I ran the software with just programming intensity, and fx playbacks and a lot of Palletts without a big problem with no hardware besides a mouse and a touch screen for an entire year before personally buying a PC wing.

If you are used to 24 submasters for control of your conventionals like an Expression, you wont like ANY of the modern programmer based consoles (hog, chamsys, vista)

You have to get used to using keypads or the groups to use your conventionals, especially without wing.

The front end is not as pretty as Vista, from an Express user, I am not used to a pretty GUI.

Its like Chamsys was built for folks using IBM Thinkpads and Jands Vista was built for Macbooks.

I use the console in our main room, and a Chamsys $60 dongle in our youth space with 12 movers and the conventionals on another console… The teenagers love it and they get how to use it.

I prefer to spend $3200 on a PC wing with 2 full universes and hardware than spending $8000 on the vista equivilant. I do not believe in spending a ton of money on a console that will control sixteen pretty old moving lights and have a console that is prettier to show off to my other tech guy friends…

I would rather buy more movers/leds/etc…stuff the conregation actually sees.

Thank you for this great review…. at some point in my life I will get off my duff and start writing about chamsys.

and while I can completely agree with most of what you say from an audio engineer perspective (aside from saying IEMs are better in tiny clubs, which I’d have to disagree with; in most clubs, the drum kit and often the guitar amps aren’t miced, so IEMs would basically leave everyone onstage hearing nothing but the vocals), the problem is that people often forget to look at it from the musician’s perspective. We’re used to hearing our instruments pass through a certain amount of air before the sounds hit our ears, and even with all the best plug-ins in the world, that’s hard to replicate. throw into the equation the fact that most IEM situations are less than stellar in terms of plug-in availability, etc, and it’s nearly impossible to come close to replicating sound traveling through the air and then hitting our ears.

which leads us to the main aspect of the equation, which, as simplistic as it may sound, is simply the “fun” factor. most of us became musicians because we got a taste of what it felt like to stand in front of a guitar amp and hit an A chord with a certain amount of raw power, or to feel the bass and kick drum lock in and shake the floor beneath our feet. and because we all know what it feels like to hear your own voice amplified for the first time, most of us got used to the way our vocals sound bounced off several unbaffled garage walls way before we ever got used to the way our voice sounded dry through a pair of headphones. The way those factors all come together into something much more magnificent than the sum of their parts is the reason most of us started or joined bands in the first place. take away that raw power, the rumble of the floor beneath your feet, the natural reverb of a room, and put it through headphones, and you take away the fun that hooked us in the first place…

I would even go so far as to say many musicians are in as much, or more, danger of ruining their ears since switching to IEMs as they were when they were using wedges, because the just keep cranking them in their ears, hoping to regain a little of that magic…

Danley was very impressive for its value…It sounded better than a few of the line arrays at a third of the price…