Midas Pro2 review

So, I finally had the opportunity to run a show on the newish Midas Pro2. I had been hoping to get this chance ever since it came out. The Pro2 has a very compact size for handling 56 channels. I won’t go into a lot of the basics since those are really easy to look up on their website, but I'll talk about my experience... Due to its size, the typical console stand that was sent was way too big for it, luckily I had a demo of the Mini Console Rokker from Entertainment Fabrication and it lowered it down a bit so I could see the screen better, and didn’t stick out into the aisle as much...

On powering up, it did send a small DC pop through my PA, worth muting your system if it can easily be done, but nothing that would make me power everything off first if my amps were already on. The console didn't come zero'd out, and all the defaults that I could find had been written over except for one that was warning that it would make the console not accept future upgrades. So for the next hour, I erased channel names, copied a flat channel across all the channels, unassigned VCA's, re-did the pop groups, and tried to figure out patching.
I am going to start with the screen since it is where you will spend most of your time. It's nice and large and has a mirror output on the back via DVI. Since the screen wasn't touch, they were able to make all the information smaller and fit a lot more per page than you would expect from perhaps an M7CL or similar. Of course that being said there were several functions that would have been much nicer as a touch instead of having to use their very stiff and small trackball. My wrist was hurting by the time I got through soundcheck.
One thing I liked about how the information was displayed on the screen was that the right 1/4 almost always displayed an expanded view of the selected channel or parameter you were on (unless you pulled up a system function like patching or naming), the left hand side gave a decent overview of channel activity for the 8 channel's faders below the screen, but lacked in one main area - there was no overview of the eq's.
Moving on to the right of the display, is the section of knobs and switches for eq, gain, gate, etc. for your selected channel. I found it a little lacking in that I really dislike having to use arrows to page through the different filters in a parametric eq. it seems much slower, and I am constantly having to double check what filter am I on. The only real confusing thing here though, is the gain knob has a swap button, that changes it's function from stagebox gain -> trim gain (digital trim) ->  delay. this was confusing at first since the system tech told me the trim gain was the analogue preamp, and stagebox gain was digital, and I was trying to figure out why all my levels were so low... 
To the right of that is a bank of mutes, meters, and stuff for all the 16 auxs and 8 matrixes. For Midas to have dedicated nearly twice as much space to this as to the previous section they must believe it's really important, but I couldn't really find a use for it since I could pull all that info to the faders.
So there are 16 input faders, and then 8 VCA/ output master faders. These last 8 do not have any meters on them though, which was really odd since you can expand the inputs to all 24 faders (one of my favorite features), but if you are using them for outputs, you have the meters in the bank above to reference, so it's not too bad.
More on the fader sections, there are only 6 characters on the scribble strips, I would rather have had more, it seems unnecessary in this computer driven age to have to abbreviate so much, or at least it would be nice to be able to have a long name on the screen.
The back-light for the displays can be colored to your choice, which makes it really nice to be able to quickly find money mics and such. But since those were built into the select buttons for each channel, selecting became a bit clunky to me.Since you can have either 16 or 24 channels viewable at a time, this is where many manufacturers get awkward solutions in my opinion. Midas has an interesting solution in that there are scroll buttons to the right or left. Imagine that every input and output is on a giant loop of channels and you are scrolling by 8 one way or another. the only issue I had with it was that sometimes I'd get a bit lost as to where I was (because I had a few bank that ended up with similar names) and a "home" button would have been nice.
Now I really like the POP groups, it's a really convenient way to view a small group of channels especially if they are on several different layers. But the only thing I didn't like was that, since there were no custom layers, I couldn't re-order the channels within a pop group. I think it should be fairly easy to implement within the setup dialogue.
Finally I would like to mention sonic quality. Everything seemed to have to be way over eq'd to make it sound right compared with every other console I've used in that room. Even something like an sm58 I had to dial about 8 db out of 220ish where I would normally only cut 2 or 3 db out. I know everybody says they are legendary preamps, and they have a nice warm quality to them. but I did not find it useful for the show I was doing.(think early rock and roll) I would carry around outboard FX if I was using this console. The delay was ok once I got used to it, but the reverb left a lot lacking. I have Waves presets I made over a decade ago that sound better. As you increased the reverb time (max 8 sec) past about 1.5 sec. it starts getting a "tremolo" sound to it. I tried all the different presets for hall, plate, room... but they were all the same. 
I have no Idea about the remote aps, My computers OS is too old to run the mac version, and I don't have an iPad. 
Now of course these are just my opinions, and what I was able to do in the 1 day I had it. Feel free to comment below if you find out I'm wrong on something that can't be done, or if you like something that I didn't, I'd love to hear how it worked for you.
'Till next time
-Steven A.