Stairville Stage TRI LED Bundle Complete

If anyone is considering just one light for a small band setup, then I'd stick my neck out and say this should be the one. I own a number of different types of lights - scanners, UV, washes, parcans, various club lights - but this one has been one of the most versatile lighting purchases I've made.

The bundle consists of the lights themselves, in a well-built sturdy zip locked case, footswitch with captive jack cable, and lighting pole.

LIGHTING POLE
I'll deal with the first and only problem I've had with the TRI LED at the start: Pretty much throw away the cheap and nasty pole supplied with the bundle. I don't know how many times the nuts and bolts holding the stanchions that hold the legs up have been lost and replaced, the final straw being when one of the stanchions cracked at one of the bolt holes. At the start of this year I replaced the stand with a spare speaker pole, and never looked back. This was the main thing that held me back from giving a full 5 star rating.

LIGHTS
As to the light itself, I operate it in larger setups under DMX and in smaller setups using just the supplied footswitch. Under DMX control, the LCD menu display makes it easier to set up than trying to remember a number of dipswitches like you get on many other fixtures. There are a number of DMX modes which should suit pretty much any setup, including a variety of preprogrammed chases.

I usually set up the fixture somewhere near one of the PA stacks, but have used it from as far away as about 6 metres from the front of the stage with OK results - it can illuminate at dark stage reasonably well at this distance, but you do lose definition.

FOOTSWITCHES
The footswitch controller is absolute simplicity itself, with switches for Autorun, Freeze, Sound-to-light and Blackout. These commands are helpfully echoed through the DMX output, so I often DMX daisy-chain a couple of footlamps or stage washes and control the whole lot via the footswitches. Very effective for a small but pro looking setup. The captive cable on the footswitch is only about 5 metres long, and I have found a few situations where I needed a longer run than this. There is no spec in the manual to say whether or how long the cable can be extended, but with a female to male jack cable, I was able to get it to stretch reliably to almost 20 metres, which is as long as anyone should ever need it. I made up a 10 metre extension cable which lives in the front pocket of the light case, giving me a total of about 15 metres.

The different footswitches should be mostly self-explanatory, but just to explain that the Autorun switch causes the light to run sequentially through it's internal pre-programmed chase modes - always starting from the first (slow) one when you press the switch. If you leave it in this mode, you will see the lamps chasing faster and faster until you get to the strobe modes at the end of the programmes, where it loops around to the first mode again. There is no way to skip to a preferred mode that I have found. Some could call this an ommission, but in operation, it is still quite versatile, and if you need more control than that, then you should probably be using a DMX controller.

One point I would like to make - if the pocket on the lighting case was just a few centimetres longer, you would also be able to fit the footswitch in, making it an even more perfect bundle!