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UK - Several Allen & Heath iLive digital mixing systems were selected by two PA companies, APR Audio and SXS Events, running seperate Olympic events in Weymouth, where all of the sailing events were held.

Somerset-based APR Audio used several of its iLive systems for the opening night at the Weymouth & Portland Beach Live Site, which hosted live entertainment, welcomed the Team GB Sailing Squad, and broadcast a live screening of the London opening ceremony.

APR employed the largest Control Surface in the series - the iLive-176 - at FOH with an iLive-T112 at monitor position, both fed from an iDR-64 MixRack. An iDR-48 with iLive-144 was also set up to manage monitors for Eliza Carty, who headlined the opening night.

Meanwhile, SXS Events managed the Bayside Festival, a major festival running alongside the Weymouth Olympic Sailing Events. Located at the end of Weymouth beach,

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UK - LumenRadio will showcase its RDM products and OEM partners at this year's PLASA show. Remote Device Management, RDM, is an extension of DMX that allows bi-directional communication for configuration and monitoring of equipment typically found in entertainment applications and also in many architectural lighting systems.

The company released the first wireless DMX/RDM product based on its wireless CRMX technology in 2009. It has since then completed hundreds of successful installations all over the world and added wired RDM connectivity in the form of the Unity extension. Integral to the success is also SuperNova; a powerful and ever evolving software application that offers a feature rich RDM controller and an easy to use graphical user interface; putting the power of this technology into the hands of the everyday user.

Lighting industry heavyweight Robe, a pioneer in the

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South Africa - A two day Protocol Training course was hosted at DWR Distribution in Strijdom Park, Randburg on 3 and 4 September.

This year, Nick Britz from DWR has taken Training under his wing and is running with sessions that will benefit technicians and interested parties in the industry.

The Protocol Training covers everything from the basic DMX 512, RMD, Artnet, Ethernet and Wireless Networking. It includes fault-finding techniques, addressing fixtures, monitoring units in the rig, configuring networks and the ins and outs of some of the most commonly used protocols.

September will be a busy time at DWR Distribution, and other courses include the Avolites Titan 6 Training on the 10 and 11 September and Robe Training on the 17 & 18 September.

(Jim Evans)

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UK - At the end of an unrivalled summer of success, PLASA 2012 opens its doors for the very last time at the Earls Court Exhibition Centre on Sunday 9 September and with pre-registration figures already way ahead of last years, it's time to celebrate!

As PLASA announce a new home for the PLASA Show, the final event at Earls Court promises to be a glorious celebration of the industry's involvement in the Diamond Jubilee and London 2012 Olympics. The Olympics Uncovered sector of the Professional Development Programme is close to a sell-out and joining Backstage at the London 2012 Ceremonies will be Making it all Possible! presented by Riedel Communications; Landscape Video, a seminar from Tait dedicated to those transforming LED panels that turn stadiums into vast video screens and Scott Burges from Creative Technology delivering From a Wobbly House to the

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UK - Robe lighting continues to celebrate its popular theme of 'Working With Winners', as CEO Josef Valchar donates an authentic Olympic torch - used on one of the torch relay legs for the London Games - for auction at the PLASA exhibition taking place next week at London's Earl's Court Exhibition Centre.

The torch, 800mm high with stylish conical design and featuring an attractive shiny gold finish, will be on display on the Robe Stand Hall 1 F47 on Sunday and Monday of the exhibition for all to admire.

The auction will take place during the PLASA Innovation Awards, presented at the end of the day on Monday in the Central bar area. A professional auctioneer will be on hand to conduct the proceedings and help find the lucky winner!

All funds raised will be distributed to leading industry charity, Light Relief.

(Jim Evans)

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UK - Watched by a global audience of four billion, the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony has been hailed as a spectacular success - and Huntingdon based specialist flooring company Le Mark played a vital role by converting an original design into a printable format, producing and then installing the 'reveal' floor which featured so prominently in the 'Pandemonium' section of the ceremony.

Linda Gibbons, Le Mark, sales director, explains, "We had been working on this major project for over four months but, along with all other ceremony suppliers, we were asked to 'save the secret' by Danny Boyle - but now we want to tell the world.

"We have also been collaborating with UK Trade & Investment to try and find overseas markets for our products and services and we were hoping that as the opening ceremony was the biggest shop window we could possibly ask for it would br

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Spain - Around 5,000 people attended the 20th Night of the Habaneras on Cura Beach (Playa del Cura) in the Spanish seaside town of Torrevieja recently, with seven groups in the town taking part.

The event, which served as a prologue to the 58th Certamen Internacional de Habaneras y Polifonía, featured powerful sound projected along the beach by an RCF TT+ line array, provided by rental house Orecam.

Orecam, who provide sound reinforcement each year, fielded five TTL33-A elements each side of the stage, with four TTS28-A subwoofers to achieve the required SPL and reproduce the sound of choral singing, along with Spanish and Cuban habaneras, with absolute clarity.

With around 300m of beach to cover, the production company took no chances and provided four delay masts, with four TTL33-A enclosures on each. They also provided a further six tiny RCF TT08 precision monitors as st

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USA - Provident Bank Park is home to the Rockland Boulders minor league baseball team as well as the St. Thomas Aquinas College baseball team. Opened in June of 2011, the stadium is also undergoing its first season as a summer concert venue. Featuring a variety of well-known acts, including Gavin DeGraw, Colbie Caillat, Gretchen Wilson, REO Speedwagon, and Smashmouth, among others, Provident Bank Park has rapidly become an important destination for sports and entertainment.

To ensure the best possible audio quality for its patrons, stadium management wanted a world-class sound system. They found it with a collection of loudspeakers drawn from the Aero Series 2 catalogue of Valencia, Spain-based D.A.S. Audio.

Dynamic Productions, a full event production, sound, lighting and staging company headquartered in Orangeburg, NY, was contracted to provide staging, lighting, sound, vide

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UK - Meet The Parents is a new reality comedy show, where in each episode a poor unsuspecting guy has to try and last the whole night at his girlfriend's parent's house. What he doesn't know is that he is being recorded by 30 hidden cameras.

Martin Kempton designs the lighting show which includes MAC 500s, MAC 600s, MAC TW1s and Pixel Par 90s, supplied by Richard Martin Lighting (RML).

Meet The Parents is filmed for Objective Productions. The first episode is currently scheduled to go out on Wednesday 12 September at 10pm on E4.

(Jim Evans)

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Sweden - For the 36th time, Stockholm's classic fans assembled for the traditional picnic outside The Maritime Museum in the Gärdet district where the annual classical prom was presented by The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra (RSPO) conducted by Marc Soustrot.

For at least 20 of those concerts the sound has been mixed by DM Audio's Lars Wern. Fielding their new Martin Audio MLA Compact system, the leading production company ensured that not only the orchestra but also famous Swedish soprano Malin Byström were heard as never before by the 25,000-30,000 people who attended.

Presented by actor Samuel Fröler, the comprehensive programme, including popular works by Bizet, Gershwin, Schubert, Wagner and more, was played out through 12 MLA Compacts, rigged on each side of the stage, with three DSX subs set up in a cardioid pattern on each side (with the centre sub turned ar

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Switzerland - XL Video supplied LED screens, media servers and control for the special Freak Out All Night Dance Party event at this year's Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

Curated by producers Nile Rodgers and Mark Ronson, the show's theme traced the evolution of disco music into today's electronic dance music.

The line-up included both Rodgers and Ronson, who were joined by a host of stars including Grace Jones, Anita Baker, Alison Moyet, Johnny Marr, Elly Jackson from La Roux, Chic, and Dimitri from Paris.

For the show, XL Video specified their versatile Pixled F-11 LED which formed the flown screens above the stage and a front piece for the DJ booth. In total over 70 square metres of F-11 were used.

For the screen content, XL Video was granted access to the extensive Montreux Jazz Festival and Chic archives.

The crew employed two Catalyst media servers a

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UK - The BFI restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's silent masterpiece Blackmail was shown for the first time at a special outdoor screening at the British Museum, the location of the film's chilling chase sequence. The film was accompanied by an ensemble of 18 musicians, conducted by Timothy Brock, performing Neil Brand's specially arranged score.

With the programme commencing before sunset the projection challenge was to ensure that the screen images were sufficiently bright to be seen in almost full daylight conditions, and also that this glorious BFI restoration could be fully appreciated by the sell-out audience of over 1,000. Thus four of QED's new Christie WU20K-J projectors were quadruple stacked in order to produce astonishing high brightness images of exceptional quality.

