Audio Playback

Dan, when they build a process controller to run a steel mill or a nuclear reactor, they don't usually arrange for Homer to plug in a set of headphones. You are perfectly right that an audio player is needed during production development, but that's why designers and their associates have PCs. Since the steel mill example is perhaps extreme, let me also say that on multiple occasions, I've seen the speaker support (i.e. the slides for the shareholders or customers) computers brought by top-level industrial show companies suddenly freeze - during the event - because Norton AntiVirus began to update virus definitions. CEOs just hate that. (And that was before you could embed videos into PowerPoint.) My own computers are frequently kneecapped by Windows update events I'd rather have at a later time.

Producers were skeptical about computerized lighting control when the predecessors of today's very reliable consoles were under development. There are plenty of scary stories from that era. In more recent times (but before EOS...), it hasn't been that hard to produce hiccups in an effect running on an overburdened console. I for one am content to have a lighting console produce a reliable stream of DMX under the control of the programmer/operator. Now that we're talking about 30 DMX streams over ethernet, I think you underestimate the demands already on the console.

Dan, when they build a process controller to run a steel mill or a nuclear reactor, they don't usually arrange for Homer to plug in a set of headphones. You are perfectly right that an audio player is needed during production development, but that's why designers and their associates have PCs. Since the steel mill example is perhaps extreme, let me also say that on multiple occasions, I've seen the speaker support (i.e. the slides for the shareholders or customers) computers brought by top-level industrial show companies suddenly freeze - during the event - because Norton AntiVirus began to update virus definitions. CEOs just hate that. (And that was before you could embed videos into PowerPoint.) My own computers are frequently kneecapped by Windows update events I'd rather have at a later time.

Producers were skeptical about computerized lighting control when the predecessors of today's very reliable consoles were under development. There are plenty of scary stories from that era. In more recent times (but before EOS...), it hasn't been that hard to produce hiccups in an effect running on an overburdened console. I for one am content to have a lighting console produce a reliable stream of DMX under the control of the programmer/operator. Now that we're talking about 30 DMX streams over ethernet, I think you underestimate the demands already on the console.