Re: Midas Pro 1
Hi Guys,
The idea of using a PRO1 as a XL88 'on steroids' had crossed our minds. In fact I did exactly that using a PRO2c (all the prototype PRO1's were out on beta test!) earlier this year at the T in the Park Festival, in Scotland. We had the video, DJ, announcement mics etc all running straight into the PRO2c. We then took the house XL8's in via AES50 connections. We also had 3 x XLR analogue and 2 x AES pairs for visiting engineer consoles. Obviously the analogue lines were running through the mic amp, but we had no problems at all over the weekend with headroom and all the engineers seemed happy with the results. I know this may not always be the case, but for us it worked extremely well.
We used a POP group for each set of inputs for visiting consoles and VCA groups for all the local stuff. So access was very direct and we could show any engineer that was interested exactly how their signal flow was moving through the system very quickly and easily. No EQ or processing in the PRO2c (apart from announcement mic's and DJ obviously!) was used, it was literally a distribution point. All the engineers seemed very happy with that aspect of the system.
Because both the AES inputs/outputs on the back of the surfaces of the PRO Series (and also the DL452 AES card used in the DL Series I/O boxes) have a sample rate converter per input/output pair there was no need to clock anyone console to the house system. They worked as they normally would, if they wanted to output 96kHz audio they could. But if their console was 48kHz that also was not a problem.
All in all it was a very neat solution and worked seamlessly. Of course a PRO1 would be a lot more cost effective and offer more local i/o on the back. But I only had the PRO2c available to me at the time.
Hope this clears things up a little.
