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Poland - During the Sunrise Festival, Kolobrzeg becomes a real focus for techno fans in and around Poland. DJs like Eddie Halliwell, Fergie, Ferry Corsten, John O'Callaghan and many more performing on two stages ensured that everybody had a great time at this year's event. Lighting designer Pawel 'Spider' Pajak chose a grandMA control system, and for the first time, a brand new MA VPU (Video Processing Unit).

The festival ground was divided into the Cube Stage and the Ring Stage. The Cube Stage was run by two grandMA full-size consoles, one MA VPU and three MA NSPs (Network Signal Processors) which were controlling 60 Clay Paky Alpha Beam 300s, 24 Alpha Wash 575s, 10 GLP Impression XL luminaires and 22 A&O Falcon 7Ks.

On the Ring Stage was a single grandMA full-size plus a grand

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UK - The annual Q Awards was held on 26 October at the Grosvenor House in Park Lane with Q Awards - The Gigs, this year held at north London venue the HMV Forum, providing a six-day run up of top band performances including Kasabian, Biffy Clyro and Lostprophets.

With a stellar line up and attendance by a host of famous faces, The Forum needed to know that crowd management would not be an issue. It put full trust in resident crowd safety company, A.P. Security and wasn't disappointed.

"We've been working with the Forum for a couple of years now, so we know how things work, where the pressure points are and how to handle any situations that may arise," says Wayne Grove, in charge of the venue for A.P. "However, working on an event like this comes with its own particular issues, so we plan carefully to make sure that everything is covered."

AP

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USA - Audio-Technica is celebrating its 16th year of supporting the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards by providing an extensive selection of vocal and instrument microphones for its annual awards show.

The 43rd Annual CMA Awards aired live in 5.1-channel surround sound Wednesday, 11 November, on the ABC Television Network from the Sommet Center in Nashville, and featured over 250 Audio-Technica microphones, including an impressive array of hard-wired mics and Artist Elite 5000 Series UHF Wireless Systems.

The team responsible for the audio at this year's CMA's again included a who's who of broadcast audio. The audio was supervised by award-winning audio producers Michael Abbott and Tom Davis; ATK/Audiotek provided the sound system with FOH (front-of-house) mixers Patrick Baltzell and Rick Shimer; the broadcast music mix was handled by New Jersey/California-based Music Mix

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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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India - Lighting designer Tim Dunn specified a grandMA full-size console to run lighting for the Twenty 20 Champions League cricket Opening Ceremony event, staged in the Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bangalore.

Produced by Venkat Vardhan of DNA Entertainment Networks, one of India's leading international event companies, the 30 minute all-action Opening Ceremony show featured a cast of 350 including Japanese drummers, Shaolin Monks, lotus flower dancers, silk performers and local schoolchildren, plus three international stars - Chaka Khan, Jamelia and Shaggy.

Dunn (from Gearhouse South Africa) was asked to design the event's lighting by DNA after delivering an impressive show for the Closing Ceremony of the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament in Johannesburg in May, for which he also used a grandMA.

He didn't think twice when it came to specifying a console. He's used a gr

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UK / USA - The DiGiCo SD8 has scooped four awards: the Pro Sound Web/Live Sound Reader's Choice Award for New Console Mixer Digital Large Format; Best Audio Product - Digital Mixing Console and Best Overall Audio Product at the Worship Facility Conference and Expo New Product Awards; and Best New Live Sound Product in the Audio Pro Industry Excellence Awards.

This is the first year that Pro Sound Web/Live Sound and Audio Pro International have hosted awards, with both organisations inviting their readership to vote for their favourite products.

"We are honoured to win in both the Pro Sound Web/Live Sound Reader's Choice Award and the WFX New Product Awards," says Matt Larson, national sales manager at Group One, DiGiCo's US distributor. "These are prestigious awards in the live sound and House of Worship markets and the industry as a

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China - Approximately 40,000 people packed into the TaiZhou Sports Centre Stadium to see a star-studded line up of the biggest music and comedy superstars from China and Hong Kong perform in the acclaimed Golden Autumn concert. This was recorded for broadcast by the local TV station, TaiZhou TV.

Over 100 Robe moving lights - a mix of ColorSpot and ColorWash 1200E ATs - were used for the show in a design by Bovey Xie, with all the equipment supplied by Beijing based rental company Wen Jing Xuan's Shanghai office, along with 30 lighting crew.

Xie's creative starting points for the design included making it look big, bold, bright and lively with an appropriate sense of spectacle. He also needed to make each of the 12 performances - which included Kelly Chen, Alan Tam, SunNan, JiangKun, A-Mei and many more - look different and individual, matching each of their styles with

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Italy - The Clay Paky Alpha Spot 1200 HPE is the latest star featured on the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus world tour. The Greatest Show on Earth, founded in 1884, has been entertaining audiences for over 100 years and delivers fun, fantasy, animals and whimsical talent to millions of people every year.

Feld Entertainment has owned Ringling Bros. since 1967, when Irvin Feld purchased the show from John Ringling North. Irvin Feld and his son, Kenneth, are credited for raising the production quality of the show and raising the bar for the circus, through aggressive promotion and creative marketing, in addition to introducing multicultural, educational and preservation initiatives.

