Stairville Stage TRI LED Bundle 70th Comp

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!

Bought 2 sets of these several years ago for our band. Cant comment on the footswitch controller as we use PC software programme to control our lights. But the lights themselves have been wonderful. Gigged upto 3 times a week with these, and although I've heard of others that have had issues, we have never had any issue with them - well, not until 2 days ago - but that seems to have righted itself, so could have been a ghost in the works that one night. The cases haven't lasted as long as the lights, mainly the zips breaking and the metal hinges wripping through the back f the case fabric that holdsthe case together - but after several years use in and out of a band van, can we really expect anything different to that ?
We;ve actually just ordered another bundle - wouldn't have done that after all this time if they hadn't have been up to the job and we hadn't been happy with them.

I looked around at various lighting rigs and decided on this one for the ease of use for the output that we were looking for. It came in two boxex, the main lighting rig and the footswitch (the stand is seperate). The main lighting rig is so easy to set up I would say a child could do it, but not quite as it a bit heavy for a child. All you do after putting the stand up (not all the way) is just lift the complete rig out of the supporting case and fit it into the stand, then just connect up the power lead and the footswitch and away you go.
The lights then need to be pointed in the direction of use, as there are four of us in our band we use one spotlight each, and just point in towards the roof area above one of us... initially we did point the spotlight directly at us, but in a small venue it was just too bright... It can be set up for sound to light (we use this one), automatic or user defined (by use of some sort of controller). We have found it works just great on sound to light and only use the footswitch to stop it and start it when needed (in between songs etc). All the various elements can be set up using an easy interface and once it has been set up, we have never had to change it as we tend to play in the same sort of venue so it takes about five mins to unpack and get the whole system up and running.
It could do with a longer lead for the footswitch as we have to 'play around' a bit at different venues to get the swith to the right person... however we have got around this by 'training' at least two members of the band...
With white, red, blue and green the LED's give out a very good light and gives some excellent picture opportunities for your promo shots. I would highly recommend this system to any local type band.

I can not stress how useful these lights have been for my band. We use them all the time for events and would not go out without them now.

In terms of build quality - they are perfect. Well made and come with a great carrying case so that they never get damaged in the van.

The LED's are powerful enough that we only realistically need one stand but for a full stage effect I would recommend two. The actual lights can be moved up and down as well as swivelling 180 degrees so they are perfect for covering a large area.

In terms of the stand - this also works perfectly and has some great height options for those that want to get the lights above a crowd.