UK - Live events creative solutions specialist, Production Bureau (Pb) has invested in 20 Spotlight FresneLED 200 warm white universal dimming luminaires for use on client events during the busy autumn season.
Production Bureau has been providing technical solutions, installations, AV equipment and services to the live events and exhibitions & display sectors for over 30 years, with projects ranging from international conferences to small-scale roadshows.
Dave Morgan, Pb's technical resources manager, required a versatile and low-energy LED Fresnel that could be used across various types of shows and events, so contacted Bob Allen in the UK lighting sales team of professional equipment re-seller AC-ET.
Morgan comments: "At Pb we are continuously investing in ne

USA - The North American premiere of the musical Tinga Tinga Tales in October featured seven Chauvet Professional Maverick MK2 Spot fixtures. These lights, along with 13 Maverick MK2 Wash units and eight COLORado 2-Quad Zooms, supplied by WorldStage, were part of a Herrick Goldman lighting design for the show at Manhattan’s New Victory Theatre
“The MK2 Spots provided the strong beams of the chromatic rainbow when the children in the audience discover how the Chameleon character gets his colours,” said Goldman, who positioned the 440W moving LED fixtures on the second electric. “They enabled us to shift Chameleon’s moods rapidly, which helped tell his magical tale. The MK2 Spots also played heavily in Tortoise’s Rasta rap, with a call and response with the audience. Overall, the spots help to highlight performers in a variety of dramatic ways.”
Gol

UK - The end-of-season fireworks display at Legoland Windsor Resort is one of the resort’s most anticipated events on the calendar. Six shows are held over three weekends during late October and early November, with this year’s Legoland Heroes extravaganza, deemed the most spectacular and ambitious yet.
Sound designer Dave Shepherd has been looking after the sound for the fireworks display since 2003. This year, following the demos held at LH2 in June, he opted to try out the recently launched HALO Arena large format line array system from EM Acoustics.
Shepherd explains that a large percentage of the park is covered with dedicated sound systems for the fireworks display, which is not without its challenges: “There are multiple viewing areas populated with buildings and trees that we need to work around. We also have fairly tight noise restrictions due to
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Indochine X PixMob Fan Immersion

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's - 40 thousand LED pixels on a ceiling!!! Indochine's whirlwind tour transports fans to another level of the live experience - immersing them from floor to ceiling with PixMob's X4 wristbands, and an LED ceiling made entirely of its NOVA Minis! With the vision of Indochine's creative team, PixMob used its LED fan-technology to turn attendees and venues into an ocean of effects, and a starry sky of LED magic. Très très cool!

Read more about the Indochine tour in the latest issue of LSi

Greece - The Stelios Kyrillidis rental company in Elassona, Larissa, has taken delivery of the first Outline GTO C-12 system in Greece and the rig’s high-profile debut on arrival was a date on Bryan Ferry’s world tour at Thessaloniki’s Dassous (Forest) Theatre.
The second event followed just two days later, with concerts by top Greek names Giannis Aggelakas, 1000mods, Active Member and Pyx Lax at the magnificent Vrahon Theatre in Athens.
Bill Michailidis of Mega Event (Outline’s distributor in Greece) comments: “The system was a personal choice of Bryan Ferry's sound engineer, Davide Lombardi, who assured me that he preferred this system to others he has worked with over the years.
“For this first set up, Giulio Gandini (R&D engineer and tech support and training specialist with Outline) came to Greece and we designed the system for this specifi

Europe - Prolyte Group presented its distributor awards at its bi-annual networking event for distributors.
The Partner Immersion Event was held at Prolyte’s International Training Centre in Emsdetten, Germany to bring together distributors from all over the world.
To thank partners for “the trust, support and contribution to the Prolyte brand”, Prolyte Group presented the following awards to their distributors:
Platinum Award ProlyteStructures: AED Distribution; Platinum Award StageDex: AED Distribution; Platinum Award StageDex: Bellalite; Platinum Award ProlyteStructures: Cast C.Adolph & RST Distribution; Platinum Award ProLyft: DWR Distribution; Platinum Award ProLyft: Huss Licht & Ton; Platinum Award StageDex: Stage Electrics: Project of the Year Award: DP Music; Project of the Year Award: EES - Entertainment Equipment Supplies; Consistent Devel

