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UK - Technical staging specialists Blitz, part of the Blitz Charter Group, has invested £500,000 in Toshiba's Technorainbow TR 2006R 6mm curvable indoor LED display - one of the most compact and lightweight screens (9kg per panel) in its class allowing for easy transportation and assembly, say Blitz.

Designed to create maximum impact indoors, the TR 2006R's 6mm pixel pitch delivers outstanding picture quality with a 170° viewing angle. The curved LED wall with SMD (Surface Mount Display) is suited for real-time video display in TV studio set design, whilst being ideal for use at corporate events, say Blitz. Jeff Bailey, head of division for Blitz TV Services explains: "This is currently the only screen to offer configurations for both concave and convex imagery and demonstrates our commitment to offering top end high quality 6mm LED screens. To make studios more capt

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UK - A state-of-the-art PA system has been developed for Caledonian Macbrayne (CalMac)'s new ferry terminal in Oban by T.G.Baker Sound, one of the UK's leading PA/VA system houses and Interalia Communications, a leading designer and manufacturer of digital voice announcement solutions.

The pioneering product enables CalMac's operators to programme a series of general announcements during the day and also enter the timetable arrival and departure announcements to free up staff from having to make manual announcements during busy times.

CalMac currently owns and operates a fleet of 31 vessels providing passenger, vehicle and shipping services to the islands off the West Coast of Scotland and in the Clyde estuary. Two other vessels are retained on Charter. There are currently 26 routes within the network. In 2004, more than 5 million passengers and over one million accompanied ca

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UK - St Michael's church in Chiswick is an active community church with a busy programme of performances and concerts. In 2005, the church began looking to make better use of a raised area between the nave and the sanctuary where the performances were at that time taking place, and looked into options for a portable stage.

Torin Douglas contacted Maltbury on behalf of the church, and Maltbury MD Philip Sparkes, Douglas and Father Kevin Morris of St Michaels discussed the church's requirements. The staging would need to operate at different levels, be able to cope with the three levels of floor in the area, and be easily and compactly stored when not in use: Maltbury's Metrodeck system was chosen to meet these demands.

The final package supplied was one of bespoke and standard modules, which provided a good fit with maximum versatility, say Maltbury. It allowed the church to cr

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USA - The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, established in 2002 by the prominent Swiss watchmaker, seeks out gifted young artists from around the world and pairs them for one year with renowned masters in their discipline. The second round of the mentoring program culminated on 5 December 2005, when distinguished patrons of the arts gathered for a gala celebration in the promenade of the New York State Theatre at Manhattan's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Sound reinforcement for the event is a formidable task. Based on their previous success providing sound for the event's debut presentation, New York City's SIA Acoustics and Scharff-Weisberg, Inc. were called back for an "encore performance". To overcome the effects of a highly reverberant space and satisfy the exceptionally critical listeners in the audience, SIA turned to Meyer Sound M

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Spain - Located in Barcelona's Passeig de Gràcia, Casa Bonaventura Ferrer, known as El Palauet and work of Catalan architect Pere Falqués, is an early 20th century treasure and an example of modernist architecture. Equipped with an infrastructure and technological base that allows it to host a variety of events, a customisable Martin lighting system lets El Palauet dress for any occasion.

El Palauet houses six separate entertainment spaces spread across two floors, in addition to a large discothèque, El Tinell, on the ground floor. Clients can choose from any of the spaces, from a large room for dancing to a unique space for holding company meetings.

Martin Architectural's Spanish representative, ECLER, working jointly with installer EIM (Estudios y Montajes Eléctricos, S.L.), executed a dynamic lighting installation that brings to life both the magnificent fa

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UK - Audio specialist Orbital was appointed by London-based project managers Populus UK to design and install the key integral audio guide element to The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association's new interactive exhibition, Moving Forward Together.

Featuring as the main element of a year of celebrations, marking 75 years of guide dogs in the UK, the showcase exhibition was launched on the Isle of Dogs Museum in Docklands by David Blunkett MP.

Through a range of three-dimensional, touch-sensitive and audio features, the history of guide dogs is brought to life, along with up-to-date information on current campaigns and services provided by the charity Guide Dogs. Moving Forward Together will tour shopping centres, airports and public spaces throughout 2006.

To enable blind and partially-sighted people to appreciate and understand every part of the exhibition, Howar

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UK - Hebden Sound Ltd, the British company with a reputation for its high quality condenser microphones, has recently taken over Accusound, which will continue under this name and will still benefit from input from founder Griff Jones, say the company.

