Sound

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UK - Allen & Heath has announced the latest firmware update for its GLD digital mixer range, adding a FX unit as well as microphone presets.
Included in GLD V1.6 is the Dimension Chorus FX unit. Inspired by a classic chorus based on bucket-brigade technology, Dimension Chorus offers varying degrees of density from subtle special effects through to heavier modulation.
Also new to GLD in V1.6 are the company’s ProFactory mic presets created in collaboration with Shure, Sennheiser and Audio Technica. ProFactory mic presets are designed to give engineers a fast track starting point when working with a variety of widely used microphones.
Other enhancements in V1.6 include a post-fade option for the Automatic Mic Mixer and a 50Hz noise on/off switch for the Space Echo FX Unit.
“From touring bands through to corporate AV, GLD has become a hugely popular wo

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USA - Texan evangelist Joel Osteen recently brought his Christian preaching to LA with a capacity crowd at the newly-refurbished LA Forum.
With a weekly TV audience topping seven million and an international monthly audience of more than 20m in over 100 countries, Osteen has been voted the most influential Christian in America. His Night Of Hope gatherings combine contemporary worship with live music, prayer time and inspirational messages.
A very different sonic challenge from most other live events, the principal technical requirement when presenting evangelism is vocal intelligibility - seamless full-frequency audio coverage, without ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ spots, delivered to every single person in the room at conversational levels. At the LA Forum that meant catering for a congregation of 18,000 and Special Event Services of Winston-Salem, North Carolina,

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Sweden - Alcons provided a new audio system for a 19th century theatre in Stockholm.
Vasateatern, which closed in 2010 during the transformation of the surrounding buildings into the new Scandic Grand Central, had poor sound-proofing and remained closed even after the hotel’s opening. To overcome the acoustic issues, the interior had to be rebuild on a smaller scale, making space for a sound-insulating air gap around the auditorium.
The new ‘floating box’ Vasateatern features most of the original fittings, but with modern acoustic materials, flexible seating and a brand new Alcons LR7 audio system.
Swedish systems integrator Electrosound has done the sound design and installation at a number of Scandic hotels, including the Scandic Grand Central complex. When it came to equipping the theatre, an Alcons LR7 system was chosen. This includes a main PA of 20 f

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Germany - The Audiovisual and Integrated Experience Association (AVIXA) presented a session on the role of AV technology in higher education at OEB Global 2017 in Berlin.
The cross-sector conference focused on the latest developments in learning, with insights and best practices from leading organisations in the field. AVIXA took part in OEB Global for the first time and was a gold sponsor of the event.
Moderated by AVIXA CEO David Labuskes, the session The Power of Integrated Audiovisual Experiences in Higher Education demonstrated that AV experiences were important not only as a way of drawing the best students to their institutions, but also for improving their learning outcomes.
“Your next new class of students has grown up in a world that’s totally connected,” Labuskes said. “They live their social lives in the palm of their hands. They speak

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Australia - Live events technical solutions provider NW Group has recently added 370 L-Acoustics cabinets to its inventory, including a substantial L‑Acoustics K2 system. The purchase has been made in anticipation of the upcoming Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games for which NW Group’s audio brand Norwest has been chosen to supply the sound system for the opening and closing ceremonies.
The new system comprises a total of 124 K2, 24 K1-SB, 60 KS28, 72 Kiva II, 24 SB15m, 24 SB18m, 42 ARCS WiFo, and 18 LARAK II with 28 LA4X amplified controllers.
“We have had enormous success with our V-DOSC, dV‑DOSC and Kudo inventories. They have delivered a great return on investment and have been the cornerstone of our success in the sports ceremonies market,” says NW Group general manager, Gra Whitehouse. “Adding K2 made perfect business sense. It’s a ‘do everything

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USA - Adamson Systems Engineering will lead a training session as part of the inaugural AES@NAMM educational programme during the 2018 NAMM Show running 25-28 January in Anaheim, CA. The company is a first-time exhibitor and will occupy booth 17305.
Jeremiah Karni, head of education at Adamson, will lead the session alongside senior applications engineer Brian Fraser.
Karni says: “As part of our commitment to on-going education for our users, we’re excited to support the AES@NAMM Line Array Loudspeaker System Academy. During the half-day courses comprised of software and practical hands-on sessions, we will give a comprehensive taste of our two-day Adamson Applied Certification training and share our many years of experience in the application of line arrays and the theoretical principles behind line array technology. This is a great opportunity to bolster people

