[Mike]

I assume it'll all be disposal unless any parts might be needed for an urgent replacement until they've been upgraded - isn't the plan for all or most regions to have received the same upgrade?

Yes, unless a region's kit is literally failing there will be no desire to swap it out I'd expect.

Just because Leeds' older gallery looked modern it actually wasn't, it was still 20 year old hardware, just the monitor stack was replaced with a multiviewer and LCD screens presumably because new CRT preview and reference monitors are very hard to come by.

The only reason Leeds had animating astons was they got on the Caspar bandwagon, which was a product trialled in the Midlands to see if it could replace the ancient Aston hardware that was standard faire across the regions, primarily because they were all on their last legs and it was felt not reasonable or necessarily viable to source older hardware that was the same. After all the Caspar boxes that provide the animated astons in some regions, and all the animation on the new sets, are just normal PCs that output to SDI/HD-SDI and into the mixer - would it be worth moving that box to another site when it can just be set up on a new machine if required.

The rest of the Leeds gallery was still a GVG Zodiak mixer, standard sound board seen across all the regions of a certain age and Quantel ServerPlay automation which I'm not even sure is still a thing and still runs on XP hardware.

Animating astons while something people on presentation sites seem to love, is only a thing because it's pretty standard now - as long as the aston can still do it's job who cares if it bounces out of the bottom of the screen, flashes and animates off and on etc.