The current tour, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus Party & Showhas for the first time in its 125-year history included a European leg including stops in

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UK / Hong Kong - Orbital Sound announces that it is to provide the event communications for the inaugural Extreme Sailing Series Asia, kicking off at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club in November. Following the success of the 2009 European Series, OC Events has announced three confirmed race events, concluding in Oman in February 2010.

Event manager Stuart Whitman comments: "We have had excellent support from Orbital over the past two seasons, improving our event communications dramatically. They do a supreme job, whatever the conditions, and we have a great working relationship. We wanted to maintain the continuity for the Asian series, giving us quality communications without drama - as there is more than enough of that in the racing itself. This is an exciting move, as we embark on evolving the Extreme Sailing Series format and bringing it to new audiences aro

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Norway - The first Midas XL8 Live Performance System to be installed in Norway has gone into the Olavshallen concert hall in Trondheim. Supplied by Midas' Norwegian distribution AVAB CAC, the XL8 will be used to host a wide range of musical events at the 1,250-capacity venue.

For the last 15 years, the Olavshallen's technical supervisor Henrik Torgersen had been working on a Midas XL3 and it was time to look at a digital system. "Having tried out lots of digital systems available on the market, there was no actual competition to the Midas XL8," he says.

"After testing a lot of digital mixers I realised the XL8 was the console which could rise to the high standards of our venue. The Olavshallen has a lot of external engineers working at the venue, and there is no time for training during each sound-check, so it had to be a familiar surface."

After a very q

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Hippy Days Are Here Again - The Broadway production of flower power musical Hair is transferring to London next year, producers have announced. It will become the first New York production to move its entire cast to the West End when it opens at the Gielgud Theatre on 14 April. The show, which was first staged in London more than 40 years ago, ran for almost 2,000 performances. It was only brought to a halt by the collapse of the Shaftesbury Theatre's ceiling in 1973.

The musical famously opened one day after the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK in September 1968. Previously, its scenes of nudity and drug-taking, along with blasphemous and sexually explicit language, would have fallen foul of the Lord Chamberlain's office - which licensed all stage productions.

The current Broadway revival started its run last summer, and has been extended three times. Artistic

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Israel - Waves Audio is now shipping Vocal Rider, the first of Waves' series of new Mixing tools. Vocal Rider is designed for mixers and recording engineers, automatically riding the levels of vocal tracks. Instead of manually riding a console fader, or tediously drawing in every level change on a DAW track, Vocal Rider does it automatically, making it a true timesaver, says the company.

The user sets the target range of the vocal level in relation to the rest of the mix. Vocal Rider then compensates for all deviations from the target, intelligently raising or lowering the vocal volume, instantly. Unlike compression, Vocal Rider adds absolutely no additional colouring to the track.

(Jim Evans)

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France - Digigram has appointed Global Broadcast Supply (GBS) as their exclusive distribution partner in Southeast Asia. GBS will be representing the full range of Digigram products including the sound cards and networking products, with particular focus on the new IQOYA range of audio-over-IP products. The move coincides with the deployment of extra sales and marketing resources in the region with the appointment of Nancy Diaz-Curial who has started as sales account manager with Digigram Asia to handle India, Japan and Australasia.

GBS is headquartered in Singapore and has a number of local offices throughout the Asian region. The countries they will be serving for Digigram are Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Brunei and Myanmar. As well as being an authorised distributor for a large number of internationally renowned brands in the b

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Finland - Finland's first installation of JBL Professional's new CBT100LA column enclosures has taken place in the Latokartano Sports Hall in Helsinki. Eight of the compact passive line array cabinets were specified as part of a complete sound reinforcement fit-out by systems contractor Pertti Krautsuk of Workland.

Run by the Physical Exercise department of the City of Helsinki Sports Administration, the Latokartano Sports Hall consists of two large areas, which can be combined into a single, larger space. Schools and sports clubs use the space primarily for volleyball, floorball, football and tennis. Mr Krautsuk, who set up Workland back in 1994, selected the CBT Series loudspeakers for their high sound quality in terms of both music playback and speech intelligibility.

The Sports Administration issued the contract for the technical fit-out once the new building superstructur

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Brazil - Tenda da Raposa in Rio de Janeiro, one of Brazil's premier recording facilities, recently installed South America's first Rupert Neve Designs 5088: A 32-channel system featuring four Portico 5032 Mic Pre/ EQs, four Portico 5015 Mic Pre/ Compressors, eight 5033 Five Band EQs, a 5043 Stereo Compressor, and 16 channels of Shadowmix Automation.

Although it started as a personal project studio, Tenda da Raposa quickly began to attract independent musicians, producers and singers due to its atmosphere, gear and design. After 10 years of non-stop operations, having recorded the biggest names in the independent music scene in Brazil, and after over 300 CDs, it was time for a major upgrade - an analogue console.

