So our facility currently has a Strand MX that we use for all our shows, but due to a recent dimmer-failing, we've been looking for a new system, and both the local production companies are offering to get us an ETC SmartFade 2496.
Being the enterprising(wrong word?) student I am, I'm all for the upgrade, I mean, the board can light up its LED's in a plethora of pretty colours, but the question comes up of do we really need it?
The main argument for it seems that because we have lots of people using the space, the new board can password lock out all the recording features so nobody can mess anything up.
But other than that, the two seem almost identical in "Usable features", sure the SF has more cues, but we've yet to max out our MX, and so on.
There's nothing really wrong with the MX, it seems to work relatively well for our needs, and has yet to break down, but looking for some third party input.
As far as budget, we can afford the SmartFade reasonably within our current upgrade budget, and we've somewhat looked at other consoles, but our budget is nowhere near enough to get ML's(not even rent). And our power supply constrains us from getting too many more channels (Looks like we're going with 24, we don't have enough distro for 48 dimmers, and apparently semi-permanently installing SOCA is illegal.)
Here's the tech/feature sheets for both for comparison,
StrandMX
SmartFade
Being the enterprising(wrong word?) student I am, I'm all for the upgrade, I mean, the board can light up its LED's in a plethora of pretty colours, but the question comes up of do we really need it?
The main argument for it seems that because we have lots of people using the space, the new board can password lock out all the recording features so nobody can mess anything up.
But other than that, the two seem almost identical in "Usable features", sure the SF has more cues, but we've yet to max out our MX, and so on.
There's nothing really wrong with the MX, it seems to work relatively well for our needs, and has yet to break down, but looking for some third party input.
As far as budget, we can afford the SmartFade reasonably within our current upgrade budget, and we've somewhat looked at other consoles, but our budget is nowhere near enough to get ML's(not even rent). And our power supply constrains us from getting too many more channels (Looks like we're going with 24, we don't have enough distro for 48 dimmers, and apparently semi-permanently installing SOCA is illegal.)
Here's the tech/feature sheets for both for comparison,
StrandMX
SmartFade