"Britrow had told me they had one available and I'd been looking at using it for a fair while as an avid XL4 user in the past," says Lemon. "It's a matter of opportunity; I happened to be in London, I was already thinking about these shows, and Mike Lowe told me it was available and I thought, why not?"
After completing the three shows Lemon says: "In practise it came back to that sonic aspect, the desk just stands head and shoulders above everything else for sheer panoramic range. Lots of headroom, lots of depth, beautiful imaging across the panoramic range.
"The way the dynamics reacted sounded really good, and of course the channel EQ is outstanding. I think it's to do with running at 96kHz rather than 48kHz; I always use an external Waves BCL unit with a Renaissance compressor and I found that seemed to react more smoothly. There was definitely a different sound from what I'm used to. In a room like the Manchester Arena, not a great acoustic environment, it was possible to localise instruments in the mix to their proper positions on stage, that's what I meant by panoramic range."
Mike Lowe, of Britannia Row Productions, is a director of M7 Audio Ltd, the company set-up initially to handle the rental operation of the Midas XL8 in the UK. M7 Audio Ltd is owned by Britannia Row Productions, Cane green, Capital Sound Hire, Concert Sound, Skan PA Hire, SSE Hire, Wigwam Acoustics. He says: "It is now over eighteen months since we put M7 Audio together and so this has been a lengthy project for us to get to do our first shows with the product. It has obviously been a lot longer for Midas themselves.
"It has been a great experience working on this 'extreme' flagship product, which is Midas's entrée into the digital console market. It has also been fantastic working closely with six of our competitors on this project while still competing, sometimes fiercely, with each other. This has been, and continues to be, a challenging experience but Britannia Row are very happy to be part of the XL8 story. We have been part of the Midas story since the beginning starting with Pro 2's and Pro 4's in the 70's. Pro 40's in the 80's and XL4's and Heritage 3000's in the 90's. It is great to be part of M7 Audio and to be lucky enough to be the M7 Audio partner to have Jon Lemon agree to be the first soldier 'to go over the top' and use the Midas XL8 with Noel, Gem & friends on the Teenage Cancer Trust Shows at The Royal Albert Hall and Versus Cancer at the Manchester Evening News Arena."
(Chris Henry)
