If you have say, just 6 RGBW non-movers. You need to think about what you have. You actually have 24 light sources to control, not 6. So you can build lighting with different colours in areas, or brightness and darkness in different areas, or whole stage solid colours or …………… lots of options. Let’s assume it’s a band, not a stage show. If the six lights are aimed just at individual band members, with a couple doing the back light /audience facing role you can do so much you couldn’t do with your 16 dim par cans. Your lights can do things your control cannot! Increase the RGBW sources to 16 and it’s even more versatile but your hardware control simply cannot cope with this. Your fixtures probably also have effects channels for strobing and pulsing, these can’t be controlled either. The control was not designed for this level of control. It’s a dinosaur trying to talk to much cleverer equipment. The important thing that modern control do is break control into movement, colour, intensity and beam/fx and deal with each one independently. Your old one looks at individual lights in terms of just intensity. A few had dedicated better controls, but for a preset and not variable list of very specific fixtures. I had one for some elderly mirror scans where pan/tilt, gobo and colour were the only adjustable, and the four DMX channels were locked. Another brand of fixture mostly worked when i found one that had these things in the same order. Lights rarely allow their DMX channels to be swapped around, and neither do basic controllers.
With modern consoles, finding one that lets you your lights properly isnt hard, but you do need to get good at programming and creating the heads in the system. Most allow you to build your own nowadays. So you can use all features even cheap lights have inside.