For musician, producer and owner of Tenda da Raposa, Carlos Fuchs, the 5088 is a great step forward: "Being a fan of Rupert Neve's gear for so long, it was an eas

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UK - Mojo Barriers supplied its crowd barrier system across the three sites for London's biggest ever Christmas lights switch this November.

Thousands of people gathered at each of the three stages set up in Oxford Street, Regent Street and in front of St Paul's Cathedral. They enjoyed performances by stars of hit London Musicals Oliver, Sister Act and Hairspray, The Saturdays, Scouting for Girls, Spandau Ballet and Little Boots. Then the stars of Disney's A Christmas Carol, Jim Carrey, Colin Firth and Bob Hoskins each took to a different stage and they simultaneously switched on the Christmas lights. The events all tied into the film premiere taking place after the switch on.

Technical production on the three stages was managed by Clear Island Productions whose event director Sonia Jones commented, "This event has grown phenomenally, including

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Turkey - Istanbul-based Mikafon Elektronik has recently supplied Community VERIS loudspeakers to Atilim Elektronik for the surround sound system in the new main auditorium of T.C. Maltepe University in Istanbul.

Maltepe University is the latest facility of the Marmara Education Foundation, an institution that provides a broad scope of education from elementary level to university. The University is located in Istanbul and is made up of nine faculties, two vocational schools and three institutes and, with its distinguished and experienced academic staff, is highly regarded in the Turkish University system.

The auditorium, located in the main campus of Maltepe University, seats 1500 and is used for conferences, live music and theatre performances. Atilim Elektronik was commissioned to design and install the system, which uses 16 two-way VERIS8 loudspeakers for the surround sound

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Germany - In March 2009, Gerriets was chosen by the exhibition company Ambrosius Frankfurt to provide the ceiling element for the International Auto Show (17-21 September, 2009). The ceiling element was installed and changed the trade show hall's atmosphere through its eye catching organic shape.

Gerriets used more than 7,500sq.m of a semi-transparent PVC coated mesh textile for the project. Depending on the lighting direction the curved element appears transparent or opaque. Projections and laser images create additional special effects.

The ceiling element is is fastened at the hall ceiling and the hall columns. In the middle of the exhibition hall, the ceiling element forms a huge tube with a 10m diameter going up to the ceiling. A second downward tube at the side stops three metres over the floor.

(Jim Evans)

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Australia - LSC Lighting Systems has announced the release of LSC Clarity - a PC/MAC based lighting and media server control system. It will be shown at LDI in Orlando this month.

Previewed at InfoComm this year and officially launched at PLASA in London in September, Clarity version 1 software and DMX converters and programming/playback wings are now in full production.

The Clarity software suite was developed by Nick Denville from OpenClear. He has a strong background in major control consoles having worked in the 90s on the Hog 2 and more recently as lead software engineer on the Jands Vista console.

Clarity has been in development for over three years and incorporates the best of breed including drag and drop patching - with fixture cloning, LED matrix control and Media server integration permitting the most complex of shows to be easily operated from the one product.

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UK - amBIENT XC made its debut at the Higher Life Conference at Wembley Arena, featuring five shows over three days, 11-13 September. Each day featured a morning service and an evening service, with the audience remaining within the arena between the shows.

The idea was to use the amBIENT XC to run the LED lights in the arena between services to achieve a dynamic look that would respond to the stage state without having an operator present. The stand-alone DMX 512 hardware controller for RGB LED lighting fixtures is designed to create sensory surround experiences synchronising light, video and sound.

The amBIENT XC controlled 12 x 1m XBAR LEDs, 48 x i-pix Satellites and 10 x Thomas PixelLines. The ambient effects proved to be gentle and smooth enough to not detract from the ongoing religious experience, yet it still provided a dynamic look without having to program or o

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France - After Medialon's successful release early this year of Showmaster ST, its first all in one embedded show controller, the show and media control company now extends its series by releasing Showmaster Pro and Showmaster iPro.

"Both of these products have been designed to help creative people to achieve compelling entertainment and edutainment experiences with powerful and easy-to-use solutions", says Alex Carru, CEO of Medialon.

The embedded controller series brings the advantage of an all in one controller with all relevant hardware interfaces such as DMX, MIDI, Serial, Time-code, digital IOs and of course TCP/IP.

Medialon's Showmaster series share Showmaster Editor Software included at no additional cost with each product. Thanks to the easy graphical programming environment, applications are programmed in much less time than with any other conventional co

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UK - The recent Classic Rock Awards ceremony held at London's, Park Lane Hotel provided an appropriate and high-profile launch-pad for a major fundraising announcement by Yamaha Music Schools and ChildLine Rocks. Guests, who included Slash, Ronnie Wood, Brian May, Iggy Pop, Aerosmith, ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons and Iron Maiden, all applauded the free music lesson scheme whilst Joe Bonamassa who is a patron of the initiative also received the 'best breakthrough act' award on the night.

The programme sees Yamaha's national network of Music Schools offering free music lessons aimed at introducing people of all ages to music making for the first time. Participants will be asked for a voluntary donation of a few pounds for each lesson session and it's expected substantial funds will be raised for ChildLine, the free helpline for children provided by the NSPCC.

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