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Midas XL8 Makes Stellar Stage Debut with Sister Act
Now the XL8 has completed its first live production run with flying colors, Carl Casella of Sound Associates offered some thoughts on how Midas have done digital differently, and for the better: “First of all, the XL8 sounds spectacular—until I heard the XL8, I’d yet to hear a digital desk sound as good as an analog desk. With the XL8, Midas has accomplished that mission. And, from a hands-on perspective, the XL8 is a really well thought out. It’s a highly sophisticated piece of equipment, but it has a vast range of practical features missing on other digital offerings.
“All digital desks ‘work’ in a controlled environment, but we, as engineers, do not,” Casella added. “The XL8 was designed with that in mind. Around 175 cues are written into the XL8 for this show, including 28 songs and all the cues for the orchestra. We’re running over 80 inputs, including 24 lavalier mics—it’s a pretty loud show. At any given moment there aren’t any more than two vocal mics, so you’re really mixing. As well as the storage, recall and redundancy power XL8 is packing, its design elements allow the hands-on element of mixing, including on the fly fine-tuning, to remain part of the mix process.”
“The layout and work surface design on XL8 is superb—so intuitive,” agrees Pierre Dupree. “For example, when I hit the VCA buttons and see instantly, on my left, what’s on those VCAs, it makes locating something way down in a mix very easy to find and fix. Having this much processing power not only means functions are immediate, it allows very intuitive, quick recalls for more intuitive blending and mixing. When you're dealing with 20-plus vocal mics, with many different vocal arrangements per song, it's very hard to get a consistent-sounding mix this quickly on other digital boards. XL8 allows me to get what I need exactly when I need it, without the latency or digging through screens you find on other digital boards. The board has all the advantages of massive memory and processing headroom, but still lets me mix like a human being.
My house console at the Pasadena Playhouse is a Midas Heritage 2000, which I absolutely love,” Dupree adds. “Being a Midas fan, the XL8 completely blew me away: this is a digital console that feels just as good as my favorite Midas. The weight of the faders is perfect, and I love how easy it is to go between the VCAs and the regular channel faders. It’s all so smooth—I feel like I have a tremendous amount of control on the XL8.”
Carl Casella described some more of the many groundbreaking features on the XL8: “The POP (population) groups are proving particularly useful; on other boards you need to create groups before you start programming, which causes problems as a sound designer, as you often don’t know what you really need until a couple of days into a show. We’re running over 80 inputs for this show, and the XL8’s POP groups mean we don’t need to keep tabs on what page the percussion is on—it’s instantly there in front of you in its own POP group.
“Ergonomically speaking, the desk is laid out very nicely,” Casella adds, “the color-coding helps tremendously. Keeping the color-coding from the XL4 and Heritage consoles was a very smart move, bearing in mind the thousands of engineers who’ve used those boards. In that sense, you immediately feel at home with the XL8. The aux sends are all the same colors, for example. Another standout feature is the layout of the fader controls: the ‘A’ and ‘B’ banks allow for dual operation, so, as a designer, I can work on B-levels with access to every channel, and all while the engineer mixes the show. We even had three people working on this console while preparing for the show.”
“The digital dynamics that Alex Cooper designed for this desk are outstanding. The preamp and the compression algorithms are the best I’ve ever heard on a digital console,” Casella says. “The desk doesn’t have a ‘digital’ sound to it at all. When we first powered up the system in Pasadena, we actually stopped in our tracks—the phase cohesiveness was breathtaking. We SIM systems for timing, which is critical when you have 18 zones of audio like this, so there’s always a lot of digital timing going on and a lot of phase cancellation—we know what a timed system sounds like! With the XL8, when we put in the first CD, it was as if we were listening to a pair of near-field monitors. It was truly astounding. And when we got the live musicians in it was even better. If it sounds good, it is good—I don’t need to see meters to know that. Above all else, the XL8 sounds very, very good.”
6th March 2007
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