UK - The Green-GO digital intercom system was recently employed to simultaneously manage multiple locations for a corporate event spanning 10 sites across the globe. Manchester-based sound specialist Audio Alliance, working for Media 1 Productions, required dependable, quality communications to seamlessly connect venues in Japan, India, China, Poland, Sweden, Canada, the USA and the UK.
“We needed a reliable, managed talkback system that would work over our own VPN IP infrastructure,” says Oliver Driver, managing director of Audio Alliance. “Multiple Green-GO bridges were deployed worldwide, with each site a ‘spoke’ from our European data hub. The Green-GO system allowed us to manage all the comms channels at each of the remote sites from our central hub.”
The system implemented by Audio Alliance comprised more than 100 Green-GO devices, all of which were d

UK - The George Inn in Denby takes a proactive role in supporting its community, hosting many charity events and holding off-site fundraisers. This commitment was in evidence in March, when it sponsored Film Night at the historic St John the Evangelist Church to raise money for the Denby Church Community Project.
The evening’s featured film, The Greatest Showman, might not have been the most memorable, but it’s safe to say that few guests failed to be swept up in the evocative setting, as the 13th century church glowed mystically from the richly coloured light created by Chauvet Professional fixtures, installed by Sound & Light UK.
Recognising the importance and potential that light can have within the church, Sound & Light UK utilised six CHAUVET Professional COLORdash Batten-Quad 12 and four COLORado 3P IP wash fixtures. The resulting mixture of

UK - Troldtekt 100% wood wool acoustic panels have been used at London’s Open Air Theatre in Regents Park. The rehearsal building, designed by architects Reed Watt, comprises a double-height dance and rehearsal studio in its centre encircled by offices, kitchen and green room. The details of the structure have been designed to reinforce the magic of the setting in which trees, plants and sky surround the visitor.
The walls are clad with dark stained larch which helps to blur the distinction between building and landscape while creating a natural extension to the existing buildings along the edge of the site. Inside, Troldtekt wood wall panelling in natural grey also complement the natural setting while helping to dampen and keep reverberated sound to a minimum. The rehearsal studio has been acoustically rated so that the maximum noise level that can happen in the studio be

USA - Paul McCartney released his latest album Egypt Station last September and embarked on his Freshen Up world tour to support the album. Lighting designer LeRoy Bennett, who has been with the star for over 17 years, dresses the nearly 40-song playlist in complementary visuals using a lighting, video and effects package that includes over 500 Elation Professional Dartz 360 luminaires. Lighting supply is by Upstaging.
Some 528 of the compact LED beam/spot lights are used in the Freshen Up show under the lighting direction of Wally Lees, who has been McCartney’s lighting director for 17+ years and serves as lead programmer for all his tours and events.
Located above the stage in three identical pods are 240 Dartz, each pod comprising 80 Dartz in five rows of 16 fixtures wide. The pods are located centre stage and run upstage to downstage on the

UK - Lighting designer Jonny Gaskell created an elegant fusion of understatement and a bit of mystery for the UK leg of David Gray’s Gold in a Brass Age tour, for which lighting and video production was supplied by London based Colour Sound Experiment.
Jonny explained that Gray doesn’t like a busy stage, so he keeps things fairly minimalist and towards the edge of subtle, focusing the attention on the artist whilst sculpting some interesting surroundings. For this tour, he wanted to include a thread from the last tour in 2015, so revisited some of the favourite treatments from that . . . and brought a more contemporary feel to the stage by using up-to-the minute LED lightsources.
The starting point for the show visuals was when David Gray presented Jonny with a series of tattoo art by Londonboy who had created a motif for each song of the new album. The chal

Croatia - City pool Pula-Pola, a new leisure complex in Croatia, has invested in a high-tech Work Pro audio system for its swimming pool area to ensure that customers can enjoy music while they swim and - more importantly - clearly hear any public safety announcements.
Located in the city of Pula, the pool is a focal point for the local community and regularly hosts events such as swimming lessons, competitions, aquarobics and swimming parties for children. As speech intelligibility was a key requirement of the new audio system, installation company Iskatrade had no hesitation in specifying products from Work Pro, the installation, pro audio and lighting division of Equipson.
“Wall to wall tiling and other hard materials make swimming pools one of the most challenging acoustic environments for an installation company to deal with,” says Robert Wolf, CEO of Rijeka-b

