Avolites / Quartz Lighting Console
Avolites has been a household name in the professional stage and concert lighting industry for decades. “Avo” desks are known for their user interfaces that cater lighting artists who prefer instantaneous control of the lighting effects. This is why Avolites consoles are so popular among live music programmers/operators. The controls are easy to reach and are in the perfect place for instantaneous lighting control.
Avolites recently introduced the new Arena Console. This new lighting desk incorporates the same software and design interface of their popular Tiger Touch II console with additional capabilities for live lighting control.
A review of the Avolites Tiger Touch II Console can be found here:
Improvisational lighting (as opposed to strict cue scene lighting) is most common in the church world. This was relatively easy when there were only faders and buttons that controlled the intensity of conventional lighting fixtures. With the development of complex moving lights and video with multiple control parameters, a new lighting control surface was required for the improvisational lighting artist.
Like the Tiger Touch II, the Avolites Arena Console includes two color customizable touch screen displays. You can label the macro buttons as well as the rotary pots. This allows the programmers to customize the console, and make it their own, personal control surface. This aids in the designers' ability to build the control interface like their own personal lighting instrument, making improvisational control almost intuitive. Included in the control interface are fully assignable playback encoder pots and six LCD screens display electronic legends for 30 faders. This allows for quick access for playbacks, fixtures, and palettes. The Avolites Arena Console also includes an optical output for fiber connections that results in no signal loss over great distances (very useful for arena shows and large houses of worship).
The specifications on the Avolites Arena Console include: 40 precision playback faders in three pageable groups, 20 programmable macro executor buttons, three metal shaft optical attribute encoders, four optical playback encoder pots, 15.6-inch main touch screen with brightness control, seven-inch secondary touch screen, six mono LCD screens for digital fader legends, UPS battery back-up, four-port managed Gigabit network switch, OpticalCon Stage link output with an optional second link, eight physical five-pin XLR opto-isolated DMX out, up to 16 universes over ArtNet or streaming ACN (total of 8,192 console channels), compatible with Titan Net (up to 64 universes), total of 32,768 system channels, and four Ethercon Gigabit primary network connection with a battery maintained managed switch supporting Titan Net, ArtNet and streaming CAN.
Our hands-on experience with the Tiger Touch II illustrated how Avolites new control software makes instantaneous control of complex moving lights easy and intuitive. We were very impressed with the software and hardware on the Tiger Touch II, and upon first glance the Avolites Arena Console seems to follow this level excellent high quality materials and workmanship.
The Avolites Arena Console is being marketed as the new “Big Daddy” of live entertainment music festivals. This console may be ideal for houses of worship that need to control a large number of moving lights and sophisticated video effects. If it performs as well as it looks, we have no doubt that you will be seeing a lot of Arena Consoles in large houses of worship.
