Recently, at a worship planning meeting, I made the comment that the church lighting console board was showing signs of wear and should be replaced sometime in the near future. “Why, what's wrong with it?” I was asked. “Well, our board was designed in 2003, is DOS-based and uses floppy disk for backup, which are both obsolete. And the page knob skips some of the pages making it difficult to use.”
The associate pastor requested that I write a formal request and to include specifications that a new console board should address. I started with four basic requirements:
- Control our conventional lighting, LED lighting, and moveable lighting
- Interface with our installed dimmer packs and non-dimmed lights
- Be reasonably easy to operate and program by volunteers
- Have upgradable capabilities for future software and hardware changes
What else could I say? So I turned to “Church Production Magazine.” They published an article in January 2015 titled: Lighting Console Options: Latest Models Ripe for Church Use. The magazine asked the major lighting console manufacturers for suggestions on which of their products were best for the worship market. Eleven consoles were described in the article with photos and descriptions.
After studying the list of 11 consoles, I eliminated six because they were less capable than our current board or didn't meet our more detailed specifications. Of those remaining their prices ranged from about $6,000 - $8,000. (Our existing board cost around $5,000 when new.) The ones I recommended to be researched further included: ChamSys Magic Q, ETC EOS or Element, Jands Vista, High End Systems HedgeHog 4, and Philips Strand Lighting Neo.
After a few months of committee meetings, a budget was approved for replacement lighting equipment. In addition to the new lighting console board, we were also given funds to replace two moving spots. Now we had to get serious about finding the right solution for our needs and outside suppliers were called to give us advice and quotes.
Our research led us to discover that most lighting consoles are designed primarily for two types of environments: live or programmed events. Boards for live events have lots of faders and little if any ability to store and playback programmed scenes. Boards for programmed events have few faders and lots of memory storage for playback.
Traditional church services are mostly live and need to have more faders that can make adjustments on-the-fly. Large or video-based church services are likely planned and can just hit a “go” button to advance to the next scene. Our church service is kind of in the middle where we do worship songs that could be programmed with a “go” button but need manual faders for the live portions of the service. Few control boards seem to be made that have a good combination of the two.
Some of the consoles we considered used a PC or Mac as the computer and then attached to a hardware board with faders. While these options sometimes had a lower price, we discovered some churches that used these options had complaints. Some of the problems related to the connection between the PC and the hardware and most stated there was a timing delay when you requested a scene change. Hearing of these issues, plus taking into account the normal three- to four-year lifespan of a notebook computer helped us eliminate all these options from consideration.
The two board consoles left standing at this point had similar features but were very different in layout configuration. Without seeing the boards in person and being able to ask detailed questions about the operation and programming, it was difficult to know how we would implement them. Photographs on the websites weren't good enough to make a decision. Thus, we requested arrangement to either have a console brought to us or find a nearby location that we could travel to and see the board in action.
The first board had software that is quite capable and is very popular with many lighting designers. It works with conventional lights, the newer LEDs, and also moving lights. It can provide as many color washes and moving effects as your imagination can create.
The 10 faders can be programmed to serve as cue stacks for playback of programmed lighting scenes or divided for live action. By only having 10 faders (five of which would likely be used for live action), where our old console board has 24 just for live action, we could be somewhat limited in the live lighting needs to bring up house lights, light the pastor, singers, or other special focus areas on the stage. While we may have some issues with operation, I didn't see any limitation on the programming side. We would have to purchase a keyboard and mouse or trackball separately and provide table space for them.
The second board is less known at present but has much upside potential. The overall design clearly has the lighting designer in mind. It has double the number of faders from the first board, which is a huge benefit --- one that caught my eye from the beginning. Ten of the motorized-faders are shortcut keys, which are programmable with up to 100 pages or 1,000 different shortcut features. So if you need lots of faders, that feature alone is hard to beat.
Other features that were big differentiators for me on the programming side was the built-in keyboard and trackball, support for dual touchscreen monitors and the intensity level wheel, all of which I fell in love with. It was also nice having four USB ports on the top of the board in addition to four on the back and one in the keyboard tray. It also comes standard with four DMX universe ports on the back. The software is somewhat intuitive and I was impressed with all the flexibility and effects I could generate in only a week of demo use.
Both lighting console boards we evaluated meet our criteria and could do a superior job to what we have now. But by far my strong overall preference was for the Philips Strand Neo board, which also came in lower in price. I recommend if you are looking for a new light board console you give this board a good look.
