Ah... you sound like just the type of customer I've been talking about in the some other recent threads. You don't need everything
ION has to offer and it's a little out of your price range... if it only came with some submasters you would be set. You also don't need those
encoder wheels... you'll never be able to afford the moving lights. At the same time Smartfade doesn't meet your needs. You want something in the middle and so you are forced to look at an odd collection of products from the competition.
I suggest you take a look at the
Strand Basic Palette.
Strand's strategy for their new generation of consoles is one piece of software for all. You essentially choose the interface that works best for you. I am the owner of the Classic
Palette with 32 subs and 1000 channels. I'm very happy with it so far, I really like the software, it's a very smart board... but it's out of your price range. The Basic
Palette is the same software with only 16 subs and 100 channels. If you need more channels there are 128 and 512
channel upgrades available. The
LIST price on the Basic
Palette is a couple hundred more than your bid price on
ION WITH a
wing pannel. My
guess is your bid price on a Basic
Palette should be in that mid to upper $4k range*. We had a
bit of a debate a while back about
ION vs.
Strand as far as what they are capable of. The biggest difference is
encoder wheels.
Strand only puts them on their top boards. The software features are all still there you just have to use a
mouse or trackball instead. That's a real drag for some people... but you don't care as you don't have a lot of
MAC 2K's sitting around your school. Both
ETC and
Strand are really all about the software these days... it's really just a PC underneath the hood. Since
Strand got on the market first there were several features they had that
ION didn't have when it first came out. While in the past that was a problem it isn't any longer. These days new features are just a software upgrade away. I doubt there will ever be a cool feature that
Strand/
ETC comes up with that
ETC/
Strand consoles are not able to add to their software in the next update.
An important
point to consider is customer service.
ETC has a golden reputation... see two recent threads here in CB about that.
Strand's old reputation is not great. However I think things have changed some. Six months back I wrote about my disastrous training session here. I'm told new of my post here made it all the way to the president of
Strand in a few days, I was told that all their installers were going to be retrained and to make it right with me, the next week they flew
in one of their lead software designers from Toronto. They worked very hard to take good care of me and I've had some other issues with my new
system and so far I've been happy with their customer service. So while I think everyone around here would agree that
ETC is the gold standard of customer service, in my experience
Strand is trying hard to improve their reputation and is definitely worth a look over the other
console options out there.
In conclusion... Baby
Palette isn't
ION but you don't need
ION. Baby
Palette is far more advanced than anything else out there (including Smartfade) and It shouldn't cost as much as
ION.
*Remember pricing on products varies wildly. When you ask two dealers for a quote, the price begins with their wholesale price. If dealer #1 does a larger volume than dealer #2 the manufacturer is willing to sell them to dealer #1 for a lower wholesale price. The second factor is the size of the package you are buying. If you are only buying the
console you will pay more for it than someone buying a complete
system with dimmers, raceways, and instruments... when the package is bigger, the dealer has more profit margin to
play with to give you a better deal overall. Finally, the dealer considers the long term benefit of your business. Maybe you only are purchasing $5k today but you spent $20k last year, $40k the year before that, and you are thinking about a full remodel in the future. They want to keep long term customers. A few years ago I became pretty good friends with the custom sales guy at the local dealer. Even though I had very little budget, he gave me the same price cut as the big theaters in town. Relationships with local dealers pay over time.
Where are you at in this great big world? Maybe we can recommend some dealers for you to get prices from. I'll
send you a PM with the names of the two national dealers we've been dealing with.
).
