GLD vs. Pro1 Comparison: by Peter Wituszynski
For Christmas, I had an upright bass with a crummy pickup on it. There was no way the parametric EQ was going to cut it, so I wanted to add in a graphic. It turns out that the GLD only has GEQs as part of the output busses. The only way to put one on the bass was to assign its channel to a group, and then assign the group to the L/R mix. This seemed like a waste of a group bus to me.
When I went to the Pro1, I originally thought it couldn’t be done either, but it turns out that one of the FX processors is a dual-31 band GEQ. They can be patched anywhere in the console, including a mix channel’s insert. The crummy part is that the insertable GEQs will not work with the GEQ FLIP button, meaning you can’t use the faders to tweak the EQ. Instead, you have to use the rotary knobs, 8 at a time, which is really annoying. Luckily, like everything else, you can save presets of your work and copy/paste at will.
Tap Tempo:
The Pro1 has a nice “Global Tap” button that can be assigned to any or all of the FX processors. However, the tap button itself is crummy. I had a hard time getting it to actually hit the tempo I wanted. Sometimes it gave me half-time of what I wanted. Strangely, the light that flashes on the tempo is among the options that the board has for “LCD brightness” and whatnot. You can tell it to only flash once after you hit it, or never flash. If you’re easily distracted by flashing lights in the corner of your eye, that’s a slick detail for the Pro1.
The GLD has no tap tempo button, but any of the 10 soft keys may be assigned to ONE of any FX processors. This means you can have multiple different taps going at a time, which is flexible but mostly pointless. If I had 3 different delays going, I wouldn’t want to waste 2 more soft keys on tap-tempos.
Faders:
The GLD faders are okay, but they are a lot like the Yamaha faders I remember from 10 years ago. When you recall them, they zip to their location with a familiar scraping sound. If two faders are linked, the following one kinda bumps around all jittery-like. The Pro1 has much nicer faders that are smooth to move and also more “reserved” when they recall. They slide up a little slower and a lot quieter than the GLD. They also don’t to the jittery dance when moving as a linked pair.
Sound:
The GLD is very clean, and I can’t say anything bad about it. The Midas is smoother, maybe a bit more mellow. I don’t have much experience with Midas gear, but it seems like the “analog gain + digital trim” split gain controls are supposed to let you dial in how much “Midas” you want in your sound.
Nevertheless, the GLD is a 48kHz system and the Pro1 is a 96kHz system, so take that as you will.
Virtual Soundcheck:
The GLD will work with any I/O card already out for the iLive line, which means you can pop a Dante card in there and be off and running with 64 channels both ways. These are managed in the “Patching” screen, on their own tab. I did not have a card to try with my demo, but it seemed straightforward, and there was a setting that lets you pick clocking options for that card.
You can get digital signals (Ethersound, Dante, MADI) out of a Midas, but you first need a $900 rack-mount box and then a third party card (another $900) for whatever you’re converting to. The console itself only supports Midas’ AES50 protocol, so you’re kind of in a corner for getting things into and out of it. The rig I demo’d was converting to MADI and then went into a mac pro for 48 channels of recording at 96kHz. You can also get PCI-E cards from Lynx which take AES50 straight off the board, at 24 channels each. The I/O is set in the patching page as “tape returns” on the input channels. Each input channel in the console’s patch has two inputs, the “normal” and the “tape return”. You patch physical mic preamps to the normal input, and your virtual soundcheck I/O to the “tape return”. You also have to double-patch the physical inputs to your digital outputs. Then there is a global setting in the “preferences” menu to turn on the tape returns so you can run your virtual soundcheck.
Conclusion:
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