Sound

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Singapore - Singapore's highly-respected arts centre Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay has become the first customer in Asia to purchase the new Soundcraft Vi6 digital console. Esplanade's head of sound Robin Shuttleworth says: "The features we get on the Vi6 made it worthwhile for us to pioneer this console."

The first use of the Soundcraft Vi6 console was at Baybeats, Singapore's own local annual indie music festival at Esplanade, a free festival of live indie music which attracts bands from countries such as Malaysia, Norway, UK, USA, Australia and of course, Singapore itself. At Baybeats, the console was used as a monitor desk for the Powerhouse stage: soon after, at another festival to commemorate Singapore's National Day, the Soundcraft Vi6 was used for front-of-house control.

"We operate two outdoor venues, and frequently run shows which feature five or six

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UK - Visual messaging captures the imagination by combining audio, videoand graphics to provide custom messaging in a compelling and dynamic visual format.

Denon's new DN-V755 Network AV Player provides the flexibility to achieve this, enabling: the display of schedules or directories, interspersed with marketing material; the creation of interactive kiosks; the ability to integrate messages into dynamic signage; the ability to upload new training and educational videos, and messages to be programmed into a loop, for delivery according to a preset schedule. They can even interact with users and be updated with new information and graphics at a moment's notice. The DN-V755 can be controlled from a remote (either on- or off-site) or directly from the front panel without the need for a computer.

The DN-V755 Network AV Player dispenses with the expensive programming involved when

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UK - This year sees the 22nd Reproduced Sound conference and the agenda, as ever, will be packed with the latest in audio technology, acoustics and real world applications and the presentations by the international line-up of industry-leading experts never disappoints. Organised by the Electroacoustics Group of the Institute of Acoustics, in collaboration with AES, ABTT, APRS and ISCE, this year's conference will be held on Friday 3 and Saturday 4 November at the Oxford Hotel, Oxford.

Over the two days, papers and discussions will cover a range of topics including Loudspeakers, Speech Intelligibility, Distribution/Networking, Digital Audio Networks, Lossy Compression and Bitrate Reduction, Ultrasonic Audio, Sound System Applications and Virtual Acoustics.

The Reproduced Sound conferences will feature presentations from some of the industry's leading academics, consultants, sup

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UK - Leading UK loudspeaker system manufacturer Martin Audio will be celebrating its 35th birthday at PLASA 2006. On show will be examples from its product ranges - including line array, Wavefront, stage monitors, AQ, Blackline, Ceiling, Stadium, Contractor, Cinema and accompanying dedicated control electronics and amplifiers.

Martin Audio - stand G39.

(Lee Baldock)

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UK - No, we're not talking about standards of excellence (well, not in the usual sense) and not a length of metal to attach lights to, either. We're talking about a large bar where industry people can meet to socialise and have a drink or two.

Socialising and networking will be very much to the fore at PLASA06: the large Central Bar's opening hours are being extended, for the first time, as it becomes the official PLASA06 After Show Bar, which will remain open until 8pm each night, following the 'soft close' of the show at 6pm.

Sponsoring the PLASA06 After Show Bar will be some of the entertainment industry's major players, including Aviom, Avolites, DiGiCo, Lab:Gruppen, Mobil-Tech, Stardraw and XTA Electronics. Those who visit the sponsors' stands will get complimentary drinks, entry into a free prize draw and the chance to win £1,000.00.

(Lee Baldock)

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UK - The V-440HD, a flexible and affordable video mixer, is the latest flagship video mixer/switcher from Edirol. Building on the success of the Edirol V-4 VJ mixer, it was designed as a professional solution for live concerts, corporate events and outside broadcasts - or any application requiring seamless mixing of SD and HD video and computer signals up to SXGA. The mixer sports eight individual inputs and Edirol say it offers "exceptionally clean transitions" augmented by a joystick-controlled Picture-in-Picture facility. Two separate Keyers for SD and HD are accessible from the user interface.

Expandability has also been a key design feature and Edirol says it has ensured that chaining together multiple units of the V-440HD is pain-free, enabling a single HD image to spread across multiple output displays - ideal for multi-screen performances. The V-Link control sy

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UK - PLASA 06 will see the UK launch of InOut Digital, on the stand of its UKdistributor, CUK Audio.

