UK - Barco received the Manufacturer of the Year Award at the 2005 AV Awards ceremony held in London last week. Barco collected the award for its work, in conjunction with Innovative Design and rental partner XL Video, in designing and creating the MiSphere LED modules for U2's Vertigo tour.

The judges stated that Barco's technological innovation and the way it worked with the U2 tour designers to develop MiSphere was a good example of a manufacturer working with its clients to develop the market as well as an engineering feat.

Lee Spencer from XL Video comments: "The experience of working with Barco on this project was refreshing, as their professionalism, dedication and commitment to every aspect of the MiSphere 's production was inspiring."

Stephan Paridaen

China - The 4th Music China and 3rd Prolight + Sound Shanghai open this Wednesday - 19 October - at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre in Pudong, Shanghai.

Music China will house around 750 manufacturers and suppliers of musical instrument and accessories. Prolight + Sound Shanghai, with around 170 exhibitors, will show a good range of pro-audio and specialist lighting equipment. Together the events are expected to attract well over 35,000 retailers, wholesalers, dealers, distributors and musicians.

Music China 2005 will house "the largest offering of musical instruments and accessories to be found anywhere in Asia". As well as national pavilions from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Taiwan, Spain and the UK, some of the world's leading names in MI will be at the show.

Prolight + Sound Shanghai will feature exhibitors from eleven countries & regions, includ

UK - The Mach CW 115, CW 215, CW 118 and CW 218 are the last four subwoofers - and the last speakers - to be introduced in Mach's new C-Range of installation speakers. All products in Mach's C-Range are now on the market - providing "a competitive line of high-quality products for various venue sizes".

The CW series is a line of reflex loaded subwoofers which give a deep and fast bass output. Built for heavy-duty use in professional environments, the subwoofers are constructed with sturdy Baltic plywood cabinets and feature a SafeCoat coating to give optimal strength.

Like all speakers in the Mach C-Range, the CW subwoofers are designed to fit unobtrusively into any install environment and feature the same flying point principles used on the C-Range top boxes.

All four subwoofers feature: Reflex loaded, compact cabinet design; improved excursion control and lineari

featured content

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

USA - Chauvet Lighting's Colorsplash 196 will debut at LDI 2005. The 7-channel, linkable DMX-512 can fixture is fitted with 196 bright red, green and blue light emitting diodes that produce a "high-output, richly colored wash suited for architectural, ambience-setting and entertainment applications".

The diodes are distributed in seven individually controlled, concentric circles and they can produce a wide spectrum of colours via RGB mixing. Colorsplash features seven static colours, a colour change program with 10 selectable speeds, 5-color pattern chase programs with adjustable speed and sound-active mode via the LED-BOSS optional controller.

The lifespan of the diodes (85 red, 51 green, 60 blue) is estimated at up to 100,000 hours. Power is switchable, 115V/230V or 230V.Each unit weighs 4lb (1.8kg) and measures 6" x 8" x 7.5" (152.4 mm x 203.2mm x 1

Poland - Located in the heart of Warsaw, the InterContinental Warszawa hotel provides an architectural landmark as one of the highest buildings in the city. It has 326 guest rooms and suites, and 75 residential suites, all of which fully equipped with the latest technology. In addition, there are three restaurants and two bars, and eleven banqueting rooms with room for 700 guests.

The hotel has installed the Bosch Praesideo Voice Alarm System. Most of the installation work was carried out by local reseller, ANB which has been operating in Poland since 1992. A spokesman for Bosch said: "IEC60849 certification and compliance with the even more stringent Polish regulations underscore Praesideo's high standards.

Praesideo demonstrates flexibility and user-friendliness in several ways. It allows the hotel to route messages to one or more zones, depending on the emergency situa

Relative newcomer RJS Electronics, showed its new range of illuminated intelligent switches. The SKI range, from manufacturer RGB, are programmable LCD switches capable of showing up to four lines of text and available with various colour lenses. The two-year-old company now boasts a client list including Klark Teknik, AMS Neve and DiGiCo - not a bad line-up.

Sharing a stand with Schnick Schnack Systems, E:Cue Lighting Control showed a prototype of its new Butler Ethernet to DMX gateway with integrated replay unit. This tiny device is capable of handling 1,024 channels and uses compact flash for storage - a medium that more and more manufacturers seem to be adopting.

Control solution provider ShowMagic showed its new suite of products - SL, SLX, AV and Vista. This suite of products allows for the synchronization of lighting, sound and AV elements from a single control package. It also makes use of multiple protocols, audio and video formats as well as PowerPoint files to give the user a single control interface.

UK - Following the change in ownership of Mean Fiddler earlier this year, 2005 is a year that its former managing director Melvin Benn will remember. L&SI met up with him at the Leeds Festival and talked about the event, and about Mojo's new Barrier Load Monitoring System which was being tested at the site.

Noticing there were several representatives from the Clear Channel management team 'monitoring' things on site, it begged the question, how is the new marriage affecting things? "It's business as usual this year," explained Benn. "I'm aware things may change, but I've been left to get on with what is already working, with no interference."

"This is the 7th Leeds Festival and the third on this site and I think it has evolved over the years to what we have today. You always look to learn and improve things and I think we've created a better site this year, a

While Lake didn't have anything new to show product wise, the fact that it is now part of Dolby Labs is a significant announcement and underlines the respect its Contour product has garnered in the industry.