USA - Grammy-nominated American metal band August Burns Red have recently completed their US headline tour accompanied by an Allen & Heath dLive Wings mixing system, handling FOH and monitor duties.
In early 2018, sound engineer Chris Pollock, introduced August Burns Red (ABR) to the world of dLive, which instantly led to the band purchasing their own Wings system, comprising a dLive C1500 surface, DM32 MixRack and two Waves V3 cards – used for virtual soundcheck and playback.
Pollock comments, “I actually heard about dLive for the first time in early 2017, after reading a magazine article about Jared Daly and his dLive setup for Northlane and it really peaked my interest. Later that year I did a club tour with a hip-hop artist and Clair Global was gracious enough to purchase a C1500 for me to try out. I immediately fell in love and ended up taking the system o

UK - Production AV has announced two open days on 7-8 May at its new premises in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
The AV hire and event company will offer hands-on demonstrations of its latest 6mm, 3.9mm and 2.6mm LED screens, 4K screen management system, media servers and camera solutions. The team will also showcase some recent projects, including large-scale projection mapping of Cheltenham’s Municipal Offices for a WWI Remembrance event and recent work on the Teenage Cancer Trust series of star-studded concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
There will also be an opportunity to meet the team and discover more about the company’s plans for future growth.
“We’re thrilled to not only have a new home but also a much larger facility, which will have a direct benefit for our clients,” says Production AV’s managing director, Pete McCrea. “There is a r

UK - Violinist and conductor André Rieu is known for his popular tours, visiting over 100 venues a year with his Johann Strauss orchestra. The tour is an opportunity to impress both live audiences and millions of viewers watching in cinemas and on DVD. This means that the lighting needs to be suitable for cameras recording the show for broadcast, DVD and the cinema, as well as the audience attending the performance.
It is important for the André Rieu Tour lighting be as compact, portable and low weight as possible to enable quick transitions between shows, supporting the tech crew as much as possible. The large number of performers in the orchestra need to be lit with a uniform field and dynamic effects to highlight different aspects of the performance, creating a great atmosphere for the audience.
To meet these goals, Maurice Verbeek, lighting designer at André Ri

Australia - Major theatre productions often have lives involving multiple productions in multiple countries, which provides an opportunity for the production team to assess the equipment they are using and make changes to benefit from advances in technology. This was exactly the situation multi-award-winning sound designer Gareth Fry found himself in, opening Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in Melbourne, Australia after its success in London and New York.
“DPA’s d:screet 4061 Miniature Microphones have long been theatre stalwarts because they sound great, are very tough and are small enough to hide on cast members,” Fry explains. “I’ve been using the legacy version of these microphones for years, and we typically hide them in the hairline, on the forehead, so they are not visible to the audience.”
In 2017, a year after the play opened in London, a

UK - Robe is the main sponsor of Blackout - an immersive visual and sonic installation created by Guildford School of Acting (GSA) lighting tutor Mig Burgess to raise awareness of mental illness.
Blackout will be staged in the Bellairs Theatre at the University of Surrey and refers specifically to bipolar II disorder. The work is designed to offer a snapshot of what it’s like to experience the highs and crushing lows of bipolar II, what Mig describes as being “like the lights going out in your head”.
Mental health has been high on the public agenda in recent years, with the loss of a number of high profile music artists, including Tim Bergling (Avicii), The Prodigy’s Keith Flint, rapper Mac Miller, Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell and others.
With the essential seed money being provided by Robe for this proje

Vietnam - Epizode is a popular music and arts festival, held annually on Vietnam’s biggest island Phu Quoc. It’s aim is to bring the latest global trends in electronic music to Asia, whilst at the same time showcasing the best regional talents. East meets West at this winter hub of party goers, travellers and industry personalities and the latest edition attracted more than 10,000 people from 79 countries.
The festival hosted more than 140 international and regional DJ superstars across four stages spread along a beautiful beachfront, delivering non-stop performance 24 hours a day for 11 days. One significant new addition to the 2018/9 line-up was Pioneer Pro Audio’s XY-3B system, which took care of the Egg stage. The general consensus was that this renewal had seen a marked improvement in the festival’s audio provision, compared to the previous year and XY-3B played

