GLD vs. Pro1 Comparison: by Peter Wituszynski
The Pro1 arrived thursday afternoon, just in time for our next-to-last rehearsal. The guy bringing the rig also brought a Midas DL rack (48 in and 16 out) and a recording setup to play with. My mind had turned into mush by the time he was done patching it. The interface is so easy to get lost in, and its not always clear what the rotary knobs should be doing, or why they aren’t doing anything at the moment. But once it was configured, the console was entirely mixable. I do like mixing with POP groups, though there are times when I would rather see more than one thing at a time. It certainly sounds great, and it feels like the processing has more life and character to it than the GLD. However, it was cramped-feeling. Mixing on only 8 channels at a time is fine until you need to do 3 things at once. Then it quickly becomes a game of “where is that button?!”.
Like all the other Pro models, there is a trackball and yes, you do need to use the mouse for a lot of things. However, I thought that the trackball itself was probably the best one I’ve ever used. It is “stiff”, so to speak, so it is easy to control
. What I did not like was the click button placement. I am used to using my thumb to click on a track pad. This is impossible when the click buttons are above, not below the trackball, so you are stuck using your fingers to click. You may connect any USB mouse or keyboard to the console, and the model I had was in a flight case with a built-in keyboard tray. It is important to note that while you do need to mouse around configuration screens, all the actual mixing is done with the console’s physical controls.
I had a few issues booting the console, such as needing a power cycle once when the outputs weren’t passing audio. This may have been due to the funny clock situation I was in, though. The AES50 connections needed plugging and unplugging more often than is comfortable, but again that may have been due to my specific situation with network bridges and the MADI interface for the recording rig.
Comparisons
The consoles are in the same price point, in fact they are just about the exact same price. They have some feature trade-offs between them, though. Here are some comparisons between feature sets.
I/O:
The GLD is designed for a remote rack, with only 8 inputs on the surface. This is great news if you want to ditch analog snakes. The Pro1 has 24/24 I/O on the surface, with optional (expensive) expander racks. This means that the console works right out of the box all by itself, but you can add more channels to get 40 mix inputs. The A&H guys hit a chord with me for putting 4 RCA inputs on the surface. In fact, for christmas, I used all the RCA inputs and the 4 XLRs without needing anything more at FoH. The Pro1 loses points here for only having XLRs, since I needed to scrounge for DIs last minute and ended up running my aux sources in mono to save channels.
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