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South Africa - International dance brand Godskitchen brought their successful 2009 world tour show to South Africa, headlined by Armin van Buuren and staged at two events in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Gearhouse South Africa supplied full technical production for the Cape Town event for their client Kilowatt AV, headed by Dillon Jearey, all working closely with international production manager and lighting designer, UK-based Simon Barrington of Production Eye and project manager Andrea Frey from Angel Music.

Kilowatt has worked on previous Godskitchen events, but this is the first time they have involved Gearhouse - whose Cape Town branch supplied staging and structure, lighting, audio and AV for the event at Bellville Velodrome, which was enjoyed by 4000 dance enthusiasts. Gear

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Italy - The philanthropism of Italian Cashmere magnate Brunello Cucinelli has included his investment in the sympathetic restoration and development of the historic medieval village of Solomeo, near Perugia. Central to this project is Teatro Cucinelli, a brand new 230-seat theatre whose design is inspired by the 400-year-old Farnese theatres in Parma and Sabbioneta. Complementing the venue's elegant historic design is a state-of-the-art Yamaha audio system.

Stephan Luthi of Acoustic Light, who designed and installed the audio system, says: "The theatre hosts a range of events, from opera and live music to conferences, and we wanted the system to be acoustically very discreet in terms of the uniformity of sound, and very subtle in terms of it not being obvious that the sound is amplified."

In addition, the hands-on Mr Cucinelli wanted the system to be able to carry au

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The Netherlands - Cuelux, the new platform-independent software lighting controller from Visual Productions is now available from stock. The first batch of Cuelux has already been shipped out across Europe to a range of dealers including those that are positioned to feed the webshops, as ecommerce is an easy route for Cuelux to reach its intended audience, says the company.

Designed to suit the entry level market, Cuelux is a DMX512 lighting controller for intelligent lights, LED, dimmers, lasers and various other effects; it is shipped with an affordably priced USB-to-DMX adapter cable. Cuelux is multi-platform and can run on Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Care has been taken to design Cuelux' 100% touch-screen compliant graphical user-interface to reflect the functionality of the industry standard control boards. Programming the lights through the Cuelux cue-list system is id

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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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Hungary - GE Lighting has announced the launch of its new range of High Output LED retrofit lamps.

"Unlike many retrofit LED lamps on the market today, the new lamps from GE maintain a high standard of colour quality and do not compromise on light output," says Andrew Davies, LED senior product manager. "Very significantly, they are designed to fit the international standard size & shape for the lamps they are intended to replace, meaning users will not get unpleasant surprises when attempting to retrofit them into existing sockets."

Included in the range is a GU10 lamp. Consuming only 4 Watts of power, the GU10 offers "superior beam intensity to a 20 watt halogen GU10 lamp, whilst matching the wide flood beam angle given by halogen". This allows for 80% energy saving to be achieved. Colour temperature is a warm white 3100K whilst colour rendering

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UK - The 2009 Download Festival was acclaimed a success by fans, media, artists and scooped the Event of the Year at the 2009 Metal Hammer Awards within 48 hours of closing its doors.

Showsec has secured the festival since it's inception in 2003, this year supplying over 600 trained and licensed staff. They ensured the safety and enjoyment of 75,000 rock fans through three nights of music from the leading rock acts, headlined including Faith No More, Slipknot and Def Leppard.

Showsec operations director Simon Battersbsy commented: "The new site brought new challenges, but was a better site for the crowd and for us to work on. Download attracts really keen music fans who like any festival want to move from stage to stage to enjoy the music. Our aim is to facilitate this with ease of movement and minimal stress. The new site engendered itself to this festival: it pro

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UK - RC4 Wireless has been awarded Lighting Product of the Year by the Association of British Theatre Technicians (ABTT) in London, for their RC4BlackMagic Wireless DMX and Dimming System.

"We are particularly flattered by this award because of the nature of the voting process," said James David Smith, president and chief product designer at RC4. "The ABTT is a small organisation of in-the-trenches theatre people -electricians, carpenters, lighting and sound personnel - who make live theatre tick in the UK. There are no nominations for ABTT awards, all you need is a great new product on display at the ABTT Theatre Show. Judges are anonymous industry professionals without commercial bias. They visit all the stands in the show, large and small, looking for notable new products."

While presenting a special pipe-clamp trophy to Smith in a formal ceremony, the c

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USA - After two years, almost 2,000 attendees have participated in Shure Incorporated's Advanced Wireless Seminars around the United States, most recently in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

"We consider this a significant milestone for us, and we're looking forward to continuing this programme," said Gino Sigismondi, training manager for Shure. "With all of the uncertainty surrounding White Spaces over the past few years and with so many unanswered questions about the future of the wireless landscape, our customers need this kind of training now more than ever."

