Steph Fleming of EFX, who also ran the Radio 1/NME stage last year, noted, "One development from previous years was that I don't think we met an engineer who had never seen Midas Digital before."
As in previous years, EFX set up the two XL8s in tandem, so that guest engineers could listen in to the preceding band and get a feel for the EQ, as well as lining up gates, compressors, reverbs and overall functionality prior to line-checking their own band.
"We have a good degree of familiarity and experience with these systems," says Fleming, "and this year we took it just a little further again."
As well as the consoles, EFX deployed 192 channels of 431 mic splitters to ensure they were never short of inputs and outputs while a dozen 451 I/O boxes provided links to FOH, stage left, stage right and the drive for the monitor system. "It provides such great flexibility in the patching possibilities," enthuses Fleming, "and means we are able to accommodate all of our guests' signal requirements."
Friendly Fires' engineer Richard 'Bars' Barling was similarly impressed. "It was great," he says. "It looked and sounded like an XL4, but I love the digital functionality, like how easy it is to have channels come to you rather than sloping through layers, as with some other consoles. I found the gates very accurate and the compressors very transparent, and the onboard reverbs and delay both sounded great. I also spoke to the outside broadcast guys and they commented on how good the Midas splits sounded."
Mat Acreman, a regular user of the Midas Heritage 3000 desk, mixed Welsh rock band Kids In Glass Houses on the Sunday night and was delighted with his first experience of a Midas XL8. "I thought the POP(ulation) Groups were a great feature and really helped in getting mixes together in a short festival line-check," says Acreman.
Midas digital consoles also made their mark at Knebworth's Sonisphere festival the same weekend, where every headliner was mixed on a Midas console. Britannia Row Productions supplied two PRO6s, a PRO9 and an XL3 as well as an analogue Heritage 3000, while Metallica used their own XL8 at FOH.
(Jim Evans)
