CHAUVET DJ Obey 10 Universeal Compact DMX Controller

I went for this as i have exactly 8 par can led lights that I need to configure on my setup.I bought a cheaper one before this a dmx512 from china. That worked ok however the lights would randomly flicker. Which is no good for smooth transition or just a simple single colour wash. The flickering just looks broken.So i went for the chauvet brand because it seems well trusted in the industry.The build quality is a lot better than chinese imitations as the metal doesnt bend in the corners and the buttons seem to take more force. They dont seem like they will break anytime soon.There is no flickering or anything dodgy about this. It works just as it should.For a beginner like me i found this unit to be confusing because on youtube and other guides they all seem to have the obey 40 (or chinese imitation 512dmx) so they set "scenes" and play a sequence based on those scenes.This one however has no scenes. They just have a selection of 6 chase sequences.What I did is hold down the program button. Press chase 1 until 1001 shows. This shows you are programming chase 1. In each chase you can have 99 steps. So this is like the obey 40 except you have chase buttons instead of scenes and step up and step down buttons instead of chase!So basically when you play the sequence it will play chase one and up to 99 steps in a loop.You select fixture 1 and move the sliders to get it to be the colour you want and save its colour by pressing add. Then go back to that step (as saving each time moves u up one step) and then deselect fixture 1 and select fixture 2. Then move the slider to the colour you want etc etc.Say you want the first step for all ur lights to be blue..simply select all of the fixtures. Move the slider to blue. Then add. This saves that step and moves on to the next.What happens then if you go back to edit the step and change one light to red. If you dont save that single fixture change it and you select another fixture to change: the previous light will have the old colour and the saved colour on at the same time! So i was sat there saying wtf! I have to save one at a time after step one??So thats one star away for me. Because for each step after the first i have to press back a step. Change colour. Save. Back a step etc etc. You have to save one at a time otherwise when you move to the next fixture without saving it will show you the previous colour and the colour you have selected both on the same fixture.To run the sequence in that chase then you select either auto. Or audio. Audio will play according to sounds around the unit. Auto will play them according to the speed the slider is at. You put the slider to the top and move it down on tiny millimeter movement. The other slider controls how the lights fade into different colours.If you press chase 2 3 4 5 6 again it will remove them from being played so it will loop what you have programmed in chase 1. Took me a while to figure that out as chase 1 would end and chase 2 would begin but i didnt program that far. Just only a few steps of chase 1.Il make a video tutorial on this one day!These units need some serious concentration to program.I recommend downloading a free dmx calculator app for your phone for when you assign your addresses for each light.For me i have cheap par 86 cans and i have to start with light (fixture 1) with the switch 1 down on the back of the light. And switch 10 (switch 10 is down on all as this is dmx control enabled).So one light is set to address 1. Done.The second light then is at address 17. Because this dmx controller has 16 channels which do stuff such as colour. Fade. Etc. So each lights address is 16 channels away.To work this out. Simply use the app! Set your first address as 1 then press +16 and it will tell you what switches then to switch down to get to 17 which will be the address (like a door number) for your light.Then press +16 then to get your next address for your next light and what switches to switch down to get that number for that light.Repeat then pressing +16 for each light!!I recommend then putting a sticker on each light and the number fixture it is and what switches are meant to be down incase some switches get knocked up or whatever.Overall i am happy with this but wish chauvet did a basic tutorial on how to use these for different scenarios instead of some 10 year old on youtube showing you how to set it up lol

Having agreed to run a school disco and needed some lights - I looked on Youtube to get me started and quickly thought that I could do something a bit special using DMX. Quite a few reviewer flagged up this particular controller, and it seemed a good price on Amazon. Being a first timer on DMX I've spent four nights playing with the Obey 10 attached to two PAR lights but already I've found that it's really quite limited and has a number of quirks. The quirks include that: there doesn't seem to be a clean way of coming out of the programming mode without going through a sequence of blackout key presses; if I physically switch the lights in their position within the daisy chain and reassign their channels, the programmes don't seem to work (though that may be a quirk of the lights); when selecting one light to programme then deselecting that light and before selecting the second I have found that on occasion the deselection causes the light to switch to all LEDs being on an overriding the previous settings (again not sure whether this is the controller or lights) - also seems ok if selecting all lights at once. One reason for selecting individual lights is that I wanted to use the 6 programmes/chases featured on the Obey10 so I could set up different light effects depending on the record played. Having spent a number of hours setting up three distinct programmes which individually loop around I now find that unless I turn the whole unit off (flushing the memory), if I select a second chase the controller will continue to loop across the two chases one after the other, holding the original in memory - there's apparently no way of deselecting the first chase so once you've gone through 6 different songs/chases the thing will effectively be set on one sequence (until you switch it off).However, if you want to control things completely manually - it's probably Ok'ish

This mixer is great value for money. It is well constructed with decent buttons, LEDs and sliders. It has one bank of eight sliders with an option to change from bank A to bank B which means that you can control 16 lights on fade or a limited number of LED lights on RGB. The instruction manual is simple enough to use although there were a few text errors prompting me to look for something described in the manual that wasn't actually part of the mixer but I worked it out in the end.

Instructions poor

Great for the price but more features would be good.

Just starting on DMX? You could do a lot worse than this!

Works great easy to use, nice shape and can be rack mounted

Brilliant