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Brazil - Developed and published by Riot Games, League of Legends has become one of the world’s most popular third-person multiplayer online battle arena games, attracting more than 100m active players each month.
This year the Brazilian finals took place on 2 September at the Mineirinho Arena to a live audience of approximately 8,000 and was also broadcast live on ESPN in Brazil. Audio supplier Gabisom were there to ensure the gamers aural experience would match the intensity of the final battles taking place, trusting DiGiCo as their weapon of choice.
Gaining popularity since 2010, multiplayer online battle arena or ‘MOBA’ is currently one of the most widespread forms of game play and League of Legends is at the forefront of this, attracting thousands of eager gamers to the championships.
For this large-scale, multi-facted production, Gabisom was

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Germany - Jens Nilsson was appointed chief financial officer and managing director at d&b audiotechnik on 1 December.
He will work alongside CEO Amnon Harman and COO Markus Strohmeier and be responsible for finance, sales finance, IT and facility management.
Nilsson is replacing CFO Kay Lange, who will leave the post after 31 years with d&b. Lange will assist with the handover and has a commitment with the company until the end of 2018.
Harman comments: “We look forward to working with Jens Nilsson as new CFO at d&b audiotechnik. He has the right experience to strengthen the management team on its way from a loudspeaker systems manufacturer to become an audio technology and solution company.”
He adds: “Kay Lange’s contribution to the growth, successes and spirit of d&b audiotechnik can’t be valued highly enough. We plan a secure

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UK - Audiotonix has acquired Solid State Logic (SSL) as part of its expanding group that already includes DiGiCo, DiGiGrid, Calrec and Allen & Heath.
James Gordon, CEO of Audiotonix, says: “We are growing the Audiotonix Group with professional audio brands that have exceptional technology, committed people and a real passion for what they do. With their incredible history and reputation, their enthusiasm and loyal customer base, SSL is ideally placed to be the next partner in the group. The whole group will benefit by having SSL as an integral part of the team going forward. Having their help to further expand our international reach, technology and customer base will be a lot of fun.”
Antony David, MD of SSL, adds: “I am very proud of the achievements our team have made to date with the expansion of SSL. To reach our full potential we need the support and

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Italy - Italian rental company Agorà supplied an L-Acoustics audio system for Ennio Morricone’s 60 Years of Music world tour.
One of the world’s most celebrated composers and conductors, Morricone has written over 500 film and television scores and is the only film composer to have received the honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement.
Early in the tour, Morricone’s long time recording and FOH engineer Fabio Venturi and Agora project manager Giulio Rovelli heard about the new L-ISA immersive sound system and visited the L-ISA headquarters in London for a presentation and to test the mixing platform with Fabio’s own recorded material.
“Our normal L‑Acoustics configuration works extremely well. But in places such as arenas, it’s difficult to achieve exactly what we want, and since the very first concert, we’ve been looking at ways to

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UK - Adlib supplied full production, including sound, lighting, rigging and large format video projection, for a special one-off event at the SSE Wembley Arena in London, DreamWorks Animation in Concert which was presented by DreamWorks Animation, CineConcerts, and The MJR Group. It featured music and many memorable moments from DreamWorks Animation’s numerous hit films like Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon and more with music performed live by The Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra.
Adlib project managers Dave Eldridge and Richard Nicholson co-ordinated all the technical elements working closely with tour manager Barry Jepson, MJR’s production manager Leanne Powell, technical manager Curtis King and creative director Nathan Stone.
It completes a hattrick of recent noteworthy orchestral works serviced by Adlib including

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UK - Audiologic has appointed Ben Spurgeon as application support engineer. Ben, who holds a first-class BSc (Hons) degree in Audio Recording and Production from the University of Hertfordshire, joins the company from Sound Technology and will be working alongside engineer Yavor 'Max' Yanakiev to strengthen the team in response to rising demand for in-house and on-site support from its growing customer base.
Ben has varied experience in all aspects of AV system design and installation in a wide variety of settings and is familiar with the major professional audio brands.
Andy Lewis, sales and marketing director at Audiologic comments: “Ben possesses precisely the kind of expertise essential to support our customers in the often complex and challenging world of contemporary AV installation.”
(Jim Evans)

