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Five Midas XL8s in Starring Roles at Pro Light + Sound 2007
Midas displayed a grand total of five XL8 live performance systems at Pro Light + Sound 2007, Frankfurt, which also saw the system picking up a MIPA award in the Best Live Mixing Desk category.
One of the systems was on the stand of German production company Padco and the other, a full flight cased touring system, was on the Bosch Communications Systems, EVI Audio stand. Midas was demonstrating for the first time a Pro Tools HD system hooked up to the XL8, primarily for multitrack playback to demo the audio performance of the system. However as the XL8 is a networked system, once the Pro Tools digital I/O was connected to one of XL8’s modular I/O boxes, the Pro Tools system could be used for playback, recording or individual channels of plug-in processing inserted on the XL8’s inputs or buss outputs.
“As we are fully digital between the XL8 and the HD system, there are no AD-DA pair latencies to deal with,” says Midas and Klark Teknik’s brand development manager Richard Ferriday. “The XL8’s KVM switch means the whole process of playback, recording and plug-in processing can be monitored and controlled from the XL8’s daylight-viewable screens, which were also employed for remote control of the TC Electronics System 6000 FX suite.”
Two further XL8 systems were performing front of house duties for all three stages at the Agora Tent, handling a range of live performances throughout the day and into the night, while the fifth XL8 was installed in a private VIP room where Midas hosted back to back hands-on demos for the duration of the show.
Two of the three sound engineers manning stages two and three of the Agora Tent were totally new to XL8, but it didn’t take long for them to familiarise themselves with the system operation and feel completely at home behind XL8’s control surface.
“The audio quality of the XL8 is just great, and while it’s incomparable to other digital desks, it compares completely to the Midas XL4 and Heritage,” says sound engineer Rainer Kremer, who was working alongside Achim Lanzendorf on Stages Two and Three, while Sebastian Hesse handled Stage One. “Even if the input LEDs are going into the red, the headamps don’t distort. This is brilliant, because you can handle them as if they were analogue ones.”
“When a band was playing on Stage Two, it was possible to line check Stage Three using Area B of the control surface, which worked really well and can’t be done on any other digital console. This means that at a festival, only one XL8 would be needed rather than the usual two desks.
“The workflow on the XL8 is unbelievable. For example, the first day I worked on the XL8 I had the Bundeswehr Big Band with about 45 input channels from the stage, without any sound or line check, and the sound was fine after just one song! Afterwards I was able to work on the finer details, which isn’t possible with any other desk.”
Also on display in Frankfurt were the Klark Teknik Square ONE range of easily accessible, high-performance audio processors which combines the brand’s sonic quality with a feature set containing all the essentials; the Show Command integrated system of hardware, software and Ethernet technology, providing full system control including equalisation, loudspeaker management and routing, from a choice of user-interfaces, and the Heritage 3000, Verona, Siena and Venice consoles from the Midas analogue range.
In picture: Sebastian Hesse at the controls of XL8 in the Agora Tent.
10th April 2007
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