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UK - Latest signings to Parlophone, The Departure, continue their intensive touring schedule with the release of their debut album, equipped with a stage full of Audio-Technica mics.

The band, whose album, Dirty Words, was released on 13 June, has played over 100 shows in the last nine months. With no let up, they have dates, including support slots with Duran Duran, lined up throughout Europe until September, after which they embark on a headline UK tour, followed by a US tour and a further European stint.

With a few days respite before the summer's first European sprint, FOH engineer John Delf, took the opportunity to equip the tour inventory with a full complement of A-T mics. "We played Sonicmania 05 in Japan this year," he states. "The festival is spon

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USA - Robe moving lights have been specified and installed at several clubs and venues in Kenny's Alley at the landmark 'Underground Atlanta' retail and entertainment complex. Lighting, sound and AV design and production company, Active Production & Design, undertook all the installations. The entire complex includes over 100 retail stores, restaurants and nightclubs and the entertainment district, Kenny's Alley.

Active Production has worked with owners The Masquerade Corporation for over 10 years, helping with many club designs, consultations and installation projects. This specific undertaking was the largest to date for the client - involving five venues. The Masquerade Corporation asked the company to come up with a series of creative technical solutions and cutting edge designs to suit the five very different venue environments.

When it came to picking lighting fixtures,

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UK - Lite Alternative has installed a full WYSIWYG design suite in its premises to complement the company's lighting design and production services. Having used WYSIWYG to create over 40 different shows during the past four-years, company hire director Jon Greaves recently decided to upgrade the lighting team's software licenses to the WYSIWYG Perform suite so that they could benefit from the new-to-2005 unlimited DMX channels version to pre-cue outputs from any console.

Featuring advanced CAD tools, 3D rendering and comprehensive paperwork and pre-cueing. LD Paul Normandale is currently using WYSIWYG Perform to create new show designs for Keane, The White Stripes, Sigur Ros and Beck. He commented: "I use WYSIWYG to establish the basic building blocks of my lighting designs and get clients' feedback from the renderings. With the upgrade to Perform unlimited I can now see ex

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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

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UK - Clarion Events Ltd has acquired a controlling interest in ATE, the commercial exhibition, conference, publishing and services subsidiary of the British Amusement Catering Trades Association (BACTA), the UK trade association for the pay to play amusement industry.

The newly owned portfolio includes the industry leading events Amusement Trade Exhibition International (ATEi) and International Casino Exhibition (ICE), staged in London; three other smaller exhibitions including Amuse UK in Blackpool and The Betting Show in Birmingham; three European industry conferences; and three leading publications - Coinslot, Betting Business and Casino Review.

Simon Kimble, Managing Director of Clarion Events is pleased to have completed the investment in ATE and said: "We are delighted to have secured what is a fantastic company with great products and people in an exciting market.

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UK - Shuttlesound has made the first UK sale of Dynacord's new Xa-2 horn-loaded high SPL sound reinforcement system to Banana Row, the Edinburgh-based music services company. The new system makes one of its debut appearances in front of the most important people in the political world, when it is used at the Delegates' Ball at the G8 summit in the Gleneagles Hotel.

Banana Row is a multi-faceted music operation, incorporating rehearsal and recording facilities, instrumental teaching and PA/backline rental services for a wide range of customers. Having only taken delivery of the new Dynacord Xa-2 system at the end of May, the rush was on to gain some real-world experience with the system before the high-profile G8 summit event.

The first outing for the new system was at Edinburgh's biggest free festival, the Meadows Festival. Craig Hunter of Banana Row used the complete Xa-2 sys

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Japan - Lying between Tokyo and Narita International Airport, the Makuhari Messe exhibition complex is ideally situated for its role as one of Japan's leading business and entertainment destinations. As with so many Expo centres around the world, Makuhari Messe prides itself in its ability to present a full range of events. Trade shows and corporate events naturally lead the way, but the complex is also home to the purpose designed 9,000 seat Makuhari Event Hall, where rock concerts can easily be staged.

Like its close neighbours Tokyo Disneyland and Disney Sea Park, the Makuhari Messe has become increasingly successful since it first opened, so successful in fact that demand for the Event Hall had exceeded its ability to deliver. This was in part due to its large and heavy PA system that required four people to stack each cabinet. With a constant need to reconfigure the hall fo

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UK - Le Mark has been producing custom printed barrier tapes for many years, and says that in response to customer feedback the company has now produced 'standard/stock' barrier tapes as they are greatly needed in the industry. The company says it will now supply the Pyrotechnics world with two new designs which have already had interest far beyond expectation.

The new 'PYROTECHNICS IN USE DO NOT CROSS' barrier tape offers strict 'No Go' instruction incorporating both No Smoking and No Mobile Phone symbols. Also for pyrotechnic areas where access is required but obviously high awareness is also key, Le Mark has produced a 'BE ALERT' alternative. The new Overhead Working barrier tape from Le Mark incorporates the 'Hard Hat' symbol ensuring people are more aware of the hazards around them with clear and visible wording. All Le Mark's printed barrier tapes are manufac

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UK - Many companies are finding that recent changes to employment legislation are making their lives more complicated and proving a growing expense they could well live without.