Director David Anderson explained, "We felt that this was a very positive step for us. Both companies are known for their attention to detail and customer satisfaction and we can now offer a wider range of products to meet our customer's requirements.

The Hebden Sound mics provide a high quality, natural sound for use in studio and live locations. The Accusound range offer individual, instrument mounted mics for all acoustic instruments particularly for live performances, these are available as either wired or wireless systems."

(Lee Baldock)

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UK - White Light, the exclusive UK distributor for the range of DMX test and networking tools from ELC, has recently put ELC's Sidekick onto active service on two high profile tours of hit musicals Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Tonight's The Night.

Sidekick is a universal faderboard designed to add real faders and easy-access buttons to the increasing range of PC-based lighting controllers. Sidekick offers ten faders, thirty-seven buttons, one rotary encoder and an LCD display. All of the faders and buttons are configurable, and can be set to output DMX commands, MIDI commands, serial data or other protocols. Sidekick has a DMX output, MIDI in and out connectors, USB ports and an RS232 port, allowing communication with a wide range of lighting control systems.

For the Chitty tour, lit by Mark Henderson and programmed by Stuart Porter, Sidekicks are being use

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Worldwide - Depeche Mode's Touring The Angel is among the most visually creative shows on the road this year. With XL Video supplying equipment worldwide, the tour is under the artistic direction of Anton Corbijn, who has designed the set and overall visual concept. Early pioneers of touring video, Depeche Mode have always had a fresh and experimental attitude to new media ideas, and so video director Blue Leach has been in his element.

Leach was asked onboard after his innovative work with REM last year. He and Corbijn got their heads together and came up with the idea of six upstage moving screens, just off-centre and all hung at slightly jaunty angles, three in portrait format and three in landscape. "The weirder it becomes the more sense the whole video design makes, and the closer the whole medium becomes to the music," says Leach.

XL Video has serviced D

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UK - The former Atlantic Bar & Grill, one of London's most enduring and treasured landmarks, has reopened as the Astor Bar & Grill.

When Oliver Peyton's famous restaurant went into administration last September, a new operational team led by Channel 4 chairman, Luke Johnson, restaurant consultant Simon Wright and Gary Ashworth (collectively Adriatic Restaurants Ltd) took over the magnificent Grade-II listed art deco building within weeks and renamed it. The Astor name is designed to merge the great 1920's art deco Gatsby era with the edginess of the 1960's and the Profumo scandal.

After running it as a corporate party venue they have now laid out a versatile operating blueprint following a £200,000 refurbishment; this will incorporate a mix of live music, art exhibitions, sophisticated comedy, cabaret, record company showcases and high profile DJs. The weekly Live At

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The Netherlands - Seven years in the planning, design and realisation, the De Waerdse Tempel in Heerhugowaard, the Netherlands, is finally set to open. Whether it's a theatrical production or a heavy metal concert, the new multi-function venue satisfies the highest standards - using pro audio systems from EV, MIDAS and KT

The De Waerdse Tempel can accommodate up to 2,500 visitors at a time, and already two weeks before the opening it is clear that it will set new standards on the Dutch club scene.

The planning of the team led by Marcel Appelman triggered a hotly contested competition between the leading pro audio suppliers. Richard Verheugd and Remco Verhoek, responsible for the equipment in the De Waerdse Tempel, and club manager Harald Dijksstra chose in favour of Electric-Audio B.V. and MIDAS Consoles Holland, comprising an EV XLC system, MIDAS consoles, and a variety of ot

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UK - The Hammersmith Palais maintains its status as London's flagship live venue as The Shockwaves NME Awards return for the fourth consecutive year.

2006 sees the ceremonies technical production growing further in ambition, combining complex requirements from TV and bands to live audience. The TV show, produced by Remedy, is recorded live, and after the show has been recorded, the team have just an hour and a half to turn raw footage into a fully-realised TV programme, ready to air.

Nine cameras inside the Palais feed directly into three generator powered broadcast trucks, provided by Fleetwood Mobiles. A stunning homage to 60's science fiction and B-Movies, constructed by GTMS Event Solutions, will transform The Palais' main stage, themed as 'attack of the monsters of rock' and featuring Ian Brown, the recipient of this year's 'God-like Genius' Award'.

A ground bar

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UK - Bandit Lites is once again supplying lighting and rigging equipment to the British Fashion Council (BFC) Tent main venue at London Fashion Week.

