For those of us who work in our own studios away from big facilities, events like the Miloco Gear Pro Audio Expo held on Thursday November 8th 2018, are a chance to get get out there into the real world, have a nose around a world famous studio complex, reach out and play with some of the latest gear and most importantly network with fellow audio professionals and “chew the fat” about all things music and music technology.

Miloco Gear Pro Audio Expo

This was the third event held at the Miloco Orinoco Complex in Leroy Street in South East London exactly a year to the day since the first event and I believe it is fair to say this was one of the most successful.

The format for the event was, as with previous events, a mix of shootouts, master classes and downtime to look around the studios, enjoy a beer or glass of wine while lusting over the latest kit of some piece of vintage studio gear.

Dave Eringa In the Red Room

Mixing engineer Dave Eringa held two masterclass sessions in the Red Room showing his end to end mix workflow on a track by Manic Street Preachers. It was standing room only in both these two sessions in which Dave was very open about his routing and mixing choices as well as plug-in chains and effects settings.

The Pool

The first of the evening’s shootouts took place in the Pool studio live room. Attendees were given the opportunity to listen to a number of sets of high-end “main” studios monitors by brands such as PMC, Quested, Unity Audio, PSI, Adam Audio and Augspurger. The MC for this part of the evening was friend of the blog, Producer and Engineer Dax Liniere who had chosen a selection of music to best show off the features of all of these stunning monitor systems. He was also in charge of making sure all the monitor systems were level matched as well as they could be to make the test as fair as possible.

The Pool was also home to a vast array of goodies on demo by UK dealers, KMR Audio, Nova Distribution and Universal Audio who were showing off their new Apollo X range of interfaces.

Personal highlights here were seeing the new Roger Mayer 456 four channel mic pre and the new as yet unreleased Classic Stereo Limiter.

The stunning sounding REDD microphone by Chandler Limiter was also on display and it is one of those “you have to try it” mics. This valve (tube) condenser microphone has the pre-amp built in which I’m told is a good thing as it keep the sensitive part of the recording chain (the distance from the mic to the pre) down to an absolute minimum. The XLR output of the mic effectively pumps out line level which you can put straight into your DAW interface line input. I have not had the chance to use the REDD in a session yet. Maybe that is something we will have to rectify very soon.

The Bridge

This control room was home to rolling demos from the teams at Audient and Focusrite. Audient were showing off the studio’s own ASP8024 Heritage Edition 24 channel console with a very funky jazz track as well as the range of interfaces from the tiny iD4 to the new iD44.

Focusrite had a mighty rig consisting of Red Series, RedNet and ISA hardware demonstrating how you can use the Dante AoIP protocol to interface between the units in their range.

Electro Bank

The small, yet perfectly formed Electro Bank mix room was the temporary home to an AMS Neve Genesis Black console being demonstrated by Neve’s James Townend and Robin Porter. James was demonstrating the tight integration between the Genesis Black console and your choice of DAW software. He was also showing how, although the Genesis Black is a digital desk it has an truly analogue signal flow through real hardware “plug-ins”.

The Pool Control Room

The final shootout of the evening took place in The Pool control room where engineer Simon Todkill had set up a number of high end hardware units and matched the settings to their Universal Audio UAD-2 plug-in equivalents. This was a true A/B test of which do you think is better, hardware or software. In a small number of cases (no I’m not going to tell you which ones) there was quite a difference between the hardware and software but in the vast majority of the tests there really was so little to call between the two different processes. As a group we all agreed that we are now at a point where more often than not the software plug-ins do sound as good as the hardware units and unless you were doing a blind A/B you would be hard pushed to tell the difference in a mix.

Thanks so much to Robbie Dunne and the team at Miloco for putting all the hard work in to make the event happen . It was a fantastic evening and we very much look forward to the summer Pro Audio Expo at Miloco.