GLD vs. Pro1 Comparison: by Peter Wituszynski

Design and Layout:

The GLD has a sporty frame with angled corners. It features the same soft-feel black plastic that comes on Thinkpad laptops, and that earned points with me. Everything is laid out thoughtfully, although it is weird that there are so few buttons on the surface. This means that you have to interact with the screen quite a bit, and you end up paging through menus to get what you need.

The 20 faders give it a “just right” feel. It is small enough that you can stand in one place, but there are enough channels that you can have what you need in front of you.

Pro1 Design and functionality

The Pro1 is a design atrocity. It looks like it was conceived in 2002, and is all curvy and bulbous for no good reason. It is a clutter of blinking lights and buttons, and it takes a good study to get to know what everything does. This leads to the console feeling cramped, not because it is too small, but because there is just so much available. This was compounded by the fact that you can only mix one group at a time. The Midas way of mixing is to assign every input to a VCA (there are 8 ) or a POP (there are 6). A POP is just a VCA without a master fader. The VCA faders and POP buttons are all on the right-hand fader bank. When you want to mix an individual channel, you punch the VCA or POP button, and it “spills” over on the left-hand fader bank. In this way, you always have access to all your VCAs and all your POP groups, and can have any one group spilled over at a time. But it gets funny with small channel assignments. A VCA with only 3 instruments in it means you are wasting 5 faders on the left any time you are mixing that VCA. The GLD lets you always have 20 things up and mixing at any moment. After mixing on it for a while, I learned to like the Midas style of mixing and I didn’t miss the extra faders, but it is certainly disconcerting at first.

GLD Design and functionality

The GLD allows you to mix while you make changes to an input strip or do anything else (patching, naming, setup) on the touch screen. But the Pro1 is very single-tasked. You can really only do one thing at a time, since all the information is coming from the LCD screen. Sure, you can always move faders, but you wouldn’t be changing an EQ while editing an effect patch. This sometimes translated into having to interrupt my work on something (like an FX or automation settings) when a musician needed a monitor tweak. You sortof have to drop everything in the interface to see what you’re doing.

Curiously, the GLD does not display a number for the fader’s position. There are screenprinted numbers on the surface just like any console, but the screen never tells you what level the mix is at. I’ve been told that there is a button that lets you see a number, but I didn’t discover it while I had the console. This is consistent with the physical controls, which have lights to indicate position but don’t show you any numeric value.  It’s not a particularly crucial detail, but it stands in contrast to the Pro1, which shows the fader’s dB level in large numbers as soon as you touch it. In fact, every control on the Pro1 is touch-sensing, and rotary controls draw a big box around the on-screen control that they are moving to make sure you know what you’re changing.

Channel Strip:

The channel strip is very different between the consoles. The GLD has a horizontal strip with a knob for most things. The full EQ section is there (with a “push for Q” on one knob that was not very intuitive), and most of the dynamics knobs are there. The Pro1 has a vertical strip with knobs for everything and little buttons that bring a detail view on the screen. The knobs tend to share functions, with the “dynamics” section controlling both the comp and the gate, with arrow buttons to pick which

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