The tent is pitched in the grounds of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, and is hosting over 20 shows - many of them back-to-back - from a crop of major international designers.The BFC tent is also staging the final of reality TV series, Project Catwalk.

Lighting designer for this action packed site is Simon Tutchener, who's been involved with LFW for the past 10 years. It's Bandit's fourth season on the runway - for production company S2 Events - project managed for the Bedford based lighting company by Lester Cobrin, who has been involved for eight years on this prestigious event.

The 30m catwalk has to be lit completely evenly and at the same levels all the way along, primarily for photographers and broadcast ca

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UK - Do you make a lighting control desk? Or a dimmer? Well, if you were worried about the effect that the upcoming Restriction of Hazardous Substances Regulations (RoHS) may have on your business then it'll be in your best interest to read on. As the current regulations stand, RoHS applies to eight broad categories of electrical equipment:
Large Household Appliances; Small Household Appliances; IT and telecommunication equipment; Consumer Equipment; Lighting Equipment; Electrical and Electronic Tools;Toys, leisure and sports equipment, and Automatic dispensers.

With two others being exempted:
Medical Devices and Monitoring and Control Equipment.

It was previously thought that lighting desks and dimmer racks came under the fifth category of 'lighting equipment' and the scope of the exempted 'Monitoring and Control Equipment' category has been unclear in the past. Howeve

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USA - Allen & Heath's American distributor, American Music & Sound, chose therecent NAMM show in California to announce the winner of their 'Great UK Giveaway' competition.

Unprecedented for a pro audio promotional campaign, the coveted grand prize was a brand new Mini Cooper, awarded for U.S. sales of Allen & Heath's ML Series of VCA mixing consoles - the ML3000, ML4000, and ML5000.

The lucky winner was Dave Kenagy of Hoffman Music, Spokane, WA, who exclaimed:"The ML Series consoles have incredible sound and offer tremendous value. It has been a pleasure to be responsible for so many successful installs; and WOW, I can't believe it, a Mini Cooper! Thanks Allen & Heath!"

Second place went to Tim Huff of Entertainment Arts, who was presented with an Allen & Heath MixWizard3 16:2, whilst third and fourth place winners - Paul Simms from AMtech Pro Audio, and Kent Laab

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UK - Stage Electrics reports their first year as sole UK distributor for Dutch company Ice World went like clockwork. After supplying lighting, generators and PA systems for rinks for a number of years, the company had the knowledge to make the next step in this ever-increasing market.

The company provided the ice and infrastructure, including lighting and PA equipment for venues ranging from shopping malls to parks across the UK including Gloucester, Hampstead and Windsor. A more unusual location for one of the rinks was on the roof of a shopping centre in Victoria which posed some interesting challenges including pumping the cooling fluid up two storeys through a pipe run of 30m.

Stage Electrics worked closely with clients and partner company Aggreko and reports that there was no single day's skating lost due to equipment failure and all rinks opened on time. Using a highly

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USA - On 28 January one of the true architects of rock 'n' roll music, Chuck Berry, performed at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas. Lighting design company ILIOS Lighting of Austin designed the show lighting using a Martin MAC 250 rig under Maxxyz control.

The rig consisted of 10 MAC 250 Wash, eight Mac 250 Entours and Source Four profiles and Pars with haze from a Jem ZR 24/7. The Mac 250 Wash were ground based and arranged in a straight line across a backdrop cyclorama. The Entours were located at the base of three triangular scrims on small risers. LD Bryan Azar of ILIOS Lighting commented on the choice of Entours: "Chuck Berry currently doesn't have a regular on-the-road band so we didn't know how to approach focus until the day of the show. We needed something quick and flexible that could still provide some good artistry and punch."

On the control side, sh

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UK - After successfully trialing a NEXO GEO S rig at last summer's huge Pride gay rally in London's Trafalgar Square, Camel Event Production have now purchased a full 12-hang GEO S805/S830 system from dealers, A.C. Lighting, along with a number of NEXO CD12 sub bass units, NEXO NX242 TDcontrollers and Camco Vortex 6 amplifiers. The company will be able to run their new system on a Camco EtherCAI wireless network.

For the York-based technical services company it was an easy decision to make. Their managing director Kevin Wilson said, "I had been aware of the NEXO pedigree for a long time and our first chance to use a system came in front of 17,000 people in Trafalgar Square - with assistance from NEXO's UK distributors Fuzion and A.C. Lighting."

Pride had struggled to achieve even coverage at past festivals, and following complaints about the sound distribution, Camel

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USA - Cadac Electronics Plc reports that the original Cadac A-Type console that opened with Phantom of the Opera on Broadway in 1988 has become the longest-running console on a Broadway show.

