I'm fairly new to the Congo but am doing all I can to learn its ways. Unfortunately my access to the desk for live/hands-on time has been limited, so I have been learning primarily from the documents, offline software, and watching others.
What I am missing, and may be useful to others learning the Congo, is some document or manual section describing how the desk works at an abstract level. For example, post #506 in this forum detailed some of the philosophy of the Congo design, and that was *very* helpful. There is also a brief manual section on "Control Hierarchy"--also useful but much too brief.
What I would like is:
1) A description (including graphics would best) of the overall object hierarchy: i.e. channels go into groups, presets comprise channels, groups or attributes, sequences are pointers to presets, etc.
2) Since I am a programmer and think of things that way, I would like to see a picture of how the ultimate output DMX is created. That is, starting from the DMX out, moving back through the patch, to the data sources and how they mix, etc. so that I can keep in my head where the look on stage is coming from and how to change it. That has always been the basis for my feeling solid with a console--understanding how the data flows so I am confident I am in command of it.
Because the Congo has so many ways of doing anything, and the documentation doesn't include the data flow, I have found a common experience for me (and other newer users I watch) is to think everything is cleared while some light or movement continues on stage while you search for its source.
As a general comment, I am surprised how rough the documentation is at V4.3: the manuals still contain many typos, spelling and grammar errors, and a few erroneous descriptions, as well as being lacking in graphics. Honestly, when I look at a product I observe the quality and attention to detail in the documents as an indication of the same in the hardware and software.
