With summer schedules that regularly include equipment for Lollapalooza, Country Jam, Rothbury, Langerado, All Good, as well as Austin City Limits and Rock Jam festivals, investing in two new mixing consoles was not a decision to be taken lightly.
As the 2009 summer season kicked off, StagePro decided it was time to purchase its first digital consoles. For Waller, the decision was based on sound business logic. "The [Midas] PRO6 is really the first digital console at an affordable price point that will satisfy both analogue and digital users. We bought two of them," he explains. "When we look at riders, about 20 percent still say 'no digital'. Every one of those guys is a Midas user. The PRO6 is the first digital console that those guys will come on board for. And the digital guys can't wait to get their hands on it."
"We already knew that Midas had done digital right. The mic pres, the dynamics, the operating system - everything was already proven with the XL8. And the latency management system keeps everything in phase. No one else has that."
The acid test came at the season's first major festival, Country Jam, a four-day festival held outside Grand Junction, Colorado. "Was I nervous? You bet I was!" recalls Waller. "We took a pair of Heritage consoles and set them up as backups, but we never needed them. But we got total acceptance by all the visiting engineers, and the consoles themselves proved their stability and reliability. In fact, when we did the same acts at Wisconsin Country Jam three weeks later, we didn't even put the spares in the truck."
(Jim Evans)
