Tony Perez Invests in Avolites D7 It has been a busy 12 months for Mexico-based lighting designer Tony Perez, who has been working for two of the country's highest-profile bands of the moment, rockers Zoe and the genre-blending R'n'B trio Latin Mafia. Perez has also invested in a new Avolites D7-215 lighting console, adding to his growing collection of Avolites products. At the time, this was also the first D7 in Mexico. Perez's industry career started as a DJ when he was a music-loving teenager still in high school, and he's been a lighting designer and industry professional since 1989. Since around 1993, Avolites has been his lighting control platform of choice. Perez was proud to be the first in Mexico with the D7, which he has used extensively ever since. He comments, "The D7 is definitely an evolution from previous Avo consoles; it has all the features and functionality, and I appreciate, above all, the compact size and portability." Perez likes D7 for its multiple features and the speed at which he can program. If he had to pick out one feature, he says it would be the Avolites Timeline, which is native to the Titan software, allowing the creation of complex, perfectly timed, and timecoded shows directly on the console, but he adds that he likes and uses so many more of them. He also mentions that it's useful to be able to import older showfiles. He recently used his D7 as the main lighting console at six sold-out shows that Zoe played at the Estadio GNP Seguros in CDMX, running approximately 820 lighting fixtures, a mixture of moving lights and LED sources, including 120 Robe FORTES. When talking generally about Avolites as a brand, Tony thinks that it is "the most user-friendly platform, the quickest to set up and program, and the company has developed the 'next generation' of consoles in the D7 and D3 ranges without losing its origins and all the things for which Avolites is known and loved." He believes that the D7 and D3 ranges have clearly been the result of the Avolites' R & D team listening to feedback and user requests. In Mexico, Avolites has been distributed by SHOWCO for several years. High-profile designers like Perez have been instrumental in this success, but he has also enjoyed a few other Avolites firsts over the years -- he was the first person in Mexico to own a Tiger Touch console and the first again with an Arena console back in the day. Perez recalls encountering his first Avolites console, a Diamond 3, in the early 1990s: "It was physically enormous, but very logical to program and run," he recalls. After that, he started to learn how to use the consoles and their operating architecture. He moved to the Pearl range when that was launched in the mid-1990s, finding that he could get Pearls supplied on a spec almost wherever he was working in the world. "The Pearl was a ground-breaking console range in its day. Small and so user-friendly, you could always work extremely fast with a Pearl to get a show happening!" In 2002-03, he moved on to the Avolites Titan platform, which he has been using ever since version 2.5, and the first console that he purchased running Titan was the Tiger Touch in 2009, which was also his first-ever console investment. The first Tiger Touch was acquired to run a major event at the Monument to the Revolution in CDMX for the Mexican Bicentenary celebrations in 2010. Back then, he needed a console that could handle 12 DMX universes, so it made sense as a solution. He has not looked back since that first purchase, and now uses his D7, Quartz, Tiger Touch II or Arena consoles constantly, depending on the size and nature of the show, and he could not imagine completing a project without using Avolites as the first and foremost control option. 
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