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UK - Arena Structures, a specialist division of the Arena Group, has expanded with the acquisition of over £250,000 of staging and scaffolding this April.

This recent investment in plant and equipment includes a substantial amount of stage decking system which introduces a totally new staging service the Arena Group can offer clients. The new stock includes ancillary items such as steps, handrails and stair cases, including many bespoke items that are useful for the events industry and media sectors, says Arena.

Martin Clark has been appointed commercial director of Arena Scaffolding, coinciding with this expansion. Clark has been delivering staging and scaffolding projects to various events over recent years within his role at the Arena Group, such as the London Marathon and televised music shows such as X Factor and The Music Hall of Fame.

The Arena Gro

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UK - The final of Unsigned Heroes 2007, the bands competition sponsored by AKG microphones has been postponed owingto the permanent split of The Cooper Temple Clause, who were due to headline at the final in support of unsigned talent.

"The Cooper Temple Clause's split was only announced on Tuesday, leaving us insufficient time to find a replacement headline act for the final on Thursday (April 26)," said Harman Pro UK's Marketing Manager Amanda Chester. "In the circumstances, we're very sad to say that we will have to postpone the event untilanother band can be found. We'll make an announcement about the rescheduled date as soon as we can."

(Jim Evans)

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UK - The new Land Rover 2007 Defender was launched to the press at Calcott Manor in Gloucestershire, with Stage One (sets, scenery and live events), production company Cricket and designer James Grey all bringing their skills to the fore to ensure the event was a success.

Brought on board by Cricket, Stage One was asked to build three different elements - an external car plinth, an internal main set and a small set at a second venue, following a 'ride and drive'. The unusual car plinth consisted of a steel 'I' beam, with scaffolding poles threaded through and finished in silver paint. The plinth held the new Defender along with one of the first Land Rovers to come off the production line (chassis number 9). Two lighting towers were also built in the same style.

Inside the venue, the main set incorporated four 'I' beams which Stage One manufactured from mdf. The beams were erec

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UK - The Central School of Speech and Drama hosts one of a series of events organised by the ALD (Association of Lighting Designers). Professional Development for Working Lighting Designers on 3 May is sponsored by MA Lighting and will be a chance for professional lighting designers to meet in London and see new equipment in use. The event makes use of Central's excellent theatre and professionally-focused lighting design and production lighting students (some of whom will be demonstrating the equipment).

Nick Moran, lecturer in lighting at Central says, "I am delighted that Central is able to host this event in the fully-equipped Embassy Theatre. It offers professional lighting designers a chance to discover new technologies, and a chance for them to meet the students who may soon be working alongside them in theatre and elsewhere. The event underlines our commitmen

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Germany - The 8th annual Musikmesse International Press Awards (mipa) ceremony once again lauded Meyer Sound's Milo family of loudspeakers when it bestowed a mipa Award for Large Format PA System on the M'elodie ultracompact high-power curvilinear array loudspeaker. M'elodie's Milo family siblings, the Milo high-power and MICA compact high-power curvilinear array loudspeakers, received the same award in 2004 and 2006, respectively.

The mipa Awards are the result of ballots submitted by 107 music and audio magazines from around the world, and are given out each year at a ceremony held during the Musikmesse/Prolight + Sound exposition in Frankfurt.

"M'elodie has been enormously successful from the very first time we showed it," says Meyer Sound director of marketing Rachel Archibald, "and we are honoured that the worldwide music and audio press have recognised M'e

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UK 3M has announced the appointment of rear projection specialists Paradigm Audio Visual as a 3M Digital Signage reseller in UK, Ireland and mainland Europe. Vikuiti Rear Projection film from 3M will be marketed and resold on a consultancy basis by Paradigm according to the specific application requirements of customers in the corporate, retail and leisure, advertising, formal travel information displays (FIDs), control rooms and CCTV, TV and medical markets.

"We envisage Vikuiti Rear Projection film playing an incremental role in the development of Paradigm's existing rear projection product portfolio", commented Greg Jeffreys, business development director, Paradigm Audio Visual. "We have an ethos of not selling 'one size fits all' but work closely with customers to sell the best suited product for a given application."