Panphonics produces a patented flat panel electrostatic wave transducer. The sound from one of the panels is so focused that it is impossible to hear unless you are standing directly in-line with the source or, in the case of the stand's 'Sound Shower', directly underneath. Kari Mettälä, CEO of Panphonics, explained that the technology is now being employed across the global automotive and aircraft manufacturing markets for active noise cancellation, as well as in advertising systems in supermarkets, off-air monitoring at the BBC and anywhere that requires excellent speech intelligibility.

Finland - Martin's new MAC 700 profile spot debuted at the recent IAAF World Track and Field Championships, the world's largest sporting event this year, held at Helsinki's Olympic Stadium.

Lighting designer Jussi Kallioinen used 34 of Martin's new 700W fixtures for the Opening Ceremony on 6 August, alongside a host of other Martin equipment including loads of MAC 2000s (135 Wash, 68 Profiles and two Performance fixtures), eight MAC 600 washlights, 54 Atomic strobes (24 with Atomic Colors) and 24 Jem ZR33 Hi Mass foggers. Other fixtures used by Kallioinen included Studio Due City Colors, ETC Source Four profiles, and Lycian and Strong Gladiator followspots, while control was looked after by a pair of Wholehogs. All the Martin gear was supplied by Eastway Sound & Lighting of Helsinki through Lightinen Ltd - Martin Scandinavia's sole distributor in Finland.

Kallioinen, lighting designe

Rolec Music provide tailored music and AV management systems for the leisure and retail market. Director of sales Mark Bracken explained that Rolec really exhibit at PLASA in order to meet all of its 120 dealers and installers. The company showed the new DJC DJ Controller Software that allows the integration of audio and video plus all of the features a DJ may need for control, such as varispeed, cross-fades and scrolls.

PLASA 2005 was the first major trade show for Amber Sound, founded by Graham Paddon. Although just four months old, the company was discussing several major supply projects that it has already undertaken. The stand featured a range of the company's distributed products, including its exclusive UK distribution of Aviom personal monitor and digital snake systems. With the company also offering sound design and technical support, Paddon was pleased with the level of interest shown.

The theatrical, chandelier-hung Doughty Engineering stand featured a wide range of the company's rigging, lifting and suspension hardware, with its Six Track curtain tracking in constant motion. New for PLASA was a portable meat rack for lighting bars and the company was also showcasing its redesigned Superclamp, now also available at a lower price.

Deco Leisure showed new products including the Pure system - a large, fixed install audio concept developed for two principal markets - large clubs and venues specializing in urban, rap, hip hop and R 'n' B artists. Available only in white, it's extremely quick to stack and robustly built. It sits in the audio market somewhere between the line array arena systems and older stacking systems, neither of which are great for DJ-orientated applications and performance in their own right. The enclosures consist of a physically small full-range box and an enormous sub.

Community UK became its own entity on 1 July this year, making this the first time the company has exhibited at PLASA in its own right. On show was the expanded iBOX range of installation speakers, which has numerous array and dispersion pattern options, all in cabinets of identical size. The new iBOX HP3500 series, which are slightly larger than the existing 1200 and 1500 series, are a high performance 3-way system. Both the iHP3564 and iHP3594 are loaded with a 15" and 8" low- and mid-range drivers plus a 1.4" throated, edge-wound voice coil compression driver. Dispersion from the two boxes varies from 60° x 40° for the iHP3564 to 90° x 40° for the iHP3594, and both loudspeakers can operate in either passive or bi-amped modes.

To complement the range, two subs have also been released in the form of the i118S and i215LVS, and have the same physical dimensions as the

TC Electronic, who recently acquired TC-Helicon, was proudly showing the high end vocal processor developed by the company, the VoicePro, released earlier this year. The ultra realistic processor, aimed at the studio, post and live markets, gives users up to eight voices that can be altered in a variety of ways including pitch and time shift, character, harmony, transducer, reverb, delay, EQ and dynamics. Also on the TC stand was version two of the EQ Station, with new features and improved latency.

APB Dynasonics' Spectra C and Spectra T consoles are separated in their specification by EQ: the C variant boasts four band (two bands on the mid), with hi/lo switch; while T is sweepable on all four bands, hi/lo shelving (in boost mode is two-thirds of an octave wide, in cut just quarter octave) while the two mid bands have a wider boost of one octave, with a commensurately tighter one-third octave cut.

Consoles come in 24, 32, 40, 48 and 56 mono input, plus there's a 24-channel expander (stretch). The highly regarded Jensen transformers are used on all outputs.

Although with a long and illustrious history, Zero 88 could be said to be the company that Frog built in recent years. PLASA 2005 saw the launch of version 10 software for the highly-successful Frog console range, initially launched in the spring of 2000. This new version includes parameter level programming and move on dark functions. Also on display on the Zero 88 stand was version two software for the Frog 2 console and the newentry-level Jester console.

Batmink showed a wide array of RGB LED products, many of which were being launched at the show. These included Par 36, Par 64 and pin spot fixtures in a choice of black, white or polished finish. Also on display was Neon Flex, an LED-driven flexible tubing that mimics neon-filled glass. A new range of aluminium ARCLED fixtures was also on show, designed for the retail, architectural and entertainment markets.

Latest Issue. . .