You can keep your LOR stuff if you wish but once you start adding in equipment from others, you will lose that built in functionality. The LOR controllers when using their proprietary control language, have built in functions such as fade, twinkle, shimmer, etc. Unfortunately, neither Lynks or Renard equipment understands native LOR control codes. Lynks equipment uses either DMX or PixelNet (depending on the device) and Renard uses their own proprietary language.
I do believe that the success of the Lynks Express (LE) motivated LOR to set up their controllers to also work with DMX which also happens to be an industry standard protocol. Since DMX is a simple diming protocol, there is no way to issue the required commands to implement the LOR built in functions so they will no longer be available when the LOR equipment is configured to and working with DMX.
Both the LE and Renard controllers daisy chain but they do it differently. The LE is a DMX device and works by assigning a channel number to the ports. You define the controller with a starting channel number and it auto assigns the ports starting from that channel number sequentially for all of the ports on the controller. The entire data stream is read by the controller and passed along to the next controller on the chain so the controllers can be placed anywhere on the chain (or even in a separate branch) and will still respond to the channels they were assigned to. This also allows you to define duplicate and overlapping channel sets between the controllers.
The Renard controllers IIRC, are positional in their native mode. They read the from the start of the string to their total channels and remove that from the string and pass on the rest. Their implementation of DMX works in a similar way. It appears that they simply took their existing code and adapted it to understand the DMX data stream. Where it understands the DMX commands and allows you to define a starting address, from what I am to understand, it still removes the channels it is using from the data stream which makes it still somewhat positional and difficult to work with when mixed with true DMX controllers.
While the LOR controllers are quality pieces of equipment, the LE also has superior dimming curves. While this may not be much of an issue with standard mini's, it can be one when using LED's or a mix of mini's and LED's. The LE's are also much less expensive than the LOR controllers. The only down side here is that I doubt that there will be any further coops for the LE this year since we are already too far into the season to get them completed in time.