Australia - After eight years of Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour (HOSH), Opera Australia presented West Side Story, the first musical to be performed on the harbour-side stage.
Boasting a stage that is almost two and a half times larger than any indoor stage in Australia, the Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour series is one of the biggest outdoor theatrical events in the country, and a highlight of the Australian cultural calendar.
The stage and venue are constructed from the ground up in just 25 days by a crew of approximately 150 people for an exclusive four-week performance season. The West Side Story set, designed by award-winning designer Brian Thomson, is an urban New York City-inspired stage design that features a highway overpass that weighs approximately ten tonnes and soars 15m above the stage, three custom-built subway cars and the West Side Story

Slovenia - Hribar Hall is the latest newly renovated event space in Ljubljana Castle which sits majestically above the picturesque Slovenian capital. It is both a top tourist attraction, a place of historical significance and a busy event, meeting and conference hub with a series of renovated spaces available to host a diverse array of shows and events.
The new venue is designed to be completely flexible; the capacity ranges from 180 seated to 250 standing depending on the set-up and format which can be fully seated for banquets and dinners to standing with different sized stages, bare floor or catwalks. The schedule includes a lively mix of performances from music, drama, theatre, comedy and spoken word to fashion shows and other presentations including lectures, seminars and news conferences.
With this in mind, when it came to choosing the lighting, the Castle’s te

UK - The Make A Difference Trust (MAD Trust) is producing its spectacular West End Eurovision show next month and AV and event production company Blitz is providing the sound support.
Taking place at the Adelphi Theatre on 28 April (Sunday), the interactive event will raise money for MAD Trust, which fundraises for HIV and AIDS projects that build awareness and provide care, support and education in the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa.
The show will feature eight casts from West End Musicals competing against each other by singing original Eurovision song contest songs to win text votes from the audience and the approval of a panel of judges.
Martyn Hunt, theatre & sound project development manager at Blitz, says: “Blitz prides itself on its sound technical support for all of our clients, so we feel honoured to be able to provide equipment for such an impo

UK - Specialist illumination company LED Creative has been working with the crew responsible for creating the colourful, angular look that accompanies the return of classic TV quiz show, Blockbusters for Comedy Central UK.
Filmed in front of a live studio audience at Elstree Studios and presented by Dara Ó Brian, the reboot of the student favourite has been given a stunning contemporary facelift, although it still retains a host of key elements from the much-loved original, including the infamous Gold Run and original 80s theme tune.
Created by scenic designer Josh Grace, the vibrant set has a distinctly modern feel that features an array of smart hexagonal lightboxes, with offset LED frames, suspended throughout the design to complement perfectly the styling of the Blockbuster letter board.
Commenting on the show’s design, LED Creative’s Ges Smith sa

Serbia - At Novi Sad’s Green Love festival, performances by techno stars like Fatima Hajji and Sugar Lobby, combined with a lightshow by Chameleon Rental Systems, transported fans into a world of intense auditory and visual wonders.
Contributing to the spectacular sights was a collection of Chauvet Professional Rogue and STRIKE fixtures. Lighting designer Predrag Djordjević working closely with stage designer Dragan Rajčin (both from Chameleon Rental), created a stunning display on the 40 metre-wide stage that immersed the audience while supporting the festival’s artists.
A total of 32 Rogue R2X Beam, 14 Rogue R1 Beam and six STRIKE 4 multi-formatted fixtures were featured in the festival rig along with three Amhaze Stadium hazers. The luminaires were hung on upstage and side truss, as well as being arranged on the left and right stage deck.
“We needed

UK - The Legends Live tour brought together some of the great names from the 1970s and beyond. Presented by Tony Denton Promotions, the package was headlined by Suzi Quatro but also featured David Essex and Les McKeown’s Bay City Rollers, with Showaddywaddy making way for Smokie at the mid-point of the tour.
Capital Sound are past masters at providing sound reinforcement for such package tours with short turnaround times. Having recently supported the 40 Years of Disco tour, they were out in force with a full inventory of Martin Audio’s MLA PA.
Working under the experienced production management of Richard Ames, Capital’s project manager (and monitor engineer for this tour) David Preston oversaw a sound-optimised set-up in the arenas, and system tech Dan Fathers was able to gauge his optimisations accordingly.
The fact that coverage can be fine-tuned elect

