Traditional Lighting Consoles
List of Traditional Lighting Console manufacturers and sellers
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Discussion

Traditional Lighting Consoles

Traditional lighting consoles range from very small to very large. The smallest having something like four channels to the largest which could have thousands of channels.

Most traditional lighting consoles have sliders for each channel available, so for example a four channel console would have 4 sliders and a 48 channel console would have 48 sliders and so on. Obviously this will create problems when you get consoles that have thousands of channels. This is handled by using 'banks'. So if a console has 96 channels but only 24 sliders it would have 4 banks. Each of these banks will control 24 of the possible 96 channels and a switch or slider is used to change the bank in use. Most consoles will have a 'Master Fader' and a 'Blackout Button'.

The majority of consoles will have some form of backing up any show/scenes you have created. This might be an internal memory chip, a memory card, floppy disc, hard disc or some form of link to a computer. Depending on the console, the number of scenes, cues and/or shows you can create will be determined by the console, not all consoles are created equal.

A lot of manufacturers of consoles are now creating computer software to replicate their desk for use in offline programming and/or to be able to use a computer and the console at the same time.

Very modern lighting console use built in computers and software with built in screens to help program and control the lights.

But what ever the type of console the purpose is to control lighting fixtures via DMX and/or anologue signals.

Differing types of consoles have differing functions available to them. The more you want the more they cost.

Traditional lighting consoles are nearly always more expensive than the 'DMX USB Interface' counterparts, in respect of number of channels and functions available, also because they are a hardware based (physical) controller.