Re: Midas Pro 2
Hi all,
Apologies for the months long delay in updates. Sadly the chaps at Midas were unable to get hold of a Pro2 for my tour on top of the one for the bosses tour. However, I did manage to take one out to a show last week courtesy of IPB Audio.
First of all, the build quality is better than that of the Pro6 that I have used. I'm not saying that the Pro6 is poorly made, it just has a slight rattle when you tap the fader banks! All the faders and pots feel exactly the same and the buttons feel more 'solid' but that might just be down to me. It may look like it was designed by a five year old, but the layout is excellent and the colour coding of every control makes it very easy to navigate. The only concern I do have is the quality of the flightcase that comes supplied with the touring package, it appears to be quite delicate and easily scratched, as well as being extremely large and unwieldy for a desk of this size. Nevertheless, you can still fit a Pro2C, stagebox and multicore into the back of a Ford Mondeo Estate which is pretty cool!
Down to the gig! I was using the Pro2C to mix a Student Elections night at one of the larger universities here in the UK. It was broadcast live on radio, video streamed over the internet, recorded for posterity and finally had three live mixes for different rooms. The Pro2C also functioned as a comms hub for the presenters. It was very easy to arrange routing and set up mixes for all of these purposes. Cable runs were made significantly easier due to the 6 AES50 ports on the board. I ended up using a pair of 48 channel stage boxes to allow I/O in different rooms (although the board is limited to 56 channels, it can still patch I/O from any of the 6 AES50 ports (so up to 144 ins and outs) as well as all inputs and outputs on the surface being patchable, even the headphone socket!)
Initially, I set up a pair of Matrix sends for comms to the presenters in different rooms, and configured the rest of the auxes to be stereo Mix Minus sends. Once this was all set, all the wireless gear was plugged in (12x Senn lapels and 6xShure IEMs) along with the many stereo channels of playback we finally got to a rehearsal. The assignable VCAs and POP groups made it extremely easy to take control of audio from different areas and keep background noise to a minimum without resorting to gating. The automation system is extremely powerful, but also extremely quick and easy to use, by the end of the (1hr30m) rehearsal I had about 90 scenes stored ready to go for the show. Then of course, the client decides they want an extra live mix...
Which thankfully was easy to accommodate and update all of the scenes in the show, I think it took all of five minutes to patch and update the scope of all the scenes.
Another feature which was extremely useful was the built in Broadcast monitoring mode. This routes L+R to Monitor A so you can keep one ear on the mix going out and then anything solo'd to Monitor B so you can hear that too, all with only the press of a button in the settings menu.
So, its easy to use, compact, very very functional and has pretty lights. When it comes to sound quality, it simply blows other consoles out of the water, the EQ is responsive, accurate and extremely fast to use, gates and compression are also transparent and effective (the vintage compressor isn't as transparent, but Midas appear to have distilled the idea of vintage compression, all warmth and boutique valve goodness and allowed you to put it on every channel you want to without making it sound like a specific compressor).
The multiband compressors and dynamic EQ plugins were subtle and effective, the dynamic EQ kept sibilance in check on some of my problem channels without making the sound dull and the multiband compression kept the broadcast mixes sounding sweet and full without being overwhelming. I didn't have a chance to try any other effects but I would hope they live up to the quality of those two. One niggle I do have is that patching the effects and graphics as inserts requires you to patch the insert send to the input of the rack and the insert return to the output manually. I guess digital has made me lazy, but I would have expected it would auto patch these for you.
Pictures to follow!
Hi all,
Apologies for the months long delay in updates. Sadly the chaps at Midas were unable to get hold of a Pro2 for my tour on top of the one for the bosses tour. However, I did manage to take one out to a show last week courtesy of IPB Audio.
First of all, the build quality is better than that of the Pro6 that I have used. I'm not saying that the Pro6 is poorly made, it just has a slight rattle when you tap the fader banks! All the faders and pots feel exactly the same and the buttons feel more 'solid' but that might just be down to me. It may look like it was designed by a five year old, but the layout is excellent and the colour coding of every control makes it very easy to navigate. The only concern I do have is the quality of the flightcase that comes supplied with the touring package, it appears to be quite delicate and easily scratched, as well as being extremely large and unwieldy for a desk of this size. Nevertheless, you can still fit a Pro2C, stagebox and multicore into the back of a Ford Mondeo Estate which is pretty cool!
Down to the gig! I was using the Pro2C to mix a Student Elections night at one of the larger universities here in the UK. It was broadcast live on radio, video streamed over the internet, recorded for posterity and finally had three live mixes for different rooms. The Pro2C also functioned as a comms hub for the presenters. It was very easy to arrange routing and set up mixes for all of these purposes. Cable runs were made significantly easier due to the 6 AES50 ports on the board. I ended up using a pair of 48 channel stage boxes to allow I/O in different rooms (although the board is limited to 56 channels, it can still patch I/O from any of the 6 AES50 ports (so up to 144 ins and outs) as well as all inputs and outputs on the surface being patchable, even the headphone socket!)
Initially, I set up a pair of Matrix sends for comms to the presenters in different rooms, and configured the rest of the auxes to be stereo Mix Minus sends. Once this was all set, all the wireless gear was plugged in (12x Senn lapels and 6xShure IEMs) along with the many stereo channels of playback we finally got to a rehearsal. The assignable VCAs and POP groups made it extremely easy to take control of audio from different areas and keep background noise to a minimum without resorting to gating. The automation system is extremely powerful, but also extremely quick and easy to use, by the end of the (1hr30m) rehearsal I had about 90 scenes stored ready to go for the show. Then of course, the client decides they want an extra live mix...
Which thankfully was easy to accommodate and update all of the scenes in the show, I think it took all of five minutes to patch and update the scope of all the scenes.
Another feature which was extremely useful was the built in Broadcast monitoring mode. This routes L+R to Monitor A so you can keep one ear on the mix going out and then anything solo'd to Monitor B so you can hear that too, all with only the press of a button in the settings menu.
So, its easy to use, compact, very very functional and has pretty lights. When it comes to sound quality, it simply blows other consoles out of the water, the EQ is responsive, accurate and extremely fast to use, gates and compression are also transparent and effective (the vintage compressor isn't as transparent, but Midas appear to have distilled the idea of vintage compression, all warmth and boutique valve goodness and allowed you to put it on every channel you want to without making it sound like a specific compressor).
The multiband compressors and dynamic EQ plugins were subtle and effective, the dynamic EQ kept sibilance in check on some of my problem channels without making the sound dull and the multiband compression kept the broadcast mixes sounding sweet and full without being overwhelming. I didn't have a chance to try any other effects but I would hope they live up to the quality of those two. One niggle I do have is that patching the effects and graphics as inserts requires you to patch the insert send to the input of the rack and the insert return to the output manually. I guess digital has made me lazy, but I would have expected it would auto patch these for you.
Pictures to follow!
f corse I made sure the eq was on. After trying 4 or 5 different ways I gave up. Any thoughts? What am I missing? The second issue came up the next night when I had an engineer run monitors from foh. It seems the aux sends are post eq . Is there a way to make the aux send pre eq? ( I did have the pre button in on the channel strip) 
