THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL CONSOLE?
By Graeme Hague
12 March 2014
Last week we pointed out Midas’ “count-down” clock to a thing called Neutron, but it wasn’t clear if Neutron was a mixing console or the audio engine driving it. Now we know, with Midas jumping its own starter’s gun and announcing early the “world’s most powerful live mixing console” – a claim that’s bound to poke the competition in the eye – with the 271 Channel PRO X mixer that features Neutron DSP inside. The magical figure of 271 channels comes from 168 inputs and 103 outputs (with the latter alternatively counted as 99 “mix” channels). The new Neutron Audio System Engine is the culmination of a three-year research and development program at Midas resulting in advanced FPGA and MIMD (Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data) architecture that delivers more than 100 gigaflops of real-time audio processing performance – apparently the Cray Supercomputer only managed a lazy 16 gigaflops – translating into those 271 simultaneous processing channels at 96 kHz and 40-bit floating point operation. Interesting that existing PRO 3, 6, and 9 owners can upgrade those systems to the new PRO X by replacing certain sections of their control surface, installing the Neutron DSP engine and using existing remote I/O to increase the physical connections. The list of Pro X features and functions goes on, ending in a slight bummer – the Pro X will be available “before the end of 2014”. Has Midas looked at a calendar lately? With that count-down clock still ticking as this is posted, there’s still no info on Midas www.midasconsoles.com website, but maybe that’s about to change – on schedule.
Australian Distributor: National Audio Systems [email protected]
The Calrec Apollo has 1020 channels @48K and 510 @96K plus hundreds of buss outputs. This is a live broadcast console.