Paradigm is currently working on a

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UK - Lighting Partners, operators of usedlighting.co.uk, have been appointed as the UK distributor for Smoke Factory.

Commenting on the agreement, David Morgan of Lighting Partners said, "We have seen many Smoke Factory machines come through our operation and have always been impressed with the build quality and their longevity. Since meeting with Florian von Hoffen and the team in Germany, we have been very excited about bringing a dedicated sales and technical support service to the UK while expanding still further our new sales offering."

Smoke Factory's Florian von Hofen added, "We are very excited about this new co-operation. The UK used to be one of our most important markets, and with these dedicated partners we are looking forward to serving our existing customers as well as many new customers with Smoke Factory machines and service in the UK."

(J

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UK - Tuesday 1 May and Wednesday 2 May sees the return of the annual A.C. Lighting North event at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, aimed at buyers in the Midlands, the North of England and Scotland. Visitors can pre-register for the show.

The showcase will include first UK showings of a number of lighting, staging, audio and visual products, and representation from over 70 leading industry companies.

A range of guest speakers will be taking time out of their schedules to provide informal seminars on topics including different lighting techniques for stage and TV, lighting the 15th Asian Games in Doha, selling off the airwaves and how video will change the lighting industry.

The event also provides an opportunity to catch up with key industry associations PLASA, ALD, ABTT and PSA, which will all be represented at the show.

Show admission is free for registered industry

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New Zealand - Selecon is involved with supporting the upcoming OISTAT student Scenofest!, both with sponsorship funding and with providing Selecon Rama PCs for the Lighting Laboratory venue. This festival of scenography, held during the Praque Quadrennial in June 2007 provides an opportunity for professionals and students to get together in a truly international arena where interests and experiences are shared during in an intensive week of performance, lectures, exhibitions and workshops. There are over 300 activities on the schedule for this year.

As part of the Scenofest! programme the art of stage lighting is recognised as making its own distinctive contribution to the theatre and this is reflected in the calibre of the workshop and presentation speakers such as Beverly Emmons, Nick Schlieper and Richard Pilbrow.

Beverly Emmons has designed for Broadway, Off-

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India - Sound reinforcement company Sound.com recently provided a Vertec line array system for the annual Femina Miss India pageant. The event was held 8 April at the Bandra Kura Complex in Mumbai.

"We began our audio careers in search of milestones like these," said Warren D'Souza, Sound.com's founder and owner. "Sound.com was proud to be providing sound solutions for Femina Miss India, undoubtedly one of the biggest and most-watched international beauty pageants. We decided to provide superlative audio to make it a surreal aural experience."

To create this experience, Sound.com provided a combination of JBL Vertec products, including VT4889 full-size line array elements, VT4887 compact line array elements, and VT4880 arrayable subwoofers. Additionally, JBL VRX915M loudspeakers served as stage monitors, while JBLVRX932LA loudspeakers provided

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Slovakia - Leading Dutch trance-master Tisto and 6,500 enthusiastic dance music fans rocked the Incheba Expo Arena in Bratislava, Slovakia, together with one of his renowned, blockbusting theatrical shows, featuring over 60 Robe moving lights.

The lighting rig was supplied by Ministry Light and Sound from Banska Bystrica, who provided the trussing, rigging and all lighting fixtures including the Robes, plus an Avolites Pearl for control that was operated by Ludek Kovarik.

The trussing was sculpted into an interesting shape. It featured three long 'fingers' linking the stage with a circular truss that was suspended over the audience, together with several wide straight trusses, running the width of the building, positioned at FOH and at the rear of the stage.

The Robes - a mix of ColorSpot 1200 ATs and ColorSpot and ColorWash 575 ATs - were distributed all over the various tr

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Spain - As part of a major refurbishment, the Catalan Parliament in Barcelona recently replaced the conference system in its main conference hall with a Bosch DCN Next Generation system. Bosch also developed custom made units with respect to colours and shapes complementing the classical architecture of the historic parliament building.

