DMX controller recommendations.

For what its worth, I've found most soumnd to light functions on desks to be pretty poor.  The good ones are on the Pulsar Masterpiece which has 4 way bands which can be assigned, and on things like the Chamsys music input interface.

I used to have one of those, not bad for £100.  One of the cheaper units to offer soft patching of channels to faders.  Terrible to program and use i found (compared to todays modern desks)

That bar is designed for dimming and chasing generic lights rather than LED fixtures which only need 'hot' power and a DMX control signal.

There does seem to be a lack of basic, easy to use lighting controlers for things like LED cans.

Incidentally the best sound to light sensing in a cheap unit I've used is a Club40 ancient 4 channel PAR can chaser.  Without an audio signal the speed control works as normal but when you add the audio signal, the speed control selects the speed of the chase relative to the beat.  ie every beat or even between down to once every 4 or 8 beats.

The reason there isn't a generic system to control LED cans is that the dmx channels are rarely in the same order and the controller needs to know what make/model is plugged into it and its dmx address. If you just want flashing colours in time to the music, 4 par standard 56 cans with gels in them are hard to beat. They take more power but will always give you a much brighter stage and much richer colours. I've always found the cheap led pars good for nothing much more than uplighting architectually. Almost any system you buy that controls via dmx will need programing rather than being plug and play. this can be useful but again, most cheap systems are a pain to work with. If you want to continue down this route and have a laptop, the chamsys software that norty mentioned is ace, i'm not sure whether you can use the input on your laptop as a sound source but contact them and they'll know. The software is free to download and with a usb adaptor that you can buy from maplin for £60 you get the power of a desk that retails at over £8k. This leaves plenty of room for adding a moving head or twenty if the venue has them.

Hhhmmm, just re-read your post and think the standard parcan option could be the best. I don't think you'll find anything that is simple. If you do though. let me know, would be useful to know.

nothing a downloadable crack wont fix .

mk2_ginger_biscuit69 wrote: nothing a downloadable crack wont fix .

Although something that we would take a very dim and very strong legal view against!

It is possible to use your computer's sound card for sound to light functionality, however you do need a piece of our hardware connected over USB to activate this function. Why? Well, we give you 18 universes of DMX, media and LED control with impressive functionality for nothing so it's only fair to shell out a few hundred to get an Audio Interface that will do the job properly and pay our wages!

Regards,

Matt Lemon
ChamSys Ltd