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This article appeared in Disco International, February 1998, and appears on the Avolites web site by kind permission of Disco International. All rights reserved. |
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Not only was the desk itself of interest to me but also the fact that it was
being produced by Avolites that doyen of Rock & Roll desks. Avolites is a
company that is synonymous with high quality, reliable lighting control
equipment for the Rock & Roll and Concert market. Established for well over
10 years Avolites was bought out by its management five years ago from the
previous corporate owners and has since gone from strength to strength producing
consoles and dimming equipment of ever increasing sophistication.
So my first question on arriving at the London, Park Avenue headquarters was not about the new Azure 2000 but why, given its background, did they feel the need to produce a disco desk. As you would expect the answer to that is - because they could. Let me explain; Rock & Roll console production is to a large extent bespoke. The band orders a desk the company builds it - hence the (relative to disco) high cost of Rock & Roll desks. What Avolites has done is to produce a common hardware platform that effectively shares the R&D cost over many products. Software features for one desk can quickly be rolled out to the others so the cost of the desk is determined mostly by the design of the user front end. For Avolites the disco market sector represents a move not only into the cutting edge but also new volume markets - as they told me there are more clubs out there than bands on tour. For them, it is a natural extension of the current activities. That the company has carefully researched the needs of our market will become all too clear as this review progresses. |
So what do we have? The Azure 2000 is a 19in rack-mountable control system for up to a massive 2048 control channels consisting of up to 200 fixtures and 200 dimmer channels spread over four DMX lines. A floppy disc drive for archive and software updating is fitted as standard no - call for expensive proprietary memory cards here. Storage is for up to 500 memories or sequences plus a further 20 environments. Doesn't seem like a huge amount but given that most things are done with the shape library I can assure you it will be all you need. The desk can be mounted nude in either an industry standard 19in rack or the usual console cut out. It can be supplied in a flight case with graphics tablet and keyboard included, in a very 'Batmanesque' free standing console (my personal favourite) or, for that rock and roll touch, with wooden ends and a padded leather front. The first thing that strikes you is the sheer quality of the desk. It reminded me very much of the old ALS Enigma (still used as standard by First Leisure) but, no disrespect at all to ALS, this desk is a street ahead. The front panel is a durable waterproof membrane but with excellent tactile feedback from the buttons. I can personally vouch for the quality of these steel dome switches - they are the same as used in the Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard that I have been pounding, filling full of fag ash, spilling coffee on and using hard with no problems whatsoever for the last two years. |
Easy servicing There are two digital optical encoder wheels and 10 faders. The 10 faders are the only part of the desk susceptible to fluid damage so are made as an easy to remove sub assembly - another example of the care and thought put into this desk. The front panel is hinged for easy service access to the guts and that demonstration gave me the opportunity to see the main circuit board. This board is a service engineers wet dream. Every major system, power supply, DMX receiver section has status monitor LED's - the main processor has a monitor display that tells you what it is doing. In other words, should the desk ever die on you one quick glance at this board will tell you instantly where the problem is. I have never seen this quality of care and attention to the physical design of a disco controller before and, as you know, I've seen a few desks in my time. The Azure 2000 drives a bog standard colour VGA monitor as standard, text can be either typed in from the front panel, thankfully laid out as proper QWERTY or better still plug in a standard PC Keyboard. You can drive the desk quite easily without the monitor but I wouldn't recommend it. However, the display on the monitor is my only real criticism of the entire desk. Oh, all the information you need is on there, but honestly guys, compared to the rest of the desk, it looks like dog poo. Don't get me wrong, I've seen much worse but I'm into superlatives mode now and, given the quality of everything else I'm sure you can do better than this. |
Programming Nevertheless, what about the programming I hear you cry - in a word fabulous. I have never used a desk that was so easy and freeform before. I was creating great looks within minutes - what was so good was that a short while after that I could forget the desk and just create. The key is the shapes, groups and palettes. Give you an example; take a group of 8 Superscan Zooms. Grab the odd ones, color them in Lee 106 (Lee colours are built in for all colour mixing fixtures - Rosco Supergel to follow), grab the even ones, colour them in Lee 101. Grab them all set the gobo etc that you want, select pan & tilt, fan them out then apply a shape, modify it and store it. Voila program done. Playback is great, there are 10 pages of 40 keys and 10 faders. Each button action can be defined, as can the operation of the faders. However, you can modify things in real time just as quickly as programming. Take the last example, say I'd pushed the button I'd stored that memory on and I didn't like the yellow (Lee 101) anymore - press group Superscan even, colour palette Lee 120 now they are blue - if you like that re-store it or store the new look on a new button. By the way, the desk classes the above example as a simple memory so does not eat into your ability to run up to 20 simultaneous sequences or environments. A sequence would be a load of those, with each step having it's own in-out fade times! I could go on for hours about neat features in the software. Things like 4 user definable passwords to protect your work, the ability when setting the desk up to search for fixtures that you've forgotten the start address for. The 20 real time or time code controlled environments that can each store a complete pre-programmed light show or just fade up the bar lights for you at 2am. The Learn tempo feature for quick chase speed setting etc. etc. However, there's more. I deliberately didn't use the optional extra graphics pad until the very end as I wanted to see what the desk on it's own could do - adding the graphics pad makes things even easier. Colour mixes are set by pointing at the colour you want printed as a full spectrum on the pad. Shapes can be drawn on the pad and the lights will follow. Speaking of follow you can select what fixtures you want and then simultaneously move them in 3D as a follow spot on a person's head. |
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How much? As you can see by now - I really liked this desk so that just leaves the $64,000 question - how much? This was the crunch for me, no-one in the disco industry is going to pay rock and roll prices no matter how good the desk is. Had they done their research on this topic as well as for everything else. I think they have - the end user retail price is £3800, well within the wallet of the large club. |
