Robe - LEADERBOARD - Feb 2025
PLASA Show 2025 - Banner - June-Aug 2025

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USA - Blue Microphones has announced the wide availability of Reactor, a multi-pattern, large diaphragm condenser microphone.

"Reactor takes microphone technology and design to the next level, combining Blue's high-quality sound capture with intuitive pattern switching and physical microphone design," said John Maier, CEO of Blue Microphones. "With Reactor, we are excited to offer multiple patterns and high-end audio capture to a wider audience, along with making multiple mic setups more accessible."

Drawing from the design of Blue's B6 capsule, Reactor's capsule technology delivers a full sonic signature with a detailed top end, texture mids and a full bottom end. Reactor is built upon Blue's premium large diaphragm, condenser capsule design, along with a cu

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Ukraine - Each year, Swedish cosmetics giant Oriflame holds a directors meeting for its leading team from the Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus. This year, 6000 people gathered at Kiev's International Exhibition Centre where Eurovision 2008 winner Dima Bilan performed beneath a large Martin rig.

Despite the large size of the venue, set designer Nik Vishnevetski and lighting designer Dimitri Pruidze's sought to create a comfortable atmosphere and as Pruidze has worked with Bilan before, the Russian star was confident the design would meet his standards.

For the main stage rig, Pruidze chose MAC 2000 series fixtures while a 12 m high by 26 m long truss housed MAC III Profiles and MAC 2000 Wash XBs for powerful beam effects and position washes. The front truss also held MAC 2000 Profiles for gobo projection onto set pieces along with MAC 2000 Washes to front wash up to 100 performers

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Australia - Vivid Sydney is a festival of light, music and ideas that includes large-scale light installations and projections through to music performances and the holding of conferences and seminars on ideas and creativity. First held in 2009, Vivid Sydney has become Sydney's major winter festival which lights up different parts of the city after 6pm, including the Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay and The Rocks.

From light 'graffiti' on the Museum of Contemporary Art to live fire shows, more than 200,000 visitors experienced the festival this year.

One of the most popular of the light sculptures that were part of the Festival was Immersion designed by Martin Bevz and Kathryn Clifton. Consisting of LED tubes in a semi-circle, the sculpture invited the viewer to 'play' with them by reflecting their movement through the installation via a live video relay of still and dynamic

LSi 40 - Banner - July-Nov 2025

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USA - Turning their temporary theatre into a classroom for an afternoon, the Royal Shakespeare Company invited guests to learn about the development of their Lightlock technology for moving light fixtures and discover how it can be used in their own projects at New York's Park Avenue Armory.

Presented by the head of lighting for the RSC, Vince Herbert, the discussion covered the evolution of theatre lighting design from Shakespeare's times up to the present day and how designers have overcome the technological challenges presented by each step forward in lighting science. Attendees, covering the spectrum from designers, consultants, to users and programmers, were able to see Lightlock in action as well as tour the company's portable version of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

The RSC Lightlock's revolutionary technology offers designers never before available flexibility in the

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UK - Adlib's specialist installation division has completed the design, supply and commissioning of an L-Acoustics' XTi sound system at the new Chapel of the Smithton-Culloden & Nairn Free Church, located just east of Inverness in the Scottish Highlands.

The weekly main Chapel worship services frequently draw capacity attendances of up to 400 people, and they required a dynamic audio system to provide complete room coverage for spoken word services, AV presentations and worship group musical performances.

Keen on utilising the latest and highest quality communications technology to reach out to its congregation, Smithton technical manager David Eglinton and other church committee members had also heard the fantastic audio results of L-Acoustics in other venues, and wanted to cost up an L-Acoustics solution for Smithton.

Eglinton contacted L-Acoustics' UK, whose technical man

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UK - Stageco and Tait Technologies are further cementing their European strategic alliance by exhibiting together at this year's PLASA exhibition from 11th - 14th September 2011.

The two companies opened a joint London office in May, building on years of working alongside each other across a range of projects, and will be sharing a stand together for the first time.

"The joint approach will highlight Stageco and Tait Technologies' vast experience supplying the event industry, and will offer the production sector the opportunity to network with key staff that will be available to discuss engineering solutions and future projects," says the company.

Stageco and Tait, respectively, supply staging solutions and scenic motion technology, including to major projects such as Take That's record breaking Progress Tour, U2's 360° tour and Batman Live.

The two companies

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UK - After Germany , United States and Italy , Outline's large-format line-source system will be on show in London , on stand G35 at the PLASA Show, from 11-14 September.

The result of a positive two-year cooperation between Outline and some of the world's best-known rental companies, the first GTO - Grand Touring systems featured on high-profile concerts and tours, initially in the USA and then Europe. Those systems were not prototypes, but already standard production models, the same as those officially presented in Frankfurt just four months ago.

At PLASA 2011 the Italian company is unveiling its GTO-DF (down-fill). This is an element that is mechanically compatible with GTO and conceived and designed with a sole aim: providing audio coverage for the first rows of the audience in every type of event at which GTO systems are used. The GTO-DF uses six: four 8-inch mid-woofers

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UK - Three grandMA2 light consoles were specified by lighting and visual control specialists FIX8 as the most flexible, reliable and expedient solution to run the production lighting and video at the 2011 iTunes Festival.

The month-long, high profile event was staged at London's Roundhouse venue in Camden Town, featuring 62 international artists over 31 days including Coldplay, the Foo Fighters, Adele, Linkin' Park, Paul Simon and many, many more. The action was broadcast on TV and radio and streamed live on the internet.

The three grandMA2 consoles were networked together. One ran lights, one ran video/visuals and the third was used as a programming facility running MA Lighting's visualiser software grandMA 3D, and also as a 'hot' backup. MA Lighting UK's office supplied technical and on-site service and support to the FIX8 crew who were led by Neil Trenell and Jamie Baker.

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Serbia - The fast growing Exit festival is staged at the Petrovardin Fortress in Novi Sad on the banks of the River Danube in Serbia, and this year saw over 100 Robe moving lights used extensively to light two of the largest stages.

An impressive line-up of international artists included Jamiroquai, Nