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12 August 2025

Croatia - The 2025 Pula Film Festival – staged in spectacular Pula Arena, the world’s only remaining Roman amphitheatre with its four side towers fully preserved – had some extra magic added with Robe moving lights, part of a design by Emil Koller to support the movie programme.

This was the 72nd edition of this landmark event, running from 10 to 17 July 2025; it saw an increase in visitor and audience numbers, and more participants from the Pula PRO industry programme for film professionals and students maximising the professional networking and education opportunities.

Emil has lit the event – including opening and closing ceremonies – for the last 20 years, and in that time has seen numerous changes, especially as the technology has developed. The opening ceremony was broadcast live on Croatia national television’s HRT1 channel.

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12 August 2025

Canada - From sold-out arena shows to major festival stages, a wave of Canadian country music is sweeping the continent - and behind the sound of some of its biggest stars is FOH engineer Jordan Waller and his trusted Allen & Heath dLive C1500.

The 31-year-old FOH engineer from Langley, British Columbia is the sonic force behind Josh Ross, the 2025 JUNO Award winner for Country Album of the Year. With a resume that now includes the Reklaws, Johnny Orlando, Jess Moskaluke, Dallas Smith, and Tyler Joe Miller, Waller has become one of the most in-demand engineers in Canada’s booming country scene.

At the centre of Waller’s touring setup is Allen & Heath’s compact and powerful dLive C1500, a console that he says checks every box. “There’s no other console this small that does what it does,” said Waller. “I can run 128 input

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12 August 2025

Germany - Set against the scenic backdrop of the Ohmbachsee lake in western Germany, Iron Fest Open Air has quickly earned its reputation as one of Europe’s most exciting boutique metal festivals. With a focus on top-tier curation and high-quality production, this year’s edition once again pushed the bar, especially when it came to sound.

To meet the festival’s technical demands, Iron Fest’s longtime audio partner, SPV Neuschwander, selected the HK Audio Cosmo Line Array System to provide sound reinforcement across the weekend. Known for their close relationship, the SPV team recently attended an HK Audio Cosmo demo and were impressed by the system’s flexibility, reliability and sonic character.

“We had complete trust in the Cosmo system,” said Karsten Neuschwander, Iron Fest’s technical producer. “It prov

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12 August 2025

USA - Situated at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) in Murfreesboro, The Murphy Centre - home to the university’s men's and women's basketball and track teams - recently commissioned a new Martin Audio WPS line array system, after a long gestation period, dating back several years.

The contract was won by the experienced Nashville-based Spectrum Sound, which has been providing audio production services to customers since 1979 and has lately been turning increasingly to Martin Audio for its installed sound solutions.

The arena’s outdated PA system had reached end-of-life after years of patchwork fixes. To deliver modern performance and reliability, Spectrum Sound was tasked with designing a new solution. Key goals included consistent coverage, high speech intelligibility and full-range musical reproduction across the 11,520-seat venue. With

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12 August 2025

UK - When Nottingham Trent University opened its new London campus, the goal was to give students access to real-world, working environments. That meant building an AV infrastructure capable of supporting everything from live music and content creation to eSports and broadcasting.

Luc Saint Martin, technical manager for the site, was responsible for making it all work. “We run a mix of courses - music performance, production, broadcast, digital content. We needed to send and receive a wide range of signals across the building,” Luc explains. “Sometimes point-to-point, sometimes networked. Van Damme gave us the flexibility we needed to make that possible.”

Van Damme cables are now integrated throughout the building, connecting live rooms, recording studios, performance spaces, control rooms and post-production suites. This isn’t a new relati

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12 August 2025

USA - The City of Lakeland in Miami Beach, FL celebrated its inaugural Freedom Festival with a full-scale community event that brought together more than 2,000 residents for live music, food, and fireworks at the new Soccer Annex at Lakeland Preparatory School. To ensure the success of the city’s first large-scale Fourth of July celebration, Lakeland enlisted Memphis-based production company ProductionOne, led by CEO Kiley Butler, to manage full production - including critical sound reinforcement for the event’s headline band, regional favourite Landslide.

While the event site was not exceptionally wide, it extended deeply, with scattered food truck generators creating persistent ambient noise. On top of that, the logistical layout was being shaped in real time, with teams adapting to the space for the first time. The challenge was clear: delive

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12 August 2025

Spain - To mark Zara’s 50th anniversary, British artist and designer Es Devlin was invited to create a gift for the city where the brand was born: a 20-minute immersive experience housed in a newly reimagined dome at the top of Mount San Pedro in A Coruña, Spain. 50 Songs of the Sea, open to the public from July through October, invites guests into a custom-built environment that blends film, music, poetry, and kinetic architecture, all framed by a fully immersive sound experience designed by Auditoria.

Auditoria were brought on board by producers LarMac and Es Devlin Studio to design and deliver the spatial audio system and show control for the installation, working in close collaboration with Polyphonia (music and sound design content), VYV (video systems), WonderWorks (technical production), and others.

“It’s a beautiful piece of w

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12 August 2025

UK - Sound designer and car sound recording engineer Chris Jojo was tasked recently with capturing high-speed audio from a rare Ford RS 200 Group B rally car at BGM Motorsport, which followed a high-speed recording session at Millbrook Proving Ground’s Mile Straight circuit. To ensure the precise detail needed for such specialised applications, Jojo opts for his trusted collection from DPA Microphones.

“I’m obsessed with delivering a visceral, true-to-life racing experience. It’s not just about creating effects, it’s triggering memories and sensations,” says Jojo. “It’s sound design on the ragged edge of engineering, physics and raw emotion. That low-end rumble, the high-frequency scream, the way the exhaust echoes off a tree line - I want to put you there. Using DPA microphones allows me to isolate and reproduce the complex layers of automot

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12 August 2025

Europe - Audio-Technica’s ATUC-50 Digital Discussion System is now supported in MVI Audiovisual’s EasyConf software ecosystem, adding customisable control and flexibility to the popular conferencing solution. The Netherlands-based developer’s software suite includes EasyConf, EasyCam and EasyConf Connect, providing a comprehensive solution for preparing, managing, streaming and recording meetings with both in-person and remote attendees.

With recent installations at Radboud University, Nijmegen and Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the ATUC-50 and ATUC-IR are designed for straightforward plug-and-play functionality with the choice of wired or infrared wireless systems (or combination of the two). Both options provide 24-bit/48kHz uncompressed digital audio for natural-sounding voice reproduction – wired and wireless microphone discussion units can be

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12 August 2025

Europe - PPDS, the exclusive global provider of Philips Professional Displays and complementary solutions, has announced the latest structural updates to its EMEA sales and global marketing management teams, with the promotion of Jae O Choi Park and Ron Cottaar to lead the company’s amplified growth ambitions.

Jae O Choi Park, who joined PPDS as European sales director in 2022, has been officially promoted to the newly created position of EMEA commercial head, joining Angela Lin, Jason Wu, and Rosa Chiu, the commercial heads for US and LATAM, for China, and for APA and India respectively. Jae, who has held the role on an interim basis since 2024, will now officially oversee all European sales and support activities.

Ron Cottaar will now serve as head of global marketing, leading his teams around the world and devising new strategies to expand PPDS

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12 August 2025

Irish Connections - Singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran has surprised fans by playing a number of original songs and Irish tunes during a music and arts festival in Wexford town. The hitmaker played alongside Irish bands Amble, BIIRD, Beoga and Aaron Rowe in The Sky and The Ground pub as part of Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann. Brought up in Suffolk, the Galway Girl singer's father hails from Belfast, and in June Sheeran announced that he identifies culturally as Irish. The festival will be held in Belfast in 2026.

Country Music - A new soundtrack has started to rumble across Britain's green and pleasant pastures. A number of dairy farmers have started to play music to their cattle in a bid to improve their welfare and, possibly, the quality of their produce. The trend has gone viral on TikTok, with videos - from across the world - fet

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11 August 2025

UK - Polygon Live, a 360-degree immersive audio company that produces listening solutions to live music experiences, held its first UK event this spring, calling on Britannia Row Productions in London before replicating the level of service in North America with LD Systems in the build-up to Bonnaroo Music & Art Festival.

Since 2017, Polygon Live has been working closely with L-Acoustics and a team of spatial audio engineers, and when a three-day event, Polygon Live LDN, was conceived for the Italian Terraces at London's Crystal Palace Park, Britannia Row Productions became the organisation's chosen audio rental partner.

"I've always been really interested in what high-quality audio is, and how it can be experienced," begins Polygon CEO, Nico Elliott. "One of the things that triggered my intrigue was listening to quadrophonic so