He has 2 Robe spot 160XT moving heads, 2 EVL Spin flowers and 2 Robe Beam 250XT colour changers.
The DMX1440 is in the same vein as rivals from Stairville/Showtec/Botex/Prolight style controller, 19 in 4u case, joystick etc. It runs direct off the mains, no adapter needed, has a 2-line 40 character LCD backlit display, 12 channel faders, 12 flash buttons and 8 fixture buttons. It has 144 DMX channels. High street price is around £150, a little cheaper on ebay or grey import.
Programming is fairly easy, scenes are programmed in banks of 12 with a max of 20 banks. Sequences, or chases, can use any combination of the scenes from any bank. You can program the scenes to linger for any time you want, changing the timing at will from one scene to another as you program, or having a global rate adjustable by rotary knob during execution.
The display constantly prompts you for the next action (eg 'select sequence number'..'run sequence Y / N ? '...'Run Halted-Continue Y / N') etc.
The beauty of the desk is in this programmable fade rate: you can make your lights speed up or slow down automatically as the sequence progresses, making a sequence more interesting. It's particularly useful with moving heads since they are more sluggish than moving mirrors and it allows your program to 'wait' for the heads to 'catch up' with the scene changes.
During configuration, you can assign any DMX channel to any fader, unlike the rival Stairville variety whose faders are fixed to DMX channels. This means that you can put all the fixtures' colours on one fader, and all the gobos on another, for example, even though your fixtures may be from different manufacturers. It makes programming easier in the long run! As an example using the above fixtures, I assigned the Pan of the scanners with the Dish of the flowers so that I could make them turn the same way if necessary more easily. (You can still control them individually of course).
There's assignable blackout and master fade, this means that operating the 'blackout' button will only close the shutters of the lights, it doesnt cause the heads to spin round to their travel-stop positions unlike many blackout buttons. You can also dim the fixtures slightly during a sequence without affecting their movement at all using the Master Fader.
Build quality is good, the display is clear and it's all laid out logically. There are 3 and 5 pin XLRs out, a built-in mic for audio trig and an audio line-in jack. The instruction booklet is written in very good english and is professionally printed. There is space reserved for writing your fixture names next to the buttons. The display shows both DMX value 0-255 and channel percentage 0-100. Every fader is invertable and you can lock-out any DMX channels from the desk if you don't want them tampered with (eg a master reset or lamp-off command).
Minor criticisms include a lack of memory-protection, (so no good for a club installation...it would get tampered with!), the blackout button is a little sluggish if you're running a complicated program, and the speed control knobs (manual fade / manual step) are very fierce, making fine adjustments possible but tricky.
But all in all, not bad, a notch above the Stairville type due to its better configurability, larger displays and built-in power supply. But best suited to mobile DJ's, school theatres and bands.