In January 2006, Phantom of the Opera took over from Cats to hold the title of the longest-running show ever on Broadway. The A-Type, supplied and serviced over the years by Masque Sound Inc, has proved itself as the most enduring element within the sound system, requiring no more than regular maintenance to maintain its performance night after night.

Estimates from The Really Useful Group indicate that the show has been seen by more than 80 million people worldwide, bringing in over $3.2 billion in ticket sales. Looking back over the years, Masque Sound's director of technical services, Dennis Short, regards the A-Type as the lynchpin in the show's system: "Phan

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UK - Automation specialists Kinesys worked on their third successive Brits event, staged at Earls Court 1, dealing with all the automation and movement systems for the upstage video screens.

These were moved throughout the show creating different looks for the live performers, which included Coldplay and Paul Weller and separated the stage area from backstage. They were also used as stage entry and exit points for artists. Kinesys were brought in to handle this specialist aspect of the production by main rigging contractors, Outback Rigging.

The automation consisted of three Barco ILite 6 XP video screens supplied by XL Video, each of which measured 5m wide by 7m high, weighed 2.5 tonnes and tracked horizontally along a 55 metre wide StageCo 'goalpost' construction. This had an I-Beam fitted on the underside, onto which tracking beam trolleys were attached to hang the v

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UK - Longney C of E Primary School has solved all their public address problems with the purchase of two RCF Move100 wireless speaker systems and hand held microphones from Stage Electrics.

Peter Andrews PTA member said "Every year we hold a number of events to raise funds for the school and each and every event there was always the hassle over the public address."Back in June, Stage Electrics were on site to demonstrate the Move100 system to the PTA during the School Fete. The school were so impressed with the system that an order was placed with very little discussion.

The powered speakers are light weight and very portable, but the major benefit is wireless operation for both power and audio signals, allowing you to get speech and music where mains is not available. The robust transportation bag provided allows you to hand-carry the cabinet easily and safely, offe

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Denmark - Nordic Rentals A/S, based in Vejle, Denmark continues to make headway in its market, with two notable recent examples including the provision of full production for the Nordic Music Awards 2005 held at the Copenhagen Forum on 29 October and then for Duran Duran's tour date at Forum Horsens on 8 December 2005.

The Nordic Music Awards took place after the Eurovision Gala, where Nordic Rentals had a sound system already set up at the Copenhagen Forum. It required only minor adjustments from the Eurovision set-up since the event had a similar format. Both were live, televised events with speeches, music and elaborate visuals. The main live reinforcement consisted of eight Y18s per side with six SpekTrix and two SpekTrix Wave's as down-fills. Elsborg used EV XLC's as delay clusters. Nordic Rentals supplied the entire technical production, which featured Coldplay, Shakira an

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UK - Celebrating its 10th Anniversary in 2006, the annual JHS Event, to be held over four days this year from 18-21 June inclusive, offers the first opportunity for music dealers and the music press to assess the many new product additions being introduced to the JHS catalogue, the company says.

Dealers and press can also take the opportunity to discuss these items with representatives of the suppliers who will be on site to assist with such queries and information. The JHS Event 2006 will again offer its informal mix of business, including attractive show-only offers, and socialising on this 10th anniversary year. Held at the JHS Garforth head office site, Event is easily accessible at literally two minutes' journey from M1 Junction 47, and already confirmed trade attendance figures are starting to multiply, say JHS.

Product demonstrations and musical entertainment will again

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UK - The 1995 Disability Discrimination Act was designed to enhance communication for the hard of hearing in public places - something normally achieved either through induction loop or infra-red systems. Both of these require specialised engineering techniques in the planning and installation, to ensure complete coverage of the area in question as well as intelligibility.

However, according to the Institute of Sound and Communications Engineers' president, David Hopkins OBE: "This has been a charter for the opportunist to install ineffectual systems - a little like the Emperor's new clothes, but in this case it is only those with impaired hearing that can tell the difference. By the time that such inadequacies have been discovered it is usually too late."

At the Institute's ISCEx2006 Conference and Exhibition at the Park Inn Hotel in Watford on 28 February, this is

  1. XL goes HD for The Brits
  2. ARX appoints new distributor in Turkey
  3. A simple solution; a stunning result
  4. Cool Installation for Avolites
  5. Eclectic Breaks & Seltron form partnership
  6. 'Robust' Robe used on Winter Olympics
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