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UK - Following the recent changes to the Yamaha Commercial Audio organisation which saw Nick Cook assume a pan-European marketing directorate, Yamaha Music UK has confirmed that Karl Christmas, previously Commercial Audio marketing manager, has been promoted to the role of deputy general manager, Commercial Audio UK. This is a UK position leading the local team alongside general manager Ricci Hodgson, say Yamaha.

Karl Christmas will now assume overall responsibility for the coordination and management of the rapidly expanding UK sales and marketing operations, and will also oversee the continuing drive into new sectors, in particular the install systems markets.

One of the longest-serving members of the Commercial Audio team, Karl is widely respected and has been responsible for

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UK - Situated in London's O2 Arena, Matter - the latest club spin off from the successful Fabric brand - has opened its South-East-London-facing doors on a vast 3000-capacity space.

Central to the installed technology is a 16-channel TiMax audio delay matrix, which controls every channel of the main Room One sound system, including the subwoofers and the Bodysonic vibrating floor. Matter's sound and lighting design consultant, Dave Parry, says: "Before we even knew how the final system would work together, TiMax was always going to be integrated into it whatever we did."

Matter is designed around the Kandinsky principle: vibration, lighting and music all coming together as a whole to provoke a trance-like state. Parry explains: "The whole lot - lighting, video and sound - moves as an integrated whole so as a very basic example, say the club is lit blue, I can ta

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China - Shenzhou VII, China's third manned spacecraft, successfully lifted off on 25 September at from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in Gansu province. The pride of China, the Shenzhou spacecraft, with astronauts Zhai Zhigang, Liu Boming and Jing Haipeng on board, orbited the earth for 68 hours over a three-day period.

Barco SLM R12+ projectors were used to command and control the entire launch programme at both the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre and Beijing Aerospace Control Centre. The monitoring continued through the duration of the spacewalk and concluded with its culmination, when the astronauts' re-entry module landed in central Inner Mongolia.

More than just delivering an advanced technology product in support of the event, Barco also provided on-site technical standby around the clock via a specially assigned technical team.

"There's no understating the i

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

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Romania - In collaboration with lunatX, Aquatique Show International, and Paradigma Production, tarm Showlaser staged the finale of the White Night 2008 in Bucharest in front of an audience of more than 100,000.

Against the backdrop of the impressive facade of the Casa Poporului (Parliament Palace), one of the world's largest buildings, the city's insignia hovered in the air in the form of full-colour laser projections on a large WaterScreen. Space-spanning laser beams, beam fans, and light tunnels criss-crossed the area. Massive fireballs and 40m high fountains lit the night sky, in tune with the music.

This was the tenth time that tarm Showlaser had staged a multimedia spectacle in the Rumanian capital city and the team tarm will be back in Bucharest in late October for another project.

(Jim Evans)

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Spain - Beyma has introduced two low frequency models that benefit from all the research and technologies used in the P1200Nd and P1000Nd series, but using a Ferrite magnetic system.

"Our aim is to offer the latest advantages and improvements of our high power Neodymium drivers but keeping these products in a competitive price range," says the company. "The new P1000Fe loudspeakers will be introduced in two sizes, 18" and 15".

Main features include: high sensitivity (>97 dB @ 2.83V), real 1000 W AES power handling, low resonant frequency (< 39 Hz), extended and controlled excursion (Xmax ± 7.5mm) and weather resistant paper cone, treated with fibres for extreme rigidity.

(Jim Evans)

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UK - Global Design Solutions (GDS) has been awarded the PLASA 2008 Innovation Award for the MOBAL ProTester 19, a premium cable diagnostic tool. This is the second Innovation Award in two years for GDS. Over sixty-five products were put forward for the PLASA '08 awards, all of which were showcased in the PLASA Innovation Gallery.

GDS developed the MOBAL (Make Or Break And Load) digital Socapex tester to meet a market need in the entertainment industry for a comprehensive and automatic fault diagnosis and correction system. The product is compact, digital, splash proof and operates fully automatically; its OLED (organic LED) display provides the test results in symbols rather than words, making MOBAL a truly international product.

TMB are Global Distributors for the ProTester 19 MOBAL cable tester. Paul Hartley, TMB-UK's GM, says, "Over the years we have seen Socapex teste

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UK - Glyndebourne Opera House in Sussex chose Brighton's MBI Sound & Light to install an infra-red Sennheiser system, allowing hard of hearing patrons to enjoy performances with clarity.

To ensure every one of the 1,202 seats in Glyndebourne's auditorium is covered by the Sennheiser system, six strategically placed SZI 1015 radiators transmit the audio signal to four RI 150 LL induction loops and 10 HDI 302 headsets. The signal is generated from a Sennheiser SI 1015 modulator rack unit, while the induction loops and headsets are powered by an L 151-10 charger. In addition, an SI 30 test system is available to demonstrate the simplicity of the system to users before they take headsets and induction loops for the performance.

