The three-week long rodeo is both the world's largest livestock exhibition and the world's largest rodeo event. Every night after the rodeo competitions wind down, the Rodeo brings on the big name entertainment, making it one of the world's largest live concert event series. This year, audience attendance for concerts by Brad Paisley and Hannah Montana both hit the 73,000 mark.
A veteran sound engineer of 30+ years, and long-time Midas enthusiast, Howie Lindeman worked alongside Houston's LD Systems - whose large deployment of Electro-Voice audio equipment ensures the Rodeo events and concerts sound superb every year - supervising the XL8, which was on hand as the house console for visiting engineers.
Most of the engineers who tried the XL8 for their sound-check opted to use it to mix their show that evening, bearing testimony to its intuitive control surface and sound quality, as Howie Lindeman explained: "Over the course of the Houston Rodeo I introduced dozens of top touring engineers to the console, and watched every one of them take to it quickly and comfortably, as if it were their favourite analogue console. As each engineer approached the console for the first time I told them 'the XL8 will make your ears smile'. Not one of them disagreed! I would say that 98% of the engineers that came through were not only excited about simply seeing the new digital Midas, but also opted to work on it, even though they were traveling with their own gear. The other 2% were either locked into their consoles, or were using analogue Midas consoles like the XL4!"
"Only minimal training was necessary before they were mixing audio with a smile - it's so intuitive," Lindeman adds. "It was great to see how quickly they fell into actual hands-on mixing, having no issues with the navigation. The XL8 not only makes a seamless transition from analogue to digital from a technological perspective, but also from a human perspective. XL8 is digital, but its feels and sounds familiarly Midas, and every engineer loves to cook with those ingredients. Someone made a comment to me recently: 'When you walk up to a Midas, you already know your show is going to be 100%'. You can't say that about any other desk, especially digital. With XL8, you can."
(Lee Baldock)