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South Africa - Technical services and equipment supplier MGG expanded its inventory with the investment of a Hippotizer V4 Boreal. The media server made its first appearance at the EOH Annual Year End celebration hosted at three locations.
At the Johannesburg leg, Gallagher Estate in Midrand ran two shows with 4000 guests attending per night, while 2 000 guests attended the performance hosted at the Cape Town International Convention Centre and a further 700 people attended the wonderful festivities at the Durban ICC.
Johan Botha from MGG has been in the industry for many years, and has experience with media servers, though it was his first time on the Hippotizer V4 Boreal. “An MA command wing controlled the Hippotizer V4. We ran main and back-up which went into a matrix switcher in the unlikely case that anything should go wrong. Honestly though, the Hippo is a reli

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USA - Fort Scott High School is home to the Tigers volleyball and basketball teams, both of which figure large in the school's identity and after-school social life. In fact, the school recently completed construction on a second gymnasium so that multiple games and/or practices can happen simultaneously.
The new gym obviously needed a new sound reinforcement system, but the existing gym and a second-floor weight room did as well. Audio/video integration firm Total Electronics Contracting (TEC) designed and installed a combined system that handles all three spaces. Because TEC's Joplin, Missouri headquarters is two-and-a-half hours round trip from Fort Scott, TEC AV project manager Nate Pugh called on the 24/7 reliability of Ashly Audio nX-Series multi-mode amplifiers to minimize the need for service calls.
"The existing gym had four ancient-looking loudspeakers in me

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USA - McAllen is part of the fifth-largest metropolitan area in the state of Texas and is located in the Rio Grande valley, just north of Mexico. The McAllen Independent School District operates the public elementary, middle, and high schools for the children of its 130,000 residents.
After struggling for years with low-intelligibility, low-impact sound reinforcement systems in the auditoriums of its three high schools - McAllen, Rowe, and Memorial, the McAllen ISD hired the A/V integration team at local Hermes Music to rectify the situation. Ed Zamorano, director of educational/ governmental sales at Hermes Music, designed a Danley loudspeaker/subwoofer/amp/DSP system for the larger McAllen High School auditorium (1,500 seats) that was so successful, district officials asked Hermes Music to install identical systems in the smaller auditoriums (each approximately 400 seats)

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UK - Rugby Theatre in Warwickshire is an amateur company which produces 10 shows annually. Staffed and run entirely by volunteers, their own productions include drama, farce, musicals and theatrical classics while visiting performers and productions feature brass bands, children’s dance, opera and celebrity speakers.
Autograph Sales & Installations were approached by the theatre to determine why the vocal clarity and intelligibility in their venue was not always up to the high standards achieved by the other elements of their productions. After extensive acoustic testing and A/B comparisons, the theatre commissioned Autograph to supply and install a completely new sound system based on EM Acoustics loudspeakers as well as a new digital console and a selection of microphones.
At the core of the new sound system is a suite of loudspeakers from EM Acoustics’ EMS S

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UK - In venues the length and breadth of the UK, Christmas concerts and the grand tradition of pantomime are getting thousands of people into the festive spirit. Yamaha mixing consoles are at the heart of many, with no less than six hard at work in Perth, Scotland.
Opened in 2005, Perth Concert Hall is a truly modern, multipurpose venue. Amongst many innovations, the main Gannochy Auditorium features movable seating, stage and thrust stage to transform the space for a wide variety of productions. The technical specification is similarly state-of-the-art, with Yamaha CL5, PM5D, LS9-32, O1V96 digital mixing consoles and R-series i/o boxes, all on a Dante network.
The venue is owned and managed by Horsecross Arts, which also runs the adjacent Perth Theatre. Having reopened in November 2017 after a four year, £16.6m refurbishment, Yamaha QL5 and QL1 digital consoles were

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Switzerland - The Basel Tattoo celebrated its 12th anniversary by once again using TiMax object-based spatial audio and showcontrol to maintain localisation and musical timing between the marching players and the distributed spatial reinforcement sound system.
An import of the legendary Edinburgh Military Tattoo, which also uses TiMax, the Basel production is staged outdoors in front of the 18th century Kaserne Hof barracks on the Rhine. A dozen or so acts of marching bands, dancers and sometimes animals perform across a 70m x 25m parade arena surrounded by audience seating on three sides.
Award-winning Swiss sound designer, Thomas Strebel, specified a TiMax SoundHub-S48 spatial processor which received, via MADI, 10 arena, ambient, mic feeds plus five groups from a DiGiCo SD7 console, comprising submixes of performer radio mics plus Ableton music playback for various