InOut Digital is an Italian based manufacturer, designing and manufacturing advanced audio devices utilising solid-state memory. These devices have been designed to automatically reproduce warning messages, voice alerts, music and sound effects, in fact all types of audio files in a vast array of situations. The main advantage to this approach is reliability as, unlike hard disk based solutions, there are no moving parts. The memory is also extractable making files quick an easy to update. The four devices within the range cover all applications where audio needs to be repeated / reproduced.

The Panel Player can manage more than 16 hours of MP3 audio files and incorporates a stereo Class D 20W + 20W amplifier, which can also be bridged to provide a single channel of 40W. 6/8 mu

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USA - Clear-Com, a Vitec Group brand and the global leader of trusted intercom solutions, today announced that Canada's Cirque du Soleil has purchased additional components from its integrated portfolio of live audio communications technology. This is the third order for Clear-Com from one of the world's best known performance arts companies, and will be used to support production wide communications at Love, the latest production by Cirque du Soleil at The Mirage in Las Vegas.

Cirque du Soleil's order includes main and redundant power supply modules, 6/RU frames with 72- in/out port capabilities, user-friendly programming panels and system interfaces for interoperable point-to-point, party-line, portable camera intercoms, and 2-way radios.

The Compact-72 Matrix frame along with ICS digital matrix, IMF interface frame and CCI and RTS Party-Line products are all designed

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France - This year marks the 15th anniversary of the annual four-day Festival Des Vieilles Charrues. It was held in the city of Carhaix located in the heart of Brittany. This festival, which began in 1992 as a volunteer-led community project, with an audience of 500, has grown to become the largest music festival in France. It attracts over 200,000 festival-goers each year, making it one of the four largest festivals in Europe alongside Rock Werchter, Roskilde and Glastonbury. The festival has taken place at the Kerampuilh venue, in the outskirts of Carhaix since 1998 when it outgrew its previous location, in the village of Landeleu.

This year's show was held from 20 July to 23 July. The choice of performers for Les Vieilles Charrues Festival has always been uniquely diverse, which has set this festival apart from many of its rivals. Performing at this years festival were Numero

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Worldwide - Longtime Sennheiser endorsee, Madonna, again has the hottest concert ticket of the season in the theatrically spectacular Confessions Tour 2006. The show abounds with channel upon channel of Sennheiser wireless vocal, instrument and personal wireless systems, including Madonna's much-favoured SKM 3072 super-cardioid handheld transmitter. Sennheiser RF systems are also being used by the backing and guest vocalists and on many of the guitar systems, while all of the musicians on stage are outfitted with Evolution G2 wireless monitor set-ups.

For this globetrotting tour, Madonna's four SKM 3072 handhelds are run through a passive switcher to quickly reassign them to both front of house and monitors simultaneously. Additionally, six Sennheiser evolution 500 G2 series handheld RF microphones equipped with supercardioid 865 condenser capsules are available for the t

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UK - Allen & Heath consoles were used to manage sound on two stages at therecent Acoustic Festival of Britain, held in Nantwich, Cheshire. The two-day festival is in its inaugural year, and boasted an impressive line up of legendary names and a variety of styles from The Stranglers to The Cheshire Chord Company.

Local PA company, VME, was appointed to manage all the technical requirements, selecting a 48-channel Allen & Heath ML5000 VCA console at FOH position and an ML4000 on monitors in the Cheese Tent, which hosted acts including Eric Faulkener (Bay City Rollers), Elkie Brooks, Hayseed Dixie, Del McCoury Band, and Ed Tudor Pole (Sex Pistols).

The Octagon Tent showcased a diversity of international artists - some well established and others approaching the musical forefront - including Damian Etherington, Blue C, October, Jason Soudah, Red Dirt, Guy Maile, Virginia Haze, Ros

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UK - Adlib Audio introduces three new managers to its Merseyside-based operation - Dave Jones (PA hire), Roger Kirby (sales) and Peter Abraham (lighting hire).It is the final element of a staged realignment exercise that started 12 months ago and has included a £250K investment in revamping, expanding and re-organising its warehouse and offices and the acquisition of lighting rental operation Adlite by Adlib Audio.

"It's all designed to streamline the company further and ensure we deal efficiently with the massive increase in workload we've experienced over the last two years," explains director Andy Dockerty. He says: "It's also aimed to free up the director's time to focus on actually structuring and 'directing' the company. Apart from that, hopefully I'll also get time to mix more live bands and possibly even embrace the 'digital console revolution' that

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USA - Renkus-Heinz will introduce the IC7 self-powered and ICX7 non-powered Iconyx array systems at the 121st AES Convention in San Francisco.

