Stairville DMX-Master I

We purchased this controller to use with our set up that includes two moving heads, 10 Par lights, and two blinders.

The controller appears to be of great quality material, but our disappointment was with the use of the product.

You are able to record many scenes, but the only way to switch between the scenes WHILE having a timed fade is to set it on Automatic or Music Mode.
It does not allow you to MANUALLY FADE through the scenes. IF you want to manually control the scenes you recorded it instantly switches to the next scene.

Of course this feature is an essential one to manually doing lights in a concert where you know your scenes but many times you want slower fades between each one.

We found ourselves not able to use all our lights to their full capacity due to this feature missing.

That being said, the controller does things well and is built well, just know you are getting what you pay for.
It is one of the cheaper controllers, and the features are quite limited.
More limited than we expected.

Great if you want to use the automatic or music mode.

We bought this for a number of reasons, mostly that it accepts audio-in, for accurately synchronising our lights with the music being played. However, once we started using this lighting controller, we found that the other included features are incredibly valuable - and now we couldn't live without them! The scene programming and selection is incredibly intuitive - one could program a light show in a number of minutes. Couple that with Manual, Auto and Music modes, and the workflow becomes very fast. The chases are very good too, with more memory locations than I ever would have expected! The DMX-Master has a number of Banks for scenes/chases, but I'm unsure how many. Highly recommended!

As a total novice to lighting when first approaching the problem of what to buy for our venue, it was glowing testimonials from friends in the business that brought the Stairville to our attention and rightly so.
With a huge variety of possibilities and numerous well-thought-out features, it has proven an essential bit of kit for us. Crucial and flexible when creating an atmosphere for all varieties of musical styles and clubnights.
It also has the added benefit of being a familiar face for visiting technicians, making their worki in the venue far more straight-forward.
The unit's built is hardy and not unattractive. The sockets are well made. The control area is well designed and numerous nice litle touches (including the Xbox-esque swivel stick) made it one of our best and most consistently reliable purchases.
Highly recommended for anyone with a small venue and lighting array who still wants a certain level of versatility.
The tiniest criticism would be that, for those of us looking to mount it on a wall, it lacks any pre-drilled fixture holes. But that is a small gripe with an otherwise excllent acquisition.

Came in a bundle. We already had a controller but this was bundled so we got it anyway and planned to re-sell it. However, it is better than our Light Operator 24 so we have kept the Master! It is smaller but can control 12 different units (actually, more than that because we set up some on the same DMX start code) The instructions are not great if you are new to DMX but once you get each unit set up on a correct DMX code (001, 017, 033, 049 etc) you will be flying. It takes ages to program but I can't see how they could improve that unless there was a PC software tool to download programs on MIDI etc. Conclusion: Don't use Sound-to-light, get one of these!!