Audio technician Simon Yapp has worked at Glyndebourne for eight years and is one half of the opera house's full time AV department. "The new system c

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Germany - The Beijing Olympics were relayed live to giant screens at Munich airport. The sound was supplied by rental company Magic Event & Medientechnik using Electro-Voice equipment.

To provide optimum sound reinforcement for the airport's large but oddly-shaped outdoor viewing area with its sound-reflecting glass and Plexiglas facades, the Olching-based acoustics experts opted for an Electro-Voice solution, the centrepiece of which was made up of an XLD line array driven by Electro-Voice TG7 and TG5 power amplifiers with IRIS-Net software.

Markus Thomae, managing director of Magic Medientechnik, reports: "We had very little room to put the PA. Fortunately the EV XLD is ultra-compact, so we soon had the situation under control."

(Jim Evans)

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Denmark - Martin Professional Scandinavia has appointed Leif Orkelbog-Andresen as the company's new market manager for the architectural sector.

Orkelbog-Andresen joins Martin from a successful assignment at Barco where he was responsible for architectural installations in the Nordic region.

Villads Thomsen, managing director Martin Professional Scandinavia, says: "Adding Leif to our team will help us further penetrate an architectural lighting market in Scandinavia that has great potential. We look forward to benefiting from his vast market knowledge."

(Jim Evans)

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UK - Sound Technology will be on the road in October with a series of commercial audio roadshows. These will be relaxed events designed to introduce installers to the latest products from JBL, BSS, AKG, dbx, Crown and Soundcraft in an informal setting.

Technical staff will be on hand to offer guidance on the integration within projects and discuss our acoustic design services for large-scale projects.

The confirmed dates are: 14 October - Dublin's Green Isle Conference & Leisure Hotel; 15 October - Belfast's Radisson SAS Hotel; 17 October - Glasgow's Dakota Eurocentral Hotel; 21 October - Manchester's Bredbury Hall Hotel; 22 October - Cheltenham Racecourse Conference Centre, Bristol; 23 October - Sound Technology head office, Letchworth Garden City. Events start at 11am and conclude at 3:30pm.

(Jim Evans)

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USA - Prog-rock innovator Robert Fripp and his band King Crimson recently completed a short string of select American dates reinforced by a Midas XL8 console at FOH, manned by Ian Bond. In addition, a Klark Teknik DN9696 hard disk recorder was used to record the shows.

Ian Bond reports: "The XL8/DN9696 package was ideal for three good reasons: the tour used house/hired-in systems, the band required a lot of detailed monitor mixes, and the shows were being recorded. Since I handled all three as the sole engineer on the tour, I needed the best-sounding, most versatile system available for mixing and recording.

"Though the XL8 is a formidable piece of technology with immense capabilities," he adds, "For this particular tour, I put the XL8's digital flexibility to task, running it for FOH, monitors, and recording. It only took about an hour to set it up in rehe

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USA - Sight & Sound Theatres has selected 10 Robert Juliat Super Korrigan followspots for its new venue in Branson, Missouri. A Christian theatre company based in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Sight & Sound Theatres is well known for its multimedia stage productions with Biblical themes.

"We brought in Juliat's Super Korrigans plus followspots from another manufacturer for a shootout on our main stage," says lighting designer Joe Basinger. "One of my goals was to get better colour temperature and gain than other followspots we have used. Our distances are half-way between long throw and really long throw, so we needed a happy medium. With Robert Juliat's Super Korrigan, gain and colour temperature are far superior to the other followspots we've seen."

Basinger deploys the lights, purchased through PRG Dallas, for any new production rotated into the theatr

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France / USA - Rosco will show examples of its latest ranges of gobos at the forthcoming SIEL (Paris, 20-23 October) and LDI (Las Vegas, 24-26 October) trade shows. The collection has more than 400 designs: 194 new steel, 202 new Glass Spectrum and 12 new Effects Glass gobos, the company says. Among the 168 new standard steel designs are exclusive new designs offering breakups, foliage, window, architectural, geometrics, holiday, event and religious themes.

Rosco told L&SI: "In direct response to customer comments, and as a reflection of the changing trends in the use of moving lights and video projections, Rosco has more than doubled its range of standard glass gobo designs, adding over 200 new designs. These high quality images will vastly increase the tools a designer calls upon when specifying a rig of moving lights, or when merging gobo projections into a design filled

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China - Turbosound's Chinese distributor Phoenix Audio & Lighting Technology has supplied equipment to three very different establishments in two Chinese cities.

The Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications and Nanjing Agricultural University are two of the region's major seats of learning. Phoenix Audio has supplied a wide range of TCS and TXD series loudspeakers in three locations for installation by Ao-bang Audio And Lighting Engineering.

In the theatre of Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Ao-bang installed a system comprising TXD-081 and TXD-151 full range cabinets, TXD-218 subs and TXD-12M wedge monitors.

Meanwhile at Nanjing Agricultural University, the company installed six TXD-151 in the Academic Hall and, in the university's Multi-function Hall, a range of TXD and TCS Compact loudspeakers, with control by Turbosound LMS-D24 processors.