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UK - Cymatic Audio has appointed Riverside Audio to handle the exclusive sales representation of all Cymatic products in the UK from 1 January 2018.
Riverside Audio is headed up by UK sales veteran Nick Longland, whose background in the MI and pro audio industry spans almost 20 years, including nearly 13 years with Sennheiser UK. During that time, he has gained an immense knowledge of the industry and built strong relationships with his customers.
Cymatic Audio CEO Arie van den Broek comments: “Nick’s experience and vast network of contacts in the UK across both MI and pro audio markets make him ideally placed to represent Cymatic products in the UK. His personal and personable approach and ‘rep firm’ business model are a perfect fit for us, and we are looking forward to a mutually profitable working relationship.”
Longland adds: “In setting up River

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The Netherlands - Nexo will be presenting a line-up of pro loudspeakers at ISE 2018, with the French manufacturer also set to display new series of bespoke loudspeakers stands and mounts designed by Showem.
Nexo’s all-white display will feature the compact ID Series, including the ID24 full-range speaker. It uses twin 4” drivers in a V formation in combination with an HF compression driver and has an adjustable horn that rotates easily by a switch on the rear panel, giving 60 or 120 degree HF coverage. As the ID24 can be mounted vertically or horizontally, this effectively gives the user four different directivity options in each cabinet.
The Geo M6 compact line array will also be on show. Marketed as suitable for house of worship environments and applications, it keeps a low visual profile in historic buildings.
Nexo is also bringing the Geo M620 - a full-r

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Australia - Sia’s Nostalgic for the Present tour delivered three stadium shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland, with the internationally-acclaimed singer bringing her long-time FOH engineer Jon Lemon behind the mixing desk.
Lemon has known Sia for most of her life and has been doing gigs for her on and off since 2002, mixing at small venues and large stadiums alike.
“It’s a very organised show,” he says of the recent tour. “The biggest challenge was putting it all together in the first place as it’s mostly playback in terms of the music. The brief I had was to make it feel like it was live but also sound like the record with SIA then singing live on top of it.
“I see it a lot with hip hop and rap where it’s just the artist and a DJ with minimum amount of stems and the engineer has just got nowhere to go and nuance it like the record. The

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Italy - Tribute show Pavarotti, An Endless Emotion marked the 10th anniversary of Luciano Pavarotti’s death. Held at the Verona Arena in September, it was broadcast to 5.5m Rai TV viewers and even more tuned on national radios.
Artists who played with the Maestro during the numerous editions of Pavarotti & Friends wanted to be on stage for this occasion to ‘sing’ again with the Maestro, requiring 226 channels of mic and line signals coming from the band, the orchestra, the choir, the solo singers and the announcers, with 24 additional playback tracks of Pavarotti’s voice.
Agorà, the Italian production company that supported the event, chose two pairs of DiGiCo SD7 for mixing both in front of house and on stage. Two more DiGiCo SD11 were added in both locations to manage the mics of the announcers and special guests. Two SSL L500 consoles used

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UK - Swiss studio monitor manufacturer PSI Audio was chosen to provide the audio monitoring for dozens of new studios at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield near London.
At the audio branch, every student can use their own studio equipped to industry standards for the duration of the course, and the school wanted to specify monitors that could reproduce sound neutrally.
NFTS picked PSI Audio monitors from an initial set of seven brands and 15 models, buying PSI Audio A14-M, A17-M, A21-M monitors and A125-M subwoofers.
“All in all, it was a four-month process,” reveals Jérémy Rodeschini. senior supervising engineer. “People are very passionate about speakers.”
He also highlights the reliability of the Swiss manufacturer: “They came over here on multiple occasions, so we knew they would be there if we needed them. We felt ap

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Italy - Held on 9 December at the Bologna Unipol Arena, Circoloco, an international show of club house music featured an Outline GTO system as the main PA for the event.
Circoloco is a format and a brand born in Ibiza many years ago, supported and created by Antonio Carbonaro - the owner of the famous DC10 music label. Circoloco has its own identity and includes many international artists who accompany this project around the world.
The audio design and set-up was entrusted to Emporio on Stage (Scandicci - Florence), with the support of the Outline staff. It was composed of 12 GTO systems plus GTO-DF (down-fill) modules for sides, 12 + 12 DBS 18-2 sub-bass units, 4 + 4 infra-sub LAB 21 HS and 6 front-fill comprised of 2 Mantas 28 each.
Angelo Catoni, owner of Emporio on Stage, comments: “For the main PA we installed 12 GTO + DF (down-fill
  1. Production companies’ double act for SA’s Got Talent
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  4. First Thai installation for new Nexo Geo array
  5. Adamson covers every seat at Beijing’s Bird’s Nest
  6. MultiDyne adds Polish distributor
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