And the situation isn't going to get any easier. Employers' costs are set to increase further when government plans to increase paid maternity leave from six to 12 months and to allow new mothers to transfer leave and pay entitlement to fathers, together with legislation that extends disability rights and allows staff to request flexible working arrangements, comes in. Many small and medium-sized companies have already acknowledged that these are going to prove some of the most challenging aspects of running their businesses.

PLASA (the Professional Lighting and Sound Association) is running two seminars for anyone in the industry who would like to be better informed about the planned changes. Taking p

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Germany - Sixty-three million euro has been spent getting the AWD Arena in Hanover ready for next year's World Cup; the 49,000-seater stadium now complies fully with FIFA regulations.

Among the key items in the modernization programme was the provision of new sound reinforcement and public address systems, with the decision-makers opting in each case for systems from EVI Audio: the centrepiece of the acoustic design is now formed by a PROMATRIX paging and alarm system from DYNACORD and a professional sound system from Electro-Voice in which FRX+PI enclosures and RL amplifiers play key roles.

For a major project such as the AWD Arena, EVI Audio's virtually comprehensive product portfolio offers considerable advantages, since each of the different areas of the stadium - the VIP lounges, the stands, the playing field etc. - poses a different problem, which (naturally) requires a

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UK - The European Headquarters of Digidesign, based at Pinewood Studios just to the West of London, is well-positioned right in the heart of a major film and television production centre. Housed within the offices of its parent company, Avid, Digidesign's entire sales, marketing, training and education resource operates from this site; its proximity to Heathrow allows easy access for UK and international visitors.

The training and education centre offers excellent facilities for its European re-sellers. An array of meeting rooms and two fully equipped studios provide the perfect surroundings for hands-on understanding of their products. Since launching the ICON D-Control and very recently the D-Command, the Digidesign headquarters has played host to many of the company's re-sellers visiting the training centre for training on these new products.The ICON tactile worksurface, D-Co

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UK - Stardraw.com recently announced that it has incorporated support for WebBrick technology from UK-based home automation products and solutions company O2M8 into its award-winning application, Stardraw Control.

Stardraw Control generates standalone, customized control programs that can manage and monitor any type of addressable equipment from any manufacturer using any protocol over any communications infrastructure. This approach frees systems integrators from closed or proprietary architectures and applications, offering instead the ability to create a single application that can control many different products with as much or as little complexity as the end user needs.

O2M8 Ltd is a UK-based company creating innovative smart home products and solutions using standard technologies and open source software to reduce costs and drive growth in the smart home industry. WebBri

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Sweden - Over the last two months Wireless-DMX products from Wireless Solution Sweden AB have been involved in several high profile projects. These include Swedish Television for primetime programs, Royal Opera Houses in Sweden, England and Denmark plus Chinese W-DMX distributor Leifull installed W-DMX for Guangzhou television's 2000 channels of DMX. Infact over 600 units of W-DMX will be delivered before the end of the summer 2005.

To meet the demand of increasing market for both Architectural and Event lighting, Wireless Solution Sweden AB has hired a new European sales manager. Isac Alkstrand previously worked as an area manager in the medical business and has much experience in the field of international business, he will be taking care of all distributors in Europe.

W-DMX Black Box Mk2 is the second generation of transceivers for Wireless DMX 512, a small unit that can ha

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Germany - The new VMK hoists (distributor: Think Abele of Nufringen) conforming to the BGV C1 standard are equipped with two independent noiseless brakes, an integrated realtime load measurement module capable of discerning the real load as well as the values for overload and slack chain, and a thermo sensor that continuously monitors the operating temperature of the motor. A friction clutch is not necessary for VMK hoists because of the principle upon which they operate, which allows uninterrupted closed linkage and a positive fit between the motor and the load.

The VMK hoists are equipped with high resolution incremental encoders that make it possible to position the hoist to within +/- 1 mm (in combination with V-Motion) permitting precise target runs with the highest degree of reproducible accuracy. Combined with the V-Motion controller modules, the VMK hoists can execute va

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Worldwide - Round-the-world concerts in the run-up to a summit which is already destined to go down in history: before the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, from 6 - 8 July, Live 8 aims to encourage people to speak out against poverty, especially in Africa. A steadily growing number of top national and international stars have agreed to appear at the concerts to be held on 2 July in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Philadelphia, and Barrie in Canada. RF and microphone specialist Sennheiser will make use of its worldwide network of subsidiaries and affiliated companies to equip all the events with wireless microphone and monitoring technology, attending to frequency planning and provide on-site support.

"On 2 July, the curtain will rise on the 'global stage' for what is probably the largest live concert the world has ever seen," says Rolf Meyer, speaker of the Sennheiser E

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UK - New technology, originally developed by AnswerBack Interactive to facilitate audience participation in the 2005 summer show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Live, is now available at venues around the country.