USA - Opened in 1892, Ryman Auditorium in Nashville is best known as the home of the Grand Ole Opry radio broadcast between 1943 and 1974. Its age and cultural significance led to its inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.
In partnership with Opry Entertainment Group, JBL, and Yamaha, AV integration company Clair Solutions recently completed a significant overhaul of the Ryman’s sound reinforcement system, which required a lot of upfront due diligence and testing, sensitivity to the venue’s historic interior, and a deft installation to work around the Ryman’s packed calendar.
“We installed the Ryman’s previous sound reinforcement system over a dozen years ago,” says Dan Heins, regional vice president at Clair Solutions. “It was a first-generation JBL VerTec system that served them well, but loudspeaker, amplifier, and DSP technolog

UK - Edinburgh-based DM Audio is the latest company to join the Adamson rental partner network, having recently purchased a S10 line array system from Edinburgh certified re-seller, Live Systems.
The system consists of S10 line array loudspeakers with S119 subs powered by Lab Gruppen PLM20K44 amplifiers together with a full rigging package.
Dino Martino, director of DM Audio, comments: “We had been looking for a new line array system for some time and had evaluated all of the alternatives currently on the market for function, sound quality, rider-friendliness and value. We trialled Adamson line array systems on some of the events that we supplied over the summer and the S-Series really stood out for us as the best system for our client base, with exceptional sound quality, well thought-out rigging and amazing coverage. Another important factor for us is the aftercar

South Africa - DWR Distribution will now be the sole distributor for Audix Microphones in South Africa.
Audix has been a well-known name in professional music for over three decades, with acclaimed international artists using its microphones, including Willie Nelson, Todd Sucherman of Styx, and Morgan Beatbox.
“Over the past two years, our company has seen tremendous growth in the audio products we offer to the industry,” comments Robert Izzett from DWR. “The one thing we did not have were microphones. Audix is one of the leading brands across the globe, and what makes the company special and approachable is their passion for the end user. By investing in research and development over the past thirty years, and listening to their customers’ needs and requests, Audix has developed innovative and performance driven microphones.”
“We are excited to have

Europe - Laserworld has released PL-5500RGB Outdoor, a professional laser system dedicated to the outdoor use of logo, text and architecture projections.
The laser has a waterproof enclosure and has a built-in control interface that can also be loaded laser frames and animations to. The system can either be computer controlled or switched with a timer clock or a timed show playback.
The outdoor laser highly visible in the dark, due to its high power. The scanner system is fast and well-suited to graphics projections, logos or texts. It comes with a special wall mounting bracket, which is designed to be used for fixed installation.
The Laserworld PL-5500RGB Outdoor comes as a complete system including built-in LAN control interface and suitable professional control software.
(Jim Evans)

Sweden - Lights in Alingsås, the experimental architectural lighting installation, started when students from Ljuscentrum Gothenburg University came to Alingsås in 1998. Ten years later, the urban exhibition attracts more than 85,000 visitors every year and has become the largest lighting event in public spaces in Northern Europe.
W-DMX has become a frequent sponsor of the project and is proud of being able to showcase its technology in a real-life scenario, to well-established and new designers in the industry.
“In total, we used five WhiteBox F-1 transceivers, in three different sites”, says Dierk Hartmann, from Lights in Alingsås. The first site featured a set of WhiteBox units configured as transmitter and receiver, with lighting designed by Diana Joels (Brazil) and programmed by Oscar Bertenius (Stockholm Lighting). The control was supplied by