Unlike their predecessors, the IC7 and ICX7 are passive arrays with fixed beams that can be mechanically steered. The IC7 is self-powered and the ICX7 is designed for use with an external amplifier. Both feature seven high performance 4-inch coaxial transducers in an architecturally transparent enclosure that is only 44 3/8" (112.7 cm) tall, 5 11/16" (14.5 cm) wide and 4 3/8" (11.1 cm) deep.

Iconyx digitally controlled array systems use advanced technology to provide natural music and intelligible speech in the highly reverberant environments typically associated with architecturally distinguished buildings. Their slender "thin stick" vertical profile mounts flat to the wall, blending easily with both classical

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UK - PLASA 2006 will see the worldwide launch of Audica, a new brand to the professional audio installation market, on the stand of its UK distributor, CUK Audio. Audica focuses on three key elements; style, audio quality and innovation.

Cambridge-based Audica Professional Ltd products are designed the heartland of UK audio in Cambridge and engineered by a world-leading acoustic design house in Germany to meet the very highest standards for discreet elegance and application flexibility for high fidelity installed sound. The Audica Microseries is ideal for background music systems in applications such as restaurants, retail outlets and hotel public areas and for AV systems in boardrooms, meeting facilities, museums, visitor centres and hotel bedrooms.

Microseries consists of two ultra-compact wall-mount and one ceiling-mount 'micro-spot' loudspeaker which give wide-band audio s

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UK - Loudspeaker manufacturers, don't always get enquiries they expect - as was the case when TV production house Objective Productions contacted Surrey loudspeaker manufacturer EM Acoustics with a rather unusual request.

Objective Productions, known for producing shows such as Derren Brown, were working on the first show for a series called Fear Of . . ., with the first programme dealing with Flying. The show features 'thought therapist' Lawrence Leyton, who throughout the course of the programme splits people's fear of flying into core elements, such as heights and claustrophobia. The participants are put through a series of tests to illustrate their fears, and then return to the same tests after therapy, and finally get on a plane for a real flight. To bring out the effects of claustrophobia, Objective Productions approached EM Acoustics for the use of their anechoic c

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Peru - More than 25,000 people gathered in the esplanade of Lima's Estadio Monumental recently to bask in the music of Carlos Santana. The Mexican guitarist, on tour to promote his latest album, All That I Am, had not appeared in Lima since his first visit in 1995, and a capacity crowd was on hand to welcome him back.

Sound providers Carlinho Hermes Landa and Iluminación Artistica RTA opted for a system based on Meyer Sound's MILO high-power curvilinear array loudspeaker system. Freelance system engineer Andres Cuadros commented: "For me, it was necessary to have the very best equipment," he says. "With MILO, we got excellent response from the system. As a result, the public reacted very well, because both the show and the technical production were at the highest level."

The main system was made up of 12 MILO cabinets on each side, with four UPJ-1P

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UK - Speaker company JBL will exhibit a new addition to the existing popular VRX900 line array at the PLASA Show this year, and also show a new, affordable PA line for the first time at an exhibition in the UK - the MRX500 series.

The VRX900-series 'constant curvature' line array is designed for small to medium-sized venues, and can be used in a fixed installation, or to form a portable PA. The first speakers in the series to be launched, the two-way VRX932LAs, featured the JBL-patented 'constant curvature' waveguide which lends its name to the series as a whole. Three compression drivers are mounted on a continuous arc in each speaker, and when further VRX932LAs are added to the system, the speakers fit together in such a way that the arc of drivers continues. In use, the acoustic effect of this is that the drivers work together as though they were a single driver on a continuo

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UK - This year's PLASA Show will be Harman Pro UK's first European showing for three new Lexicon products which are now shipping to dealers. The Lexicon MX400 and MX400XL are 1U, 4-in 4-out hardware reverb processors aimed at studio and live users which expand upon the spec of last year's successful MX200 reverb. The MX200 was a stereo device with two effects engines, and as their name suggests, the two MX400 models are four-input, four-output devices with four independent effects processors each. The only difference between the two models is that the analogue inputs and outputs on the MX400XL are professional XLR connectors, while the MX400 sports standard TRS jacks. S/PDIF digital I/O is also available on both models.