First UK venue to be 'AnswerBack Enabled' is the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham where rehearsals for the show took place during early June. Over five kilometres of cable linked 2,200 handsets to each other, and to ultra-speedy processors, which identify the players' fastest response to within a thousandth of a second. AnswerBack Interactive's MD Paul Krisman says "During the course of our largest shows we will be processing more than 10,000,000 messages with a peak greater than 7,000 per second - this is more than 10 times that achieved by the London Stock Exchange."

Other venues offering the AnswerBack Enabled facility include the Eastbourne Con

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USA - Ashly Audio, Inc. announced the introduction of the PE-Series remote controlled amplifiers. PE-Series (Protea Enabled) amplifiers are high-power, high-efficiency, lightweight amplifiers incorporating the latest in power and control technologies. Each amplifier can be controlled and monitored through the built-in Ethernet port using Protea Software. Protea gives users access to many features, including: input attenuation, channel mute, channel polarity, input level, output voltage, output current, clipping, temperature, and power on/off.

The 800, 1200, 1800, 2400, 3000 and 3800 are low impedance amplifiers ranging in power from 400W to 1900W per channel at four ohms (20Hz-20kHz, 0.05% THD). All models will drive two, four or eight ohm loads.

All amplifiers are 2RU, weigh 20 pounds and utilize a state-of-the-art, efficient, high speed switched mode power supply. Additional

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Poland - Horn Distribution SA has been appointed the new Polish distributors for Marantz Professional products, with effect from 1 June this year. Making the announcement, Mark Perrins, general manager of D&M Pro Europe, said: "Horn has enormous experience and has been selling Denon Pro products since 1997. We are delighted to give Darek Swiderski and Jaroslaw Bronowski the official distribution for Marantz professional products as well."

Horn Distribution in fact, has been operating since 1991, when the two men set out to build a portfolio of brands that they could represent exclusively in Poland. Denon was among its first serious brands in consumer electronics but the company soon realized that there was a huge demand for Denon Pro products.

To implement this, Horn Distribution set up a Pro Division and employed a dedicated sales force. "Adding Denon Pro produ

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Norway - Leading RF manufacturer Trantec recently announced that its sole Norwegian distributor, AVAB, Cac, has acquired a fleet of its internationally award winning S6000 and S6001/2 radio mic systems.

Adding to the potential of Norway's main sound rental company and complementing AVAB Cac's expansive portfolio, the systems' have recently deployed on a musical adaptation of legendary Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's classic Per Gynt.

Staged in Norway's oldest theatre Den Nationale Scene (DNS), the production was directed by Robert Wilson and co-produced by two of Norway's largest theatres Det Norske Teatret and DNS - the score written by Michael Galasso.

Featuring as part of a sophisticated sound system, the Trantec systems' were specified by sound designer, Bjarte Vage. AVAB's Arthur Botnevik collaborated with Vage form the early stages to ensure that all the aspects of

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Germany - Opened on 7 May 2005, the MARTa Herford museum in Herford, Germany aims to provide new inspiration for art, design, architecture and business both in and around the region. The extraordinary building complex is over 8,000sq.m and houses a novel combination of a Museum, a Forum, a Centre and a Café. Zero 88 Chilli Pro Dimmers are used to control the all lighting throughout the complex, integrating with Zumtobel Staff luminaries, Luxmate control system, and Soundlight system accessories to provide a complete building management solution. The Zero 88 dimmers were chosen in part for their convection-cooled design, which eliminates fan noise, and for their reliability. The range of dimmer sizes, ability to control different loads and RCD protection were also key factors in their selection.

The Museum itself is in front of the complex and consists of a 22m high dome and fiv

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Italy - Studio Due's CS 1 line of projectors has been enhanced with two new options which allow more versatile use, say the company. Available in the halogen lamp version or the discharge lamp version, the new options are designed to produce a diffuse white light (with various beam/lens options). Unlike the company's motorized projectors created for high power stage use, this CS1 offers a range of white light, combined with noiseless operation, due to its innovative construction and the lack of cooling fans. The fixtures are especially suitable for exhibitions, theatres and museums and other environments requiring precise beam positioning.

For applications requiring colour, Studio Due has designed an external colour changer, in collaboration with another Italian lighting manufacturer, Luci Della Ribalta (LDR).

(Lee Baldock)

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UK - Digidesign has appointed Marquee Audio and Orbital Sound as exclusive UK distributors for their innovative Venue Live mixing environment. Designed from the ground up for live sound reinforcement and broadcast applications, Digidesign Venue is a feature packed, purpose-built, modular live sound mixing and production environment. Venue comprises the D-Show mixing console, front-of-house mix engine, Stage Rack I/O unit with recallable, remote-controlled preamps, and a multi-channel digital snake.

As a hugely creative sound design tool, it offers the quality and functionality of highend live sound mixing systems at an affordable price. Plus Venue is the only live sound mixing environment to feature an optional direct digital link to the industrystandard Digidesign ProTools systems. As a modular base system it is infinitely configurable, supporting up to 96 mic inputs and 27 bus

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