UK - Full technical production services provider Pearce Hire has added a Prolyte Arc Roof staging system, supplied by Stage Electrics, to its hire stock.
The Prolyte Arc Roof System is a fixed construction, based on three inward-curving trusses which are mounted to side masts. Since its delivery, the system has been used for a festival and an urban running event and has also been specified for several Christmas Light switch-ons and outdoor winter festivals.
Jim Brown, general manager at Pearce Hire, comments: “We’ve got a significant amount of Prolyte kit already - trusses, towers, rigging towers and accessories. So we were already familiar with the quality of Prolyte products and ease of handling. We were particularly attracted to the Arc Roof system because of its well-considered assembly process which is critical to the challenging set-up times our client proje

USA - GLP highlighted its latest products and claimed an LDI Awards at the annual trade show in Las Vegas last month.
GLP products were both on static display and incorporated into a light show, while the award for Best Large Booth recognised the German manufacturer’s stand, designed and programmed by Matt Shimamoto (Volt Lites) in conjunction with GLP Inc. president Mark Ravenhill.
Ravenhill comments: “We were hugely busy throughout the show and saw a great number of people from across the country and abroad. We designed a brand new “Licht!’ bar which became the central attraction of the booth and was surrounded by eight new product launches, all making their debut, which received a fantastic reaction.”
The product array included impression E350 and S350, KNV Cube and KNV Arc, impression FR1, X4 atom Rackmount PSU and products from distributed brands,

Denmark - Lighting designer Mike Holm has been in charge of many light installations throughout his career but had his first encounter with SGMs G-4 Wash for the successful Danish musical Seebach. After almost a year-long run with over 200,000 tickets sold, Seebach became the best-selling musical in Denmark in 15 years.
“Besides living up to all our performance demands, we chose the G-4 Wash because of its compact size that makes it easy to adapt to various staging designs,” says Mike Holm.
In the past, Holm has used moving-head fixtures that were a lot more difficult to install due to their bigger physical size. With great performance in a compact size, the G-4 Wash turned out to be the perfect luminaire for both the Seebach and Tarzan musicals.
“The G-4 Wash has a Fresnel lens, which avoids having to work with multiple shadows that you get from

UK - On 25 October at London’s St. Bartholomew-the-Great at Smithfield, storytelling singer-songwriter Hazel Iris celebrated the release of her first full-length album, Nine Sisters.
Shure supported the event with KSM8, BETA52, SM137, SM81, KSM141, BETA98, SM57’s and SM58 microphones and PSM300 in ear monitoring systems.
Peter Junge, engineer in charge of recording and filming the event, comments: “For the Hazel Iris album launch, we used Shure microphones on every instrument. Not only was the live-sound superb but the recording also came out really well. Listening back I was very surprised by how focused it all sounds and how little issue with bleed or ambience we have on the signals. Very often, when using that many condenser microphones in a church, there can be a problem. However, the sound is nicely separated and I’m pleased I'll be able to make a

Romania - Romania’s five-star Black Sea hotel, Nyota, offers luxurious accommodation coupled with conference and theatre facilities to cater for tourism and business.
A premium solution was required, according to systems integrator and Powersoft distributor Marius Craiu, sales & marketing manager of AudioVision Store, who spec’d Powersoft Ottocanali power amplification systems to manage the zoning and room audio systems.
The hotel needed the AV system to cover all areas, with priority for EVAC announcements and both local and remote control of the zones.
Systems integrator and Powersoft distributor Marius Craiu explains: “The hotel’s prime objective was for it to be simple to use and reliable. We began working with the hotel before building was started and although the initial specification was settled early on, there were inevitable modifications al

UK - Formed at the turn of the century, with the aim of providing lighting and production services to the theatre and events industry, Edinburgh-based Blue Parrot has enjoyed a long association with Martin lighting over the years. This has taken them from MAC 500s and 600s right through to today’s Auras and Vipers.
As their own theatre work increased, with MD Jonnie Clough himself a theatre lighting designer in his own right, the love affair continued, and just over a year ago the company invested in 12 MAC Encore Performance WRM moving heads specifically for a Christmas show at the local Royal Lyceum Theatre.
Of their purchasing decision at the time, Clough says: “It was our success with the Viper Performance that gave us the faith and confidence to invest in the Warm White Encores. I was impressed with the demo and we ordered them even before they were available.