This three-chip WUXGA DLP 18,000 lumen digital projector delivers superior performance and qua

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South Africa - This year 20,000 people gathered for the Oppikoppi Sweet Thing Festival held from 9 to 11 August 2012 on the Oppikoppi Farm near the mining town of Northam in the Limpopo Province, South Africa. For the ninth consecutive year, rental company Stage Effects were one of the technical suppliers at the music festival, lighting up six of the seven stages. Avolites controlled all six stages and a grandMA was used for two international acts.

The very first Oppikoppi was held in 1994 and has become a tradition ever since. Thousands camp out in the bush and enjoy an enormous line-up which now features well over 120 different bands, DJs and artists. International acts included Bullet for my Valentine, Enter Shikari and Babylon Circus.

Theo Papenfus and his crew from Stage Effects are no strangers to the dust and tough terrain at Oppikoppi, but each year as clock-work, they

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Hong Kong - In terms of efficiency, LED lights are undoubtedly more efficient than Tungsten-Halogen lights, but in terms of performances - colour rendering, colour consistency) Tungsten-Halogen lights are better. LED light is successfully and widely used in architectural applications, but they have more restricted applications in theatre and TV installation.

LDR's Besio Fabiano and Macostar's Mr. Derek Chow feel that they have successfully answered the question of whether LED and TH lamp sources can co-exist, by combining conventional TH lamps and state-of-the-art LED technology co-developed to produce a lighting solution for two auditoriums in Hong Kong - Lei Tung and Stanley Community Hall.

"We came across this challenging project," commented Macostar's Francis Fung "when the Hong Kong community center decided to revamp its two auditoriums because the venue's

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Italy - The leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI, visited Milan in June to attend the 7th World Meeting of Families. At the nearby Bresso Airport, the Pope celebrated the Feast of the Testimonies and High Mass with over a million believers. A stage the size of a church was constructed for the event, featuring a semi-transparent dome inspired by the windows of Milan Cathedral. The challenge posed to the sound reinforcement team involved not only reproducing the Pope's words but also the sound of an orchestra and a choir of 1,500. The provision of sound reinforcement was the responsibility of the Milan-based service company M.M.S.

To provide homogeneous and transparent audio coverage throughout the 790,000sq.m area, a number of Electro-Voice line array loudspeaker systems were installed. The PA clusters were distributed evenly, with the elements flown from 20 sca

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Richard Vivian of Big Sky Acoustics has been added to the Art of Noise panel session at PLASA 2012.

Richard brings a down-to-earth, sensible and real-world attitude to the issues of creeping noise control regulations at urban concerts and festivals, the latest tools on the market which aim to allow engineers and promoters to monitor noise levels, and the methods that sound engineers employ to stay within the sound boundaries.

Richard has experience at lots of major festivals, as well as outside night clubs in Kensington at 3am! A superb addition to the panel, which already includes John Taylor (d&b audiotechnik), Jim Griffiths (Vanguardia Consulting) and Jacob Navne (SGAudio Aps)

To book this session and check out other session in the programme, please click here

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Poland - Dirty Rigger gained even further success from its new dealer support programme after a recent trip to visit new and existing dealers in Poland. The visit resulted in securing a new distribution deal with Warsaw based MILSO.

Founded in 1990, MILSO originally began as a specialist supplier to the professional photography industry where they have since rapidly grown to be one of Poland's prime TV, Film & Photography equipment suppliers.

MILSO's Justyna Gaudziak says, "We really appreciated Hannah & Stuart visiting us here in Poland and it gave us even more confidence in their customer support. The response we've had from our customers throughout the initial Dirty Rigger trial period has been fantastic. We're really excited to now be able to offer our customers the full range of rigger gloves, tool pouches and accessories."

Dirty Rigger MD Stuart Gibbons says,

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UK - As part of an ongoing commitment to provide customers with the best in cutting edge presentation technology, Saville Audio Visual has just placed an order for 22 Christie LHD700 projectors. The investment is a major step in enhancing the hire stock available through the company's twelve branches nationwide.

The new LHD700 is a single lamp LCD projector featuring a huge 7000 ANSI lumen output for high contrast and vivid colours at full HD resolution.

Saville conference and live events divisional manager Ben Voisey said, "We were looking for a replacement workhorse projector for our hire fleet, allowing us to address the increasing demand for HD capabilities. We also wanted to maximise the compatibility of our existing stock of lenses and peripherals."

"The new projectors will allow us to provide a consistent level of ser¬vice nationwide and helps address

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Japan - Internationally renowned recording engineer and lecturer Akira Fukada made an enormous impact at the New York AES Convention in 1997 when he unveiled the Fukada Tree seven microphone arrangement - a totally new technique for recording orchestral music in surround sound for subsequent broadcast or CD release.

