Introduction

The Pearl 2000 is the mother of all lighting desks as far as anyone in Backstage is concerned. Produced by Avolites, it is the desk used to control all the main events such as the Rag Ball, SA Ball, Grad Ball and Freshers' Week (amongst others).

It is ideal for controlling scanners, and can have pre-written scanner profiles loaded in using it's built in disk drive. This greatly simplifies patching the lighting instruments to the console. The 2048 channel capacity is excellent for big rigs, such as those containing many big (20+ channel) scanners, whilst still leaving some spare channels for conventional lamps (such as parcans)

Things you need to look out for

It crashes often - at least the one we use seems to. Despite having all possible crash causing hardware removed (e.g. the disk drive or the VGA monitor driver card), the desk still manages to misbehave at least once during setup/running of an event.

Further information

Avolites Pearl 2000 Manual is available in Microsoft Word 97 format.
(due to the size of the Word document, it is wrapped up as a 306k self-extracting WinZip archive)