Installed in November 2006, the new system provides every delegate's position with a microphone, voting panel and connection for a laptop PC. Extra facilities such as loudspeakers, LCD screens for viewing voting results and presentations are provided for senior government positions, while the president's position is also equipped with a touch-screen LCD for controlling voting sessions. The system also features extra-large plasma displays for screening voting results and videos to the general assembly.

The time frame for installing the new syste

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UK - Following PLASA 2006, ChamSys received a rather unusual request from Neil Carson of Enhance Production regarding a MagicQ PC Wing - could he have a custom colour? Thinking that most clients would perhaps opt for black, ChamSys were delighted when Neil asked for a far more unusual colour - pink.

"The pink goddess is beautiful! I have had it out on two shows already," Carson said just one week after receiving the custom PC Wing which was used for the recent Sovereigns Ball event at RMA Sandhurst Military Academy. The MagicQ PC Wing was controlling 12 Colour Block DB4 units all acting as audience blinders over an arch truss and all dimmers.

Carson added, "The wing was used because the operator, Mark Jones, was using an Avo Pearl 2000 and it became apparent that there wasn't enough power in that desk to run the LED flexibly and create many interesting looks. Th

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USA - With offices in Orlando, Las Vegas and Phoenix, LMG is a sound rental company that supplies equipment to live productions throughout the North American continent. This year, for the first time, the company is providing audio for Canadian pop rocker Avril Lavigne and they have geared up for the live dates by purchasing two DiGiCo D5 consoles.

The tour is to promote Lavigne's new album, The Best Damn Thing, and sees promotional dates intermingled with summer festival appearances. The latter confirmed so far include festivals in Ireland, Switzerland, Turkey and Japan.

This will be Jim Yakabuski's third tour mixing FoH for Lavigne. For the first two he was working freelance, but he is now employed by LMG and reports, "We used D5s on FoH and monitors for the last tour and we had great results. They had an impeccable performance record, but monitor engineer Matt Pe

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USA - Lightswitch played a key role in the first ever Project Earth Day fashion show in New York that featured emerging eco-friendly designers displaying their latest apparel and textiles made from organic or recycled fibres, and found materials.

Sarah Jakubasz, lighting designer for Lightswitch created an overall design that used as many eco-friendly lighting fixtures as possible. Lightswitch designers use eco-friendly fixtures when ever possible on all their projects, says the company. Jakubasz created her design using Color Kinetics' Color Blaze 72s and Color Blast 12s. She also designed custom compact florescent fixtures that were placed on each end of the bars. Lending a hand to this worthy cause was Production Resource Group who provided lighting gear and helped defray some of the rental costs.

Lighting manufacture ETC also pitched in by donating some HID Source F

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Hong Kong - The Cathay Pacific/Credit Suisse Hong Kong (rugby) Sevens, took place at Hong Kong Stadium from 30 March to 1 April. The Samoan team beat island rivals Fuji by 27-22 in the final. For the third year in succession, Lighthouse Technologies was the official LED screen supplier for the event, providing its R16i/o-II 16mm LED screens in both the North Stand of Hong Kong Stadium itself and the official Sevens Village.

The Hong Kong stadium featured a 7 x 7 panels (7.11m width x 5.33m height) R16i/o-II screen; whilst 7 x 6 panels (7.11m width x 4.57m height) of R16i/o-II was positioned in the Sevens Village, an area sited at the India Recreation Club in Happy Valley, adjacent to the main stadium. Both screens used the Lighthouse LIP-KX for video display control.

The sponsoring for the Sevens Village was originally, and continues to be, facilitated by the UK company Show T

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USA - Meyer Sound is providing support to enable San Jose's Gyuto Vajrayana Center to host major teachings of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama this month at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. Venerable Thupten Donyo, director of the traditional Tibetan Buddhist centre, has been instrumental in making these two days of public teachings on In Praise of Dependent Origination possible.

"When I first met the monks, I felt a connection to and admiration for them. There are few things more important than spreading the message of universal peace and compassion," says Helen Meyer, executive vice president of Meyer Sound. "It is a true honour and pleasure to be involved in making this important event possible."

