50 Years of Listening: How ETC’s Customers Have Shaped Our Innovation

For 50 years, ETC has been more than a manufacturer of lighting equipment—we’ve been a partner to the people who use our products. As we celebrate our golden anniversary, we’re taking a moment to shine a light on the people who’ve helped us get here: our customers.

Innovation Begins with Listening

At ETC, innovation doesn’t start in a lab—it starts in the field. Fred saw a lighting console, was convinced he could do better, and ETC was born. It’s a trend that continues to this day across all our lines of products.

Take our architectural control systems, for example. The latest versions of our Paradigm Architectural Control Processor weren't born in a vacuum, it was a direct response to customer feedback. Users told us our systems were too big. So we reimagined it as a DIN rail model and increased the control count, simultaneously making it more accessible, more powerful, and more cost-effective.

Our Echo Integration Interface came from the struggles of churches trying to integrate their lighting with their AV systems. It provides a way for low-cost, distributed systems to interact with all the AV tools needed in modern houses of worship.

On the other end of the spectrum, Las Vegas casinos needed more control, more channels, and more everything to accommodate the glitz and glamour of a big casino. Enter Mosaic Atlas, capable of controlling massive pixel maps on the exteriors of Las Vegas casinos.

A Colorful Revelation

Sometimes, innovation comes from watching—not just listening. A few years ago, Matt Stoner, ETC’s Product Marketing Manager for Automated Fixtures was running a Tech Games event at a CUE conference. The challenge: quickly match colors and framing shutter pattern of a moving light. What he saw surprised him.

“I had come from a moving light background where I had programmed on consoles like the Hog and other competitors, not so much ever on an Eos. So at that time, when I needed to program colors on a moving light, I would open up the programmer, grab the cyan, magenta, and yellow encoders, and move them until I made a color. And that’s what I expected. I expected people to use encoders to mix colors,” Matt said. “But every single person went into the color picker in Eos—even though it wasn’t enabled by default. They opened it up and dragged their finger around while they looked at the stage to see when the color matched.”

This had big implications for how the color picker worked with moving lights. On an additive fixture like a ColorSource or Source Four LED, the LEDs are naturally a linear color progression: 10% red is 10% intensity of that red LED. But it’s different on a subtractive mixing fixture. For most moving lights with a white source and a mechanical color flag that you move in front of the source to create color—10% refers to a mechanical movement. The flag has moved 10% of its distance, which most likely doesn’t line up with a 10% increase in color saturation.

“The problem was that the color picker doesn’t know this. The color picker assumed a linear path. So if it’s different mechanically than what the console assumes, your colors will look different than what’s in the color picker,” explained Matt. Since then, ETC put a lot of development time into making custom color curves for our moving lights to work better with color pickers, ensuring that colors are more accurate and repeatable.

The High End Systems’ Halcyon series and the Halcyon Silent take this to the next level. “We have multiple different color curves in the fixtures called Color Linear and Mechanical Linear and we allow you to choose whether your color is calibrated to a linear physical movement or a linear color change. And when we use a linear color change, we get color resolution that is many magnitudes of accuracy better.”

From Off-Broadway to Everywhere

Different customers want and need different things from their lighting tools, but sometimes changing things for one audience segment improves things for everyone.

When Dennis Varian, ETC’s VP of R&D, first heard that customers wanted a “cheaper Obsession console,” he and his team assumed it was simply about cost. But a dinner with a Broadway lighting designer revealed the real issue: education.

The LD wasn’t asking for a cheaper console for himself—he wanted a more accessible system so students could learn on the same system they would use on Broadway. That insight led to a major pivot. The Ion console, originally conceived to use the Expression programming environment, became an Eos family product instead. That decision ensured that students trained on Ion would be ready for the professional world.

It also meant rethinking the Eos software to make it more accessible. Features like two-scene operation and channel faders (not just sub-masters) were added to Eos in order to support educational users. Some professionals initially saw these as distractions—but over time, they became essential tools. “Magic Sheets, originally designed for entry-level users, are now indispensable for top-tier programmers,” says Varian. “Every single user, every single programmer has magic sheets now that they take from show to show.”

Better LEDs, Thanks to You

ETC’s journey into LED fixtures is another story shaped by customer insight. Early on, we realized that linear fades between two separate colors didn’t replicate the nuanced transitions designers were used to with incandescent lights and scrollers. The result? Designers had to double-hang fixtures just to get the fades they wanted, doubling the cost of every system.

This feedback from designers pushed us to rethink how our fixtures handled color transitions. “We developed the ‘gel fade’ feature in Eos consoles, which mathematically models the spectral blend of two gel colors fading into each other,” said Varian. “Just like in the old days of scrollers and gels.”

We also stopped thinking of LED emitters as individual channels and started treating them as a spectrum. That shift allowed us to model transitions more accurately, giving designers the tools they needed to create the looks they envisioned.

What ties all these stories together is a simple truth: ETC doesn’t innovate alone. We innovate with you.

Whether it’s a house of worship, a high school theatre, a West End stage, a stadium, or a business park, our customers have always been our most important collaborators. You’ve told us what you need, shown us how you work, and trusted us to build the tools that bring your visions to life.

Thank you for 50 years of inspiration. Here’s to 50 more.