Eclipse shines at Fareham Folk Festival

May 2010

The Fareham Folk Festival is one of the biggest events of its kind in the UK. For the last fifteen years, Salisbury-based sales and rental company, MIDAS ProSound, has been supplying the sound system. This year, the company went for a complete change, from the main PA all the way through to the monitor system. The new package included two Eclipse consoles from Innovason, SMX15 stage monitors from APG and the VQ LIVE loudspeaker system from Tannoy.

According to MIDAS ProSound’s Paul Nicholson (who also heads up the distribution company Red Square Audio) the event was a complete success. “We’ve been handling the audio for the Fareham Folk Festival for the last fifteen years and we’ve always achieved great sound,” noted Nicholson, “but this year was truly exceptional. In addition to our usual festival regulars who are always kind enough to comment on the great sound, this year we had a stream of people coming to see us after each session to say how much better the sound was compared to previous years. This was clearly as a result of the Eclipse and VQ LIVE systems, and a little bit of skill from us!”

Nicholson mixed the majority of the bands himself, but he also played host to six guest engineers. “Each one of them took to the Eclipse immediately,” he recalled. “We set up each band with their own patch and all the engineers had to do was push the faders and mix. Even the analogue diehards had a great time as the Eclipse is a very analogue-friendly console with no less than 96 faders and a clearly laid out control surface. The fidelity of the Innovason and Tannoy combination was the best they had ever heard. The promoter also loved the systems as they took up far less space than on previous years.”