The company has been staging these events around the US since mid-2007 and most recently hosted two of the sessions on the West Coast for dealers, sound contractors, consultants, and technicians from major entertainment venues, including Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm, The Mirage, and The Flamingo casino

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Upbeat in Orlando - InfoComm International has announced that InfoComm 09 (17-19 June, Orlando, Florida), the annual conference and exhibition for professional audio-visual buyers and sellers worldwide, was the biggest commercial AV show ever held on the East Coast of the United States, with more than 29,000 AV professionals attending from more than 80 countries. There were 850 exhibitors participating this year, representing an increase of 80 since the last time the event was in Orlando. "InfoComm continues to be the one trade show where most professional AV service providers make their important buying decisions for the year," said Randal A. Lemke, executive director, InfoComm International. "Despite the global economy, the AV marketplace has enthusiastically embraced InfoComm as the place to make their purchasing choices, network with product and service provider

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World - On Tina Turner's current world tour, sound engineer Dave Natale deployed AKG C214 microphones as well as a WMS4500 wireless system. Natale initially tested the C214 mic on a sound check in AKG's hometown of Vienna, Austria and immediately began using the mic on the current tour.

"While touring Austria on the Tina Turner tour, I had the ability to experiment with the C214 as well as other AKG products and I immediately fell in love with the C214's features and capabilities," commented Natale. "I am very impressed with the C214 and they are now my new standard. The older mics that I use become harder and harder to find, and it is great to find alternatives. This is truly the first microphone, ever, that I have used flat."

In addition to the C214 on the Tina Turner tour, the bassist, Warren McCrae, is pleased with the wireless capabilities of the WMS4

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USA - theMovement, a non-denominational church based in San Marcos, California, has chosen the new Soundcraft Si2 digital console as the heart of its sound system upgrade. The church was making the transition into digital for the first time so the sound quality, DSP power and the ease of use were crucial in the decision-making process for the console.

"TheMovement church is very familiar with high-tech gear," reports Chris Matthews, an engineer of over 15 years. "We needed a console that had the sound quality and the power to be able to use all gates and compressors and EQs at one time. We wanted a console with history behind it and Soundcraft has a rich history including the Vi6, and their partnership with Studer is very appealing."

Matthews adds: "The feature I like the most is that there are no real pages I have to go to in order to get an aux or EQ

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UK - New Zealander Rodd McClintock, a design student at Leeds Metropolitan University, is the winner of the 2009 Enlighten Design Competition run by Leeds-based High Technology Lighting.

The brief in the fourth annual contest staged by the Middleton Grove lighting design specialist was to design a luminaire for a high-end market using Philips matchbox gear and fluorescent lamps.

McClintock, 37, won the competition - it encourages innovation, raises awareness of the potential the lighting sector can offer and recognises and rewards good ideas - with his entry Lumin-Eye,centred around a sustainable world theme.

He explained: "My inspiration came from the sea, with the design based on brain coral and blown glass, which is made from sand, a highly sustainable resource with excellent reflective qualities and producing beautiful colours, though my winning entry was mad

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UK - Adlib Audio supplied sound for the Love Music Hate Racism Festival 2009, staged at Britannia Stadium, Stoke, UK, organised by Stoke City Football Club and Stoke-on-Trent City Council.

The artist line-up included Reverend and The Makers, Beverley Knight, The New Beautiful South, Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, Ironik & Chipmunk, Helsinki, VV Brown, The Beat, Bashy, Mick Jones & the Rotten Hill Gang. Other musicians and performers including Pete Doherty, Eddie Izzard and Kelly Rowland spoke out against racism.

Adlib's team was crew chiefed by Marc Peers, the system was designed by Tony Szabo and Dave Kay was looking after FOH. They had to accommodate the assorted audio needs of all performers with quick changeovers, and so adopted a festival style flip-flop system at both ends of the multicore.

Szabo chose 16 V-DOSC speaker elements a side for the main arrays on 17m towers

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UK - Hawthorn has recently acquired a substantial stock of over 300 painted scenic backdrops on lightweight canvas which are now available for rental on a daily or weekly basis from both its Midlands and London warehouses.

The backdrops come in various sizes ranging from 10ft x 12ft right up to 40ft x 20ft. They have tie tapes and can also be suspended from our free standing pipe and base support system, offering lots of flexibility in hanging to suit every venue.

Themes include: Olympics, Underwater, Circus, Forest, Carnival, Nautical, Pirate, Motor Racing, Football, Tennis, the Jungle, Christmas/Winter Wonderland, 60's, 70's, 80's, plus topics such as Venice, Egypt, Paris, Rio and Africa.

Hawthorn's new battery powered LED up lighters are suitable for lighting the backdrops without the need for cables or power as they are self contained and last for up to 10 hours, offerin

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UK - Business for Lancashire-based Water Sculptures is on a high this month, wowing audiences around the UK with two amazing water installations that follow hotly on the heels of a year of fabulous events, says the company.

Water Sculptures has been in collaboration again with celebrated choreographer Kim Gavin and renowned production manager Chris Vaughan, for Take That's Circus stadium tour.

For the band's Back for Good number, performed on the stadium's central satellite "B" stage, a 7m high screen of water appears from jets concealed within the stage floor, which shields the boys from their screaming fans. As they walk into and out of the water screen, the water disappears and re-appears as though by magic.

