. They come in in the morning and we quickly set lights with what bit of time we get after load-in, run a show, and then load out the same night. Most of the time for the rentals I don't have time to write any definitive cues so I just run off of faders and my "Show Template."

Obviously we need a board that makes controlling conventionals easier, but also has good moving light support for the theoretical future when we get some movers of our very own.

Here are my thoughts on some of the boards we were considering:

Jands Vista - My TD is adamant about getting one of these. I've never used the board but he believes the learning curve is very easy because he saw one demo'd at a lighting convention. I'm not sure if that would make a good house board for us or not because we don't regularly use any moving lights. What are people's thoughts on this?
Avolites - Good for conventionals and movers because they have a lot of faders, but I hate writing cues on them.
Hog - Better for movers and the cueing system is very powerful but the learning curve is a bit steep for most people. I love this board for movers but with a longer programming time and lack of faders, I don't think it will work well for us (I could be wrong).
ETC - I'm not too familiar with their newer stuff. I've used some boards from the EOS family and they weren't so bad though.
Other Stuff - Maybe there is something else out there that people prefer?

Thoughts and experiences are appreciated!

Aaron

 

[techieman33]

My vote would be for AVO, I've heard the cue stack is much improved in the latest versions of Titan OS. It may not be the best at any one thing, but it's a great swiss army knife and will at least get you though just about anything you could conceive of. You could also look at one of the midrange Chamsys consoles, our local rental shop when from an AVO Diamond 4 to one of the big Chamsys desks a couple years back for pixel mapping and more universes and has been very happy with it's flexibility. From what I've seen of Jands Vista it's very cue based, and not a good desk for busking. It also requires a computer to run the control surface, which is just adding more possible points of failure IMO.

 

[SteveB]

ETC Ion with as many fader wings as you can fit, plus dual touch screens. Maybe a Gio (if you have the budget) with some fader wings as it has the built in touch screens as well as external touch or regular monitors. The syntax is pretty much Obsession speak. Plus there are a lot of these desks out there, so a lot of folks know what they do and how to use one. Note that I'm a big fan of touch screens as it makes controlling ML's and LED's MUCH easier, if you end up expanding, as well the new Magic Sheet system integrated to the desk is a huge time saver in terms of visualizing the rig.

I found the modular wing system very useful for our space as I could expand/contract the system depending on the event. Sometimes it's useful for us to have our Ion up and running for a focus of the house rig, then shut down and give control to whatever tour desk is sitting alongside. Or we use all 140 faders on the 3+ wings. The 1x20 wing that sits on top of the Ion is a useful device as it's out of the way yet you always have at least 20 faders available. Plus you can get an iPad (with the $50 app) as a remote that is a terrific on deck addition.

FWIW, about 80% - 90% of our event are exactly as you describe, one-off's run on faders. We have 6-12 ML's plus 300+ conventionals and busk a lot.

 

[Footer]

What kind of touring shows? What are riders asking for? Do shows reguarly carry a show disk (or do they grumble when they can't use their show disk).

If your doing music, Avo, Hog, Chamsys, GrandMA. If your doing theatre, ETC. If your doing both but have to deal with show disks, then ETC again. If you busk 90% of your stuff the programmer based consoles are your friend. The world opens up greating when you go from the world of "subs" to the world of "playbacks". But once again, pull riders from the last 2-3 years... what did people want?