UK - London’s Royal Albert Hall has completed the biggest improvement to sound in its auditorium since the installation of the acoustic ‘mushrooms’ 50 years ago (as reported in LSi April 2019).
The project took 693 days of labour, 15,291m of cable, and 465 individual speakers in the world’s largest loudspeaker install in a single room.
With equipment supplied by Autograph Sales and installed by SFL, the digital distribution network adopted a ring topology and the selection of multi-format I/O cards included analogue, AES, ANA, DMI Optocore and DMI Dante.
Within this, a pair of BroaMan Route66 Optocore AutoRouters, managing Optocore links from the DiGiCo

World - Shawn Mendes: The Tour hit the road at the beginning of March on a nine-month world tour under a lighting rig which comprises Ayrton Khamsin-S, Ayrton Bora-S and Ayrton Mistral-S fixtures as the major components.
LD Louis Oliver avoided the use of followspots or remote tracking as part of his design intent for the show, choosing instead to work with Ayrton fixtures to provide key lights for the young Canadian singer, and carve out dramatic backdrops with creative back, top and side light.
“We wanted to keep the performance space organic, allowing the technology to hide in the background,” he says. “With the design, we wanted to craft bold environments for Shawn to perform within. We tested the new Ayrton fixtures and found they could compete with anything else on the market. Ayrton has created a range of LED fixtures you can use without

South Africa - Team Robe T1 successfully crossed over the finish line coming 112th overall at the 2019 Absa Cape Epic.
Paul Newman of Lucidity Technical Production Services and Mike Hewan, a Johannesburg-based business consultant, were sponsored by Robe Lighting and DWR Distribution as they put their heads down for one of the most brutal mountain biking races the world has to offer.
“It was a fantastic opportunity to support Team Robe T1, and we were very proud to be involved in Cape Epic for another year,” comments Josef Valchar of Robe Lighting. “Cycling is a popular sport in the Czech Republic and we are all big fans, as well as privileged to play a small part in such a legendary competition.”
With the South African entertainment industry behind them, Team Robe T1 shared video clips and photos throughout the race. Even at times when they ran out of leg

UK - Southwest London’s Stylus Productions has recently purchased a complete Allen & Heath dLive FOH and monitors package from Autograph Sales & Installations.
Comprising two dLive S5000 control surfaces plus DM48 and DM0 I/O racks, the new equipment is to be deployed with Australian singer-songwriter Dean Lewis, who sets out on tour this April, starting in the UK and continuing throughout the year across Europe.
Sam Thomas and Oliver Weeks, co-directors of Stylus Productions, comment: “We were becoming more aware of the increasing popularity of the dLive series consoles within the touring market, having seen them crop up on artist riders more regularly as well as hearing anecdotal feedback from engineers. So, when a new client, namely Dean Lewis, came to us spec'ing Allen & Heath we were happy to use that as the springboard into our first investment

USA - Fine Design Associates has been designing exhibit lighting at leading tradeshows for more than 25 years, working closely with creative company to create lighting for exhibition displays. Most recently, Fine Design was responsible for lighting an industry leading brand’s booth at the CES show held in Las Vegas in January.
Principal designer, Paul Fine and his team have been working on a global technology leaders’ booth making them stand out at CES for many years. The lighting design has evolved over time to add more lighting fixtures to enhance the desired effects of their client.
The booth design for this client had beautifully printed SEG (silicon-edged graphic) fabric walls extending from the four corners of the booth. Large entrances were available on all four sides of the booth. The walls created an intimate space for the exhibitor to display their produ

Germany - Eight of ArKaos’ new 4K studio servers were providing a 360° video solution for the recent fourth German edition of popular TV franchise Dancing on Ice, which was recorded at the Magic Media Company’s Coloneum venue in Ossendorf, Cologne, in a special set up that was customised for the first series.
The show’s lighting designer, Manuel Da Costa, has lit DSDS (Germany Seeks the Superstar) and many other leading German talent and music shows. For Dancing on Ice, Da Costa worked alongside his regular visuals designer Dennis Muhl who wanted to run the video cues via his grandMA3 console. The video and screens supplier was ETC Germany.
They approached ArKaos looking for a new server solution that could offer extremely high-quality rendering performance, and that was easy and intuitive to control from a lighting console.
They neede

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