USA - The United Nations building in New York City became one of the first venues in the US to use the recently launched Midas Verona 8-bus mixing console for its sound reinforcement needs in addition to the new ElectroVoice Plasma powered speaker line for main FOH stacks and delays. New York Audio Service was asked to provide sound reinforcement services for an all-star line-up of jazz legends including Herbie Hancock, Larry Coryell, Terri Lyne Carrington, Nestor Torres and Buster Williams, who performed a special concert for the 'Culture of Peace' benefit at the UN last month.

New York Audio Service founder David Gibson remarked: "The Midas Verona is extremely user-friendly and straightforward. I spent a day with it in the shop, and had no trouble at all in familiarising myself with the board. I actually ran the entire show off the matrix busses, and only used 16-17 of the 32 available inputs. I found the input meter on each channel very helpful, and a real bonus on a console at this price point. The pre-amp section sounds great - super-quiet. There's just no noise in the system at all, plus you've got a rock-solid on-board power supply that's also silent. The Midas Verona, although substantially smaller and, as you'd expect from a desk at this price point, minus some of the bells and whistles of its big brother the Heritage 3000, still sounds like a Midas, and that's the important thing."

David was equally pleased with the performance of the new EV powered Plasma system, particularly given the difficult acoustic characteristics of the room - "hard, reflective surfaces everywhere with columns interspersed throughout the room - challenging to say the least!

However, as soon as we fired up the system, the Plasma loudspeakers sounded great, even with very little EQ. We didn't have to make a lot of adjustments. However, the one trick we did have up our sleeve was the Klark Teknik Helix digital EQ, which we used in parametric mode to really dial in on and isolate the one ringing frequency we heard - totally on the fly, in real time. We also used it for the delay stack behind a column where the ceiling height changed from 10 to 40ft. With the Helix you have total economy in a master unit and slave; we're currently in the process of saving tons of rack space in our other systems by switching out competitors' products to go solely with the Klark Teknik Helix."

(Lee Baldock)


Latest Issue. . .