Developed to resolve some of the problems engineers had encountered when trying to record spatial environments with traditional omni-directional microphones, the Fukada Tree clarified microphone positioning and also incorporated directional microphones for main and environmental sounds.

Akira Fukada originally developed the Fukada Tree while working for Japanese state broadcaster NHK, but since 2011 he has been CEO of his own company, Dream Windows Inc., that consults on a wide range of music recording, special sound design and audio issues. From the outset, Mr. Fu

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UK - Le Mark produced and printed the iconic London Street Map floor on to their high gloss black 'Harmony' performance stage flooring.

This stunning floor was printed and installed by the Le Mark team and revealed to a global audience of over 4 billion people during the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony.

Many will remember the 'Pandemonium' section of the ceremony and how this floor was slowly revealed . The jagged design bounced and reflected the light of the molten rings being formed . An image captured by both TV and photographers and transmitted worldwide ,proving that Britain could host the world's most emotive and stunning events.

Le Mark are very proud to welcome visitors to their stand 1- D4 and offer the opportunity for PLASA visitors to take home a FREE A4 piece of this Olympic 2012 memorabilia.

Each piece of Harmony 2012 printed stadium floor is totally unique , th

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The Netherlands - Professional audio technology specialists HHB Communications has been appointed the Master Distributor for DiGiCo's UB MADI 2.0 USB device in the UK and Ireland.

Announced during the IBC 2012 show on HHB's stand, this news further extends theirr relationship as it follows the recent appointment of HHB as DiGiCo's UK broadcast dealer.

DiGiCo's broadcast product line is comprised of powerful digital mixing consoles and complementary connectivity solutions catered for live broadcast production. UB MADI bolsters this product group by providing up to 48 simultaneous channels of MADI I/O (full-duplex) in and out of a PC or MAC via a USB 2.0 port. Compact and portable, the UB MADI is bus powered and capable of transporting signals up to distances of 100m.

Despite numerous alternatives, MADI is still the preferred method of transporting large numbers of audio chann

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UK - Midas' newly launched PRO1 digital console is making its European debut at this year's PLASA. The MidasVeniceU is also making its European debut.

"The PRO1 features new manufacturing materials and techniques, comprehensive I/O on the back, and a previously undreamt-of price point," explains MIDAS brand development manager Richard Ferriday. "The PRO1 is now accessible to freelance engineers, small music venues and anyone who actually cares about audio quality, reliability and portability.

"The VeniceU expands the range of Midas 'Digi-log' hybrid consoles, offering a user-friendly, high quality analogue audio console with integrated 8x8 USB digital audio interface. Applications include multitrack recording, playback from computer, and live inclusion of 3rd party plug-ins."

(Jim Evans)

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UK - Le Mark's Dirty Rigger team chose PLASA 2012 to launch four new PPE and accessory items, including the Glowman LED glove range.

Steve Marshall Dirty Rigger project manager commented, "Strongest sales on day one came from the new fully EN rated Tool Lanyard system , in particular the interchangeable clip and carabiner system. This allows for tools to be pre connected before commencing work. Strong export interest has come from the new pulsing or fixed beam LED Radio and accessory front of body radio and equipment carrier.

(Jim Evans)

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UK - Examples from Christie's huge projection portfolio can be seen at PLASA 2012 - both on the show floor and at the high profile collateral event, The Knights of Illumination.

AC Entertainment Technologies is showing the Christie Nitro integrated motorised yoke and projector system (in the shape of a YK50 harnessing a Christie LHD700 projector) on stand # 1-E10.

Coolux GmbH is also be using Christie 3-chip DLP HD projection on stand # 1-C17, where a pair of Roadster HD10K-M 3-chip DLP® 1080 HD projectors will be soft-edge blended and warped to project onto a geometrical shaped screen, made from different pieces of Styrofoam.

These are supported by four Christie LWU420 3LCD projectors. While two of these WUXGA projectors will perform a 360° projection on a wooden bird house, a further two LWU420 will project onto an interactive wheel and an interactive brick, where

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  3. PLASA 2012: John Meyer wins Gottelier Award
  4. 2012 PLASA Awards for Innovation announced
  5. PLASA 2012: Sennheiser in pursuit of perfection
  6. PLASA 2012: ETC highlights dimmers and more
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