Six tonnes of water are stored in tanks under the stage, which during the three minute performance showers the nearby crowds. Although they ar

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UAE - Nicolas Kyvernitis Electronics Enterprises, distributor of professional audio products in the United Arab Emirates and exclusive distributor of Midas and Klark Teknik products in the territory, have sold the UAE's first Midas PRO6 digital live audio system. The client, Sound & Stage, is a major rental firm in the region with its office in Dubai Media City.

The Midas PRO6 Live Audio System is the second networked digital audio system from Midas, employing technologies developed from the XL8. "We have seen a great amount of interest in the PRO6. The sale to S&S was prior to the PALME event, so we were excited to see the third system in place for the show," commented Chicco Hiranandani, business development manager. He added: "The sale to S&S does not only provide greater momentum but cements the PRO6's position in the marketplace. We are looking forward to the

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USA - Denon Professional showed its DN-F300 and DN-F400 Solid-state Audio Players at InfoComm 2009.

The DN-F300 and DN-F400 Solid-state Audio Players implement stable and reliable solid-state media technology as the source medium. Both products are able to read MP3 files and uncompressed WAV files from SD or SDHC cards (The DN-F300 reads from USB drives as well), which utilise technology that is far more stable and reliable in demanding applications than the 'spinning' CD.

Housed in a compact 1U-rackspace enclosure, the DN-F300 offers contractors and system integrators a versatile solid-state audio player at a cost-effective price point. The DN-F300 also has IR control and a microphone input, making it perfect for fitness and dance applications as well as background music playback. Additionally, the mic input has music ducking, which helps for paging in BGM applications. It al

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UK - Katherine Jenkins performed a special one-off concert in front of a packed Birmingham NIA on Saturday evening, as part of the opening celebrations of the 100th Rotary International Conference. Together with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the international mezzo-soprano delighted the audience with a selection of classic arias, tracks from her new album and a rendition of 'We'll Meet Again.'

For the performance Stage Electrics provided two 6 x 4m LED screens, a DMX-controlled Chameleon LED Starcloth, over 100 moving lights including Martin MAC 700s, MAC 600s and Vari-Lite VL2000s. Lighting designer for the night was Neil Tremmell, who used a GrandMA control system. Stage Electrics also specified an L-Acoustics V-Dosc line array system for the performance audio.

The 100th Rotary International Convention is a week-long event held in Birmingham, likely to attract 3

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UK - Sunbaba created tennis branding which dominated Eastbourne's Devonshire Park for the AEGON International tennis tournament taking place in June, as well as spectacular tennis windbreaks for the AEGON Championships at The Queen's Club in London.

Sunbaba supplied over 800sq.m of digitally printed Ultramesh for AEGON International, which is a combined men's and women's tournament. Three panels were used to brand the main stadia consisting of one for each side and one for the rear, which was made up into one single section. The panels were secured by the edges being connected by heavy duty bungee cord to stretch the panel across the structure while seamless welded flaps hid the bungeed edges so that the tensioning system wasn't visible.

Sunbaba worked alongside rope access specialists Nawrocki Alpin for the install. Rope access allowed the team to carefully attach the brandin

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Russia - This year's Eurovision Song Contest, the biggest contest held to date, featured nearly 2,000sq.m of LED screens plus approximately 700 moving lights. For control of most of the massive lighting rig, lighting designer Al Gurdon used a grandMA system consisting of four grandMA full-size consoles and 16 x MA NSPs (Network Signal Processors).

One grandMA full-size plus another one as backup were networked via fibre optic cable with HP2626 switches and 14 MA NSPs. The MA NSPs were installed at the FOH position, and at the two main dimmer cities. From there the DMX signal was distributed to the fixtures. This grandMA also controlled one Catalyst media server feeding the decorative elements. A second system with one grandMA full-size plus backup and one MA NSP was connected to additional media servers for further video screens - the main video elements were handled by a Virtuo

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UK - Kensington Gardens in London was a favourite haunt of author J M Barrie, and provided much of the inspiration for his most popular work, the story of the boy who never grew up, Peter Pan. Now the park is playing host to a new theatrical telling of that story in a newly created 1000-seat tent.

The production brings together a creative team from across all areas of theatre, including director Ben Harrison, a leading exponent of site-specific theatre and artistic director of the Grid Iron Theatre company, and choreographer Fleur Darkin, plus set designer William Dudley and lighting designer Mark Henderson, familiar names from the National Theatre, large scale musicals and more.

Peter Pan gives Dudley the opportunity to expand on the dramatic computer-generated virtual environments for which he has become well known since The Coast of Utopia in 2002; that

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USA - Shure has enhanced its noted KSM series of microphones with two new ribbon models. The KSM353 and KSM313 are premium ribbon microphones intended for "capturing world-class vocal and instrumental performances, both in the studio and on stage".

"Ribbon microphones have always been prized for their warm sound quality, but their delicate nature has limited their use to controlled conditions," said Scott Sullivan, Shure's senior director of global product management. "We knew there was demand for ribbon microphones that could be used in a much broader range of applications."

The KSM353 and KSM313 use a new patented ribbon material known as Roswellite, which offers higher tensile strength and more resilient shape-memory properties than a traditional foil ribbon, says the company.

"Our recent acquisition of Crowley and Tripp ribbon microphon

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