USA - Fusion band Intocable have enjoyed a 25-year career, winning three Grammy awards and and playing record-breaking stadium concerts. Their latest Highway tour has taken them all over the US since June and culminates in November in Houston, Texas.
The band's tools of choice at both FOH and monitors are SSL L300 consoles, and Jose Ramon Quintero has engineered with both, previously as monitor engineer, and now as FOH engineer. "When I started with the L300 on monitors, the band immediately noticed a huge change in the mix and in the 'room image',” he says. “There is a great separation between the instruments, and there’s a much warmer, more analogue sound than the console we were using before."
According to Quintero, the band's reaction to the technology was an important moment, as they are all accomplished musicians, and most have their own personal st

UK - Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Rex Orange County (Alexander O'Connor) has been on a UK tour, with LD Will Kinnaird looking after the lighting for the musician’s first full production.
Kinnaird took 24 Robe’s LEDBeam 150 moving lights on the bus-and-trailer tour; the fixtures proved the right tool for the low-profile aesthetic he crafted for the tour as he worked closely with show designer Jed Skrzypczak. The LEDbeam 150s and some other lighting were used at every show in conjunction with the 'top' rigs at each venue.
At the musician’s London gig at the Hammersmith Apollo, the LEDBeam 150 count was boosted to 51 and six MegaPointes were added to the rig, all supplied by High Wycombe rental company, Siyan.
For the main tour, the 24 LEDBeam 150s were deployed in three horizontal lines across the stage - upstage, mid-stage and downstage - wher

UK - Technical event production provider Blitz has invested in Yamaha’s flagship digital mixing system, Rivage PM10.
The company has a long association with Yamaha and a substantial inventory of QL and TF series digital consoles, as well as CL5s and the legendary PM1D, one of which was used for over a decade on Phantom of the Opera in London’s West End.
As a former touring and theatre mix engineer, Blitz director of sound Aron Ross appreciates the advanced capabilities of Yamaha digital mixers. Working alongside the company’s chief sound engineer, Rob Handyside and head of theatre and sound project development, Martyn Hunt, all were keen to work with the Rivage PM10 digital mixing system.
“We are really excited about the new technology and the enhanced capabilities that Rivage PM10 offers,” says Aron. “The Rupert Neve Designs SILK processing i

UK - Pop rockers The Feeling recently celebrated the 12th anniversary of their debut album with their Twelve Stops and Home tour - supported by an Allen & Heath dLive digital mixing system.
Supplied by SSE Audio, the full set-up included an S7000 surface on FOH, accompanied by a DM64 MixRack on stage. Both FOH and monitors were mixed from the S7000 with the dLive’s 128 input processing channels enabling duplicates of input signals to be made for discrete FOH - MON processing. Additionally, the MixRack was fitted with a Dante card for multi-track recording.
“The 128 processing channels and 64 buses were perfect for duplicating channels for monitors and band members who needed further processing in their IEM’s. I never had to compromise on anything, giving the band what they needed on stage and for what I needed out front,” comments FOH engineer Jon Le


The Long Goodbye - Elton John has announced UK dates for his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, saying they will be emotional and "incredibly special". The singer, who began his mammoth three-year goodbye tour in the US in September, will continue to play across the world until 2021, with more than 300 shows planned. Two UK dates had already been confirmed for next year, and there will now be more again in November 2020, kicking off at London's O2 Arena. Sir Elton will also play arena shows in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Leeds in 2020.
"The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour will take us to many places that have meant a lot to me over the last 50 years, but these UK shows will be incredibly special," he said. "The UK is home, and where my heart will always be. To celebrate some of the incredible moments we've shared with my Britis

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