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Lighting Review: Avolites Tiger Touch Lighting Control Console
The Tiger Touch console could be ideal for churches that operate “on the fly” and don’t always follow a set order.
Avolites is one lighting company I've not had much experience with. Based in London, England, Avolites manufactures a range of dimmers, lighting consoles, and other lighting accessories. In this review, we'll be taking a look at the Tiger Touch lighting console.
The Tiger Touch has four universes of DMX built into the console, and can be expanded through Ethernet connectivity using ArtNet (a network protocol that enables the transmission of DMX data over the network to ArtNet-compatible devices). The console comes with a touch-screen display built into the console, and can be expanded with an external LCD monitor for displaying additional windows.
It's a full-featured moving light console that supports pallets of light attributes such as position, color, etc.; it also has numerous places to store pallet entries, cues, chases and cue lists. For example, there are up to 1,000 soft-key playbacks (accessible via the touch screen); 60 pages of 10 playback faders; up to 6,000 virtual fixture handles to allow quick selection of fixtures; and configurable windows for up to 1,000 buttons within each window, such as color, position, group, macro.
For programming and control, there are three encoder wheels for adjusting attributes of your fixtures, a numeric keypad for direct data entry, and numerous mode and function buttons to give you quick access to the Tiger Touch's many features.
The console was easy to set up-like any console, there's a learning curve, but the manual presents the functions of the console in a logical order.
Patching the console consists of pressing the patch button to enter the patching mode; selecting whether you desire to patch a dimmer or a specific fixture type; and entering in address and label information. You then press a handle in the fixtures window on the touch screen, and the fixture is assigned to this button. The next available address in the patching parameters automatically gets incremented by the number of addresses that the selected fixture type consumes, so patching consecutive fixtures merely requires updating the label you want to be displayed on the handle button, and touching the next handle button. Pretty simple. And if you're patching 32 house lights to one handle, you don't even need to update the label-just enter the starting address info and label, and touch the handle button 32 times to get those 32 consecutive dimmers assigned to that handle.
For this review, staff at Colonial Baptist Church in Cary, N.C., was kind enough to let me use their auditorium, which has standard dimmers; Rosco iCue moving mirrors; Coemar iSpot Flex fixtures; and Wybron color scrollers. I had no problem patching in my dimmers and Coemar iSpot Flex fixtures, and even multi-part fixtures were reasonably easy to patch. For the Wybron color scrollers, I could easily patch both the scroller device as well as the dimmer to the same handle, so it gets treated as one fixture. However, I did run into an issue with patching a Rosco iCue-it would not allow me to patch both the moving mirror device and a dimmer to the same handle. I ended up having to use two handles for the pan/tilt and dimmer attributes of the fixture. Creative Stage Lighting, the U.S. distributor for Avolites, was quick to supply an updated profile that enabled putting both the dimmer and pan/tilt attributes on the same handle.
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Jim Kumorek is the owner of Spreading Flames Media, providing video/media production and writing services to the A/V/L, technology, architectural and hospitality industries. He has led audio, video and lighting teams in churches as both staff and a volunteer for over 10 years. He can be contacted at james@spreadingflamesmedia.com.
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