First off, a list of what I'm using:

2 High End Systems x.Spots 6 High End Systems Studio Commands 3 Vari-Lite VL3000 spots 12 LightWave Research Trackspots 4 Martin MAC 250s 60+ SourceFour fixtures 1 NSI 24/48 lighting console (Can you identify the weak link?)

Second of all, I am absolutely in LOVE with the VL3000s. If all Vari-Lite fixtures are like these then I can die a happy man. The color mixing is smooth, the fixture movement is (16-bit!) smooth, there aren't too many attributes so as to make programming a nightmare. And these things are brighter than heck. Oh my gosh they pack a punch. They turn my skin pure white when my hand is in the beam. The color mixing gives you wonderful rich blues and reds, even without the color wheel, which makes the colors even more saturated. It's hard to get a good dark blue with color mixing but these things do it. There's three layers of gobos, all rotatable and indexable, and of course iris and all sorts of shutter effects. Me likey.

The x.Spots on the other hand, are disappointing. First off, they're a lot less bright than I had expected - bright enough to punch through the wash but sometimes difficult to see without a lot of haze. And dear Lord the attributes - there are thirty-fricking-eight attributes on each of these things. Talk about overkill! Not only can I rotate my frost effect, I can index the frost wheel. Just, you know, in case I ever needed my frost wheel to be in an exact position. I can strobe my frost, I can strobe my colors, and there's a bunch of stuff that I'll never use just hogging memory and valuable programming time. High End really needs to rethink the x.Spot.

The Studio Commands are nice. They're reliable, bright, fixtures with color mixing that I've noticed almost never hits any weird intermediate colors usually associated from going from one mixed color to another. They just snap over and Bam! Orange or congo blue or green or whatever. And they're fast, which is nice, though not exactly quiet when moving.

Actually, all of the fixtures are loud. With them all on it sounds like there's a vacuum cleaner in the grid. Lots of fans means lots of cooling, though, and lots of cooling means happy fixtures.

More to come!