MA Lighting Brand Guidelines: The German grandMA Console Maker Founded in 1983

A founder’s initials on a lighting desk.

MA Lighting takes its name from its founder. The company’s own history says Michael Adenau — the “MA” — founded it in 1983, and TPi magazine gave the same founding year when it reported a change of management in April 2022. The company’s legal notice names two German companies: MA Lighting Technology GmbH, in Waldbüttelbrunn, in the district of Würzburg in Lower Franconia, and MA Lighting International GmbH, in Paderborn, which the company says was founded in 2001 to handle international distribution, sales, technical support and marketing.

The first products were memory lighting desks. The company says the software specialist Ernst Ebrecht joined in 1985, the year it launched the Lightcommander 24 and 48 desks with stored levels, and that its LCD 120 console went on tour with the band Mother’s Finest in 1988 — the same year MA first exhibited at the PLASA show in London and at LDI in Nashville.

The move into moving-light control came with the Scancommander. German Wikipedia, citing Lighting & Sound International of April 1992, says it was introduced at the Frankfurt Musikmesse that year as a desk for up to 16 moving lights and up to 96 dimmer channels. MA’s own history calls it the product that established the company as an innovator in moving-light control. Touring dimmers followed in 1995, the company says.

grandMA, grandMA2, grandMA3.

The console that made the company’s name arrived in spring 1997. MA says the grandMA was built on the Scancommander and Lightcommander, and it soon spread the platform across sizes and into software: smaller desks such as the grandMA light in 2000 and the grandMA ultra-light in 2001, a 3D visualiser for pre-programming in 2002–03, and grandMA onPC, a software version, in 2004. By 2007, the company says, one system could control 64 DMX universes, and MA had opened its own international offices and support centres.

The grandMA2 series followed in 2008, then a video processing unit in 2009 and a run of network nodes and control wings for the software version through the early 2010s, according to the company. The company says its working space grew to 6,000 square metres in 2010. In 2015 MA launched a separate and smaller family, dot2, with its own consoles, wings and visualisation software. At Prolight + Sound in 2018, LSi reported, dot2 had a booth of its own, with four hands-on stations and live demonstrations of tips and tricks.

The third generation was presented in January 2018. Lighting & Sound International reported in April 2018 that the grandMA3 had its first live public presentation at Prolight + Sound that month, where MA ran 13 hands-on stations and a dedicated demonstration auditorium that were constantly busy. The magazine quoted the company’s description of the range as “a radical re-think of what’s possible from a lighting control platform,” built around a new way of handling fixtures, features and effects. The same report described a press conference that MA held with Vectorworks and Robe on GDTF, the General Device Type Format introduced in March 2018 to standardise the fixture data exchanged between consoles, CAD and previsualisation software.

The grandMA3 has since been reviewed in its own right: LSi ran an “On Test” feature on the console in April 2023 and a technology focus on grandMA3 onPC in May 2025. The company lists a grandMA3 onPC rack unit in 2021 and, in 2026, grandMA3 onPC DMX keys rated at 4,096 and 1,024 parameters, extending the software route that began with grandMA onPC two decades earlier.

Lighting and its makers.

Stage and entertainment lighting is sold to a small, technical audience — lighting designers, programmers, rental companies and venue technicians — and its makers present themselves accordingly. The product is the picture: moving heads, LED washes and profile fixtures photographed against black, often with a single beam cutting through haze, so that the shape and colour of the light carry the message rather than the housing.

Much of that presentation happens on the show floor. Fixture makers routinely launch new products at trade shows such as Prolight + Sound in Frankfurt, PLASA in London and LDI in Las Vegas, and their stands are built as small productions, with timed light shows and rigs of their own fixtures. Robe, for instance, marked its twentieth anniversary at PLASA in 2014, and Claypaky first showed its one-word logo at LDI in 2016, according to trade reports and the company.

Ranges are usually split by use. Touring fixtures are sold on output, speed and weight; theatre fixtures on quiet running, framing and colour rendering; architectural lines on outdoor ratings and long-term installation. Control is its own category, and several fixture makers now also own console or data brands, so screenshots of control-desk interfaces sit beside photographs of the lights themselves.

The visual language that results is consistent across the sector: dark backgrounds, saturated beams, and colour-temperature scales running from warm to cool white. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its fixtures are made — and attributes to the company anything that rests on its own word.

A founder still among the shareholders.

MA Lighting has remained a German company with its founder among its owners. In April 2022 TPi reported that Michael Adenau had handed over the management of MA Lighting Technology to Gerhard Krude, a long-time managing director, and Alexander Schneider, a newly appointed managing director who, the magazine said, had been instrumental in developing the grandMA3. Adenau, TPi reported, would stay with the company as a shareholder and would advise and support his colleagues, and the company, which presented the handover as a generational change focused on continuity, would keep concentrating on professional hardware and software for the lighting industry. The company’s legal notice in 2026 lists René Berhorst, Alexander Schneider and Stephanie Waldorf as managing directors of the Waldbüttelbrunn company, and Stephan Saremba as managing director of the Paderborn company.

The brand’s naming is consistent across four decades of products. The company’s initials sit inside the product name — grandMA, grandMA2, grandMA3, dimMA — with a lowercase prefix in front, and the software and smaller ranges carry lowercase names too, such as onPC and dot2.

For a design guide, MA Lighting shows how a control brand can be built around one product name carried through three generations, with the company’s initials inside it. Compare High End Systems, the Austin company behind the Hog consoles, and Robe, which joined MA and Vectorworks to present GDTF in 2018. For this guide we use desk graphite, slate and an encoder amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep MA Lighting’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.