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Canada - Wireless Solution Sweden's W-DMX was recently used to good effect in Pemberton, BC Canada, for Live Nation's Pemfest 2008 which featured two stages, two performance tents and camping for 40,000 people.

Mark Laughton of Viridian Power, the site power and lighting contractor for the event, worked on the project with Ian Gordon of Christie Lites Vancouver. Their aim was to have the ability to control the entire site so that when performers such as Coldplay, Nine Inch Nails and Tom Petty were playing, the ambient level across the sight could be reduced. Also, because of the size of the site, the ability to remotely increase or decrease light levels in zones for security or other purposes was an advantage if achievable.

Jason McKinnon from Electric Aura Lighting Design was consulted to see if W-DMX from Wireless Solution might be able to achieve this goal. The site was ext

Details
UK - South West London's Capital Sound has introduced a KV2 Audio EX system into its hire inventory for use at ongoing corporate retail events, such as those within London's Armani stores, and to satisfy Capital's CSE work entertaining the British Armed Forces overseas.

The system was initially demonstrated by LMC Audio, who subsequently made the sale. LMC's Steve King commented: "The KV2 Audio brand is a genuinely exciting one and our belief in the product range is validated by every demonstration and sale. Many respected sound hire companies like Capital are blown over by the sheer value, power and quality of the products."

The EX system, comprised of two EX10 two-way, full range active cabinets, two EX12s incorporating the revolutionary 3-inch NVPD large format compression driver, and two double 12" EX2.2 active subwoofers, fulfils a diverse requirement from

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USA - Harman Professional has announced the promotion of Scott Robbins from senior vice-president of sales, Crown Audio to group-wide vice-president of sales with the specific mandate to work with brand-level sales executives to strengthen existing sales operations and to grow Harman Professional's sales presence in emerging markets. Today's announcement was made by Michael MacDonald, , to whom Robbins reports.

"Scott Robbins is a tremendous asset to Harman Professional and a resource to our distribution partners and customers alike," said Michael MacDonald, Harman Professional's executive vice-president of marketing and sales. "In his new position, his experience, energy and intelligence will benefit all of our brands and not just Crown Audio whom he has served so well and grown so effectively. I look forward to working with Scott to grow the Harman business in e

Details
UK - Hire Association Europe (HAE) will launch its new trade association for the event hire sector at the Showman's Show this month. Event Hire Association (EHA) will cater especially for companies in the event hire industry, and will run alongside HAE.

Working specifically for the event hire sector, the board of the new association will provide help and support for event hire companies across the UK and Ireland.

Graham Arundell, managing director of HAE and board member of EHA, said, "The new association has been created to better support those companies in the event hire market. Although we offer a range of benefits as part of HAE's membership, we decided that we could offer a much more tailored service to event hire companies if they had a dedicated association of their own."

(Jim Evans)

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Switzerland - A major new seminar facility in the Swiss town of Thun has been equipped with an ILA Installation line array system from QSC Audio.

The manufacturer's territorial distributors, SDS Music Factory, supplied hangs comprising four ILA2082-i per side with a pair of ModularDesign MD-S215 (2 x 15") subwoofers to meet the main hall specification of project designers and installers, DIONIX.

The venue itself offers a total of seven seminar rooms, with the largest providing even coverage for up to 700 seats. Since the shape of this space is oval, it presented a special challenge for the sound system designers, who not only needed to achieve even coverage, but set EQ patterns appropriate for concerts and worship.

DIONIX and SDS managed to meet these criteria, achieving optimum speech intelligibility and a wide dynamic range.

Christian Frei, project engineer of DIONI

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Germany - A total of 62 L-acoustics Kiva cabinets and 16 Kilo low frequency units have been used for a production of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen - a piece for three orchestras - performed during the Musikfest Berlin in late September. The epic piece was staged four times as part of the festival finale by the Berliner Philharmonika with conductors Sir Simon Rattle, Daniel Harding and Michael Boder, in a 1930s aircraft hangar at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin.

Gruppen was written for 109 players divided into three orchestral units, each with its own conductor, deployed in a horseshoe shape to the left, front and right of the audience. The spatial separation was designed to keep simultaneously played, musically separate passages distinct from one another, but in some passages a single musical process passes from one orchestra to another. This setup required three dis

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UK - The ceremony for the handover of the torch Olympic from Beijing to London (2012) was reinforced by Britannia Row's Butterfly systems. Visa London 2012 Party was transmitted live by the BBC with a Beijing-London link-up.

Along The Mall, the road running from Buckingham Palace to Trafalgar Square, several scaffolding towers were set up with a total of 100 Outline Butterfly CDH 483 Hi-Pack enclosures installed.

The main stage, the hub of the event, hosted a spread of acts including Will Young, James Morrison, The Feeling, McFly, Scouting for Girls, Il Divo, Katherine Jenkins, Sophie Ellis Bextor, Heather Small and the cast of the musical We Will Rock You. Here, the sound was entrusted to 44 Butterfly Hi-Packs and 16 SubTech 218.

In St. James Park, there were 24 more Hi-Packs and 4 SubTech 218. The entire set-up was digitally controlled by Dolby Lake processors and p

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