The effects engines offer the usual complement of high-quality, rich-sounding Lexicon reverbs (a total of 17 different types), say Harman, plus delays and effect

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UK - AKG are renowned for the quality of their microphones, and for the intense research and design that goes into them. In recent years, competition in the budget mic market has been fierce, and so to keep up with developments at the ultra-affordable end of the microphone business, AKG released the Perception Series 100 and 200 condenser mics last year. Designed in Europe but made in the Far East, the 100 and 200 manage to be excellent value without sacrificing design standards, says the company.

AKG are now introducing the Perception 400 at this year's PLASA, a new microphone which sits at the top of the Perception range, creating 'good, better and best' models for purchasers to choose from. The Perception 400 is a large-diaphragm condenser microphone with multiple pickup patterns (cardioid, omnidirectional and figure-of-eight) designed for both live and studio-based applicati

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Italy - The main stage at the Umbria Jazz Festival in July relied heavily on Radian MicroWedges for the second consecutive year, with 12 RMW-1122 12" and four RMW-1152 15" enclosures providing onstage monitoring for performers such as Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Diana Krall, James Brown and Jamie Cullum. Italian sound reinforcement equipment manufacturer and distributor Reference Laboratory provided the low profile, two-way, coaxial Radian MicroWedges as part of a complete sound and lighting package for the Arena Santa Giuliana.

Monitor engineer Claudio Venturelli admitted to having been initially skeptical about the MicroWedges, but was quickly won over: "Their main strength is probably the very vertical and narrow directivity pattern, which helps to keep the stage clean even when you have as many as 21 monitors playing really loud," said Venturelli.

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UK - PLASA 2006 will see the first pre-production unveiling of EM Acoustics' new take on self-powered loudspeaker technology - the DA-1 amplifier module. Although the product will not be shipping until 2007, PLASA 2006 marks the first opportunity for people to get to see the unit "in the flesh", and hear about it from the EM Acoustics designers, as well as see the products that the unit will fit into.

A unique "one size fits all" approach was the core ethos behind the product concept, and as such the DA-1 "will be the most flexible self-powered module on the market today" say EM Acoustics. The DA-1 is a lightweight, two-channel Class-T amplifier, designed to fit into a variety of EM Acoustics' current product range. By using the onboard DSP power, a few button presses can reconfigure the amplifier from 2-channel to bridge-mono mode, and recall limit

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UK - Crown will be exhibiting their range of power amplification products at this year's PLASA show. Alongside such established models as the affordable XLS range of amps, you'll find a mixture of products aimed at the commercial and industrial sectors, live sound-reinforcement applications, and the high-end installed-sound market.

New to Crown's Commercial Audio series is the 660A, a six-channel analogue amp designed for commercial and industrial audio applications such as paging, announcements and the provision of music in schools, hospitals, factories and restaurants. It has six inputs and six 60W outputs, so it can drive different types of speakers in different parts of a building or business. Four ohm outputs are available on all output channels, and channels 1 to 4 additionally offer constant-voltage outputs at 70V and 100V. Like other Crown Commercial Audio products, the

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UK - Marantz Professional has announced the release of its CC4001P Studioline 5-Carousel CD Changer. This is an upgraded replacement for the CC4300, with many new features. Principal among these is that the CD changer will play up to five CD-R/RW and MP3 discs, providing a jukebox of nearly 5,000 tracks. Up to 999 tracks can be contained on a single disc.

The multi-featured machine also incorporates dual digital (coaxial and optical) outputs as well as volume-adjustable headphone output and a bi-directional RS-232C terminal.

Although the previous model (CC4300P) also included an RS-232C terminal, the specifications were unidirectional - only for executing commands. The CC4001P improves on this by supporting bi-directional communication, in which the operating status is sent in reply to commands issued from the controller. This enables customers to prepare a more user-friendly

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UK - Launched in April and being shown in the UK for the first time at PLASA 2006 is dbx's DriveRack 4820 processor. The second generation of the DriveRack concept, launched last year with the DriveRack 4800, aims to provide users with all the processing and control they need to EQ and manage loudspeaker systems in large-scale live installations. Last year's 4800 processor kicked off the new DriveRack range in style, with its large colour display and plenty of front-panel controls to access the processing power. Now the 4820 provides a more affordable alternative, with a tamperproof front-panel user interface and an emphasis on using the System Architect software to access the functions of the unit in detail.

The 4820 is otherwise unchanged - it has the same four inputs and eight outputs on analogue XLR and AES/EBU digital connectors, the same 96kHz processing engine, and the sa

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