CHAUVET DJ Obey 40 DMX Lighting Controller

This a great product for its price. It works well and is compact and easy to learn. It has some features but not all the advance features other products have. This was expected. If you are starting out this is great to use!

I was very disappointed with the (lack of) programability of this unit. There are 240 scenes, which is great, but only 6 chases. It is possible to vary the duration and transition time between scenes, but only GLOBALLY - in other words, you can't have a chase that has the first scene for 30 seconds, then the second for 10 seconds, third and 4th for 2 seconds etc. Every step lasts exactly the same time, and every transition lasts the same time. So the only way I could imagine using anything but a small fraction of the available scenes is if I was going to do all the scene-switching by hand, which I do NOT want to do. Worse than that, although automatically stepping through a set of 8 scenes in a bank works reliably and repeatably at the global duration/transition set by the sliders, the chases are extremely unreliable. They seem to work maybe once or twice, then random stuff happens. Probably a bug somewhere in the system software. I have (alas after purchasing) seen other reviewers who also found the chases to be virtually useless.

This was my first time purchasing lights. Justin was super helpful in helping me select what I needed to get started... and would allow me to expand later.

Avoid this controller.. the sliders started to fall off, right out of the box. THe build quality is terrible. I might as well have bought a Chinese counterfit considering the quality would have been the same

I bought two thousand dollars worth of DMX lights and cables and this controller. plugged in the first 2 lights and it worked fine. by the time I set up the address on the 3rd light to plug it in to the daisy chain, the first 2 lights went black and the controller was stone dead. I called Chauvet support and they said the unit was defective so they sent the stuff to return it and they replaced it - took like 20 days, plugged in the replacement unit and it worked for 2 minutes and quit working. Now they are saying it must be a bad batch. Lights have been set up now for almost 2 months and I still have no controller.

This is Chauvet's version of the ubiquitous cheap DMX controller. I believe this, the Elation DMX Operator and many other essentially identical controllers are all made by the same Chinese company and simply come with different branding. The build quality is quite bad. Solder joints are prone to breaking, especially on the power connector. Buttons and faders are very prone to failure, and almost always malfunction just after the warranty is up. The feature set is extremely limited too. Only one scene can be active at a time, making independent control of multiple types of fixtures very difficult. There's also no patching; fixtures must be set to the addresses 1, 17, 33, 49, and so on. Avoid this controller unless you're doing very simple things with a small number of identical fixtures. You'll make up the extra money you spend on something better in programming time, and you'll be able to do more with your lights for better looking shows.