Meyer Sound's support of His Holiness the Dalai Lama's visit continues the audio company's decade-long relationship with the Gyuto Vajrayan

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USA - In October 2006, St. Louis' new Busch Stadium, home of the Cardinals, went on record as one of very few ballparks whose baseball team won the World Series in the facility's inaugural season. Construction for the $365 million, 44,000-seat Busch Stadium began back in January 2004. Dallas-based design and consulting firm Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon & Williams (WJHW) was charged with the audio system design portion of the project.

WJHW specified Crown, opting for CTs Series amplifiers equipped with PIP-Lite network control modules. "On this go-round, the nature of the system was certainly far more robust," says WJHW Principal Ron Baker. "One of the things that we do as a matter of course on any of these major sports projects is to use amps that are capable of being networked, operated and monitored from a central control point because there are so many channels i

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USA - GearSource and PRG announced today the first 'Gear-Up' sales event powered by GearSource.com, beginning on 1 May. This event will offer equipment from PRG's audio, lighting, video and rigging inventory at "unheard of 'auction-like' pricing, but without the hassle or buyer premiums associated with auctions".

All items will be sold on a first come, first served basis. "This isn't an auction, but the buying frenzy will be the same, based on the pricing we're already seeing coming in," says GearSource president Michael Fairbairn. "Obviously, PRG has a massive inventory of equipment in audio and lighting. This event is created to help them liquidate that inventory without the trouble of staging an auction," says Fairbairn. While the Gear-Up sale may eventually open up to other GearSource.com vendors, this event is exclusive to PRG's US-based invent

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Bulgaria - Now having aired in over 35 territories worldwide, FremantleMedia and 19TV's Idols entertainment format has become one of the most successful 'reality' television templates in modern television history and XTA Electronics has an important part to play in its latest incarnation.

Best known in the UK and the USA as Pop Idol and American Idol respectively, the format has also been a huge hit in many other countries, including Australia, Canada, Croatia, France, Greece, Malaysia, Singapore, Russia and Turkey amongst others.

One of the latest versions of the format is in Bulgaria, where it is titled Music Idol. Aired on the country's first privately owned national television station, bTV (owned by News Corporation), the series currently enjoys the station's highest viewing ratings, its live performances broadcast from bTV's studios in the Nati

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Canada - FOH engineer Brad Madix is working with Metric Halo's SpectraFoo analysis software as he prepares for an extensive international tour with Canadian rock legends Rush in mid-June.

Madix, who is returning to front-of-house for Rush after first mixing the band for part of the Roll the Bones Tour, puts SpectraFoo to good use, not only during system setup but, also throughout the show. "I use it mainly for tuning the PA - that's the big job that it does - but also for stuff in the mix. Even though I'm mixing live, I do use it for 'mastering,' metering and looking at phase."

Madix adds, "You can save the window sets so that you can switch very quickly from looking at the left and right output of the console, looking at a phase scope and mastering metering, then switching over to see an RTA view on top of an FFT analysis between the output of the desk a

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UK - Tomorrow's A.C. Lighting North Event (1-2 May) will see the first UK showings of two new product innovations from leading Italian trussing and rigging manufacturer Litec. The new Litec EXE-Lodestar 650C1 is a BGV-C1 multifunction electric chain hoist designed for use in the entertainment industry.

BGV-C1 is a German code of practice for the entertainment and theatrical venues, part of which covers lifting and rigging equipment. Adopting BGV-C1 is voluntary, but it is generally required to obtain insurance within Germany and is therefore rapidly becoming an industry standard across Europe. A C1 chain hoist can be defined as a unit suitable for use to move and hold loads above people, and as such has to meet certain criteria such as a design factor of 10:1, underload and overload protection and a double brake mechanism.

"We needed to make a simple hoist that could work

  1. d&b audiotechnik sponsors BSMC
  2. MA Lighting opens London office
  3. Harman International announces $8bn acquisition
  4. Hawthorn supplies IVCA Awards
  5. InnovaSON stars in Czech awards show
  6. Kind amplifiers power Artificiel
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