To be fair one of the replacements was the 300 series rack mounted backup, and we are also running 6 S4 revolutions and 190 dimmers, our consoles get put through their paces. we also run about a show a month, maybe a little less.
We have had the 300
console in each of our two spaces crash, for various reasons. in our black box we had a ram malfunction whereby on each save it scrambled the flash and we lost
track of
cue orders for specific atributes, and in our
proscenium we have had issues with spontaneous crashes and lockouts, as well as assorted other problems with strandnet. our recent production had difficulties where the backup would steal control from the main
console (luckily never durring a show) and the main
console would not be able to retrieve control without a hard shutdown. We have also had some issues with the boards internal timing, where cues would not pace at the same rate night after night.
I think the 300 probably runs fine on smaller systems, but we are not really pushing ours to their listed capabilities and still having stability issues.
Personally I ran an LBX all through high school and loved it, I have been significantly dissapointed with the 300, not just with stability but also user friendliness, the soft buttons are a real pain when you dont press "go" hard enough and miss a
cue.
Also, the usermanual does have a section that will explain chases and effects pretty well, but for the most part the
manual is very difficult to get useful information from and is in general poorly organized and unhelpful. The 300 is actually capable of some really cool effects if you know how to program it, unfortunately you wouldn't know unless instructed by a
strand representative, which for us took months.
Sorry that this is a
bit ranting, but I feel rather strongly on the subject. I feel that Genlyte really has a lot of work to do to
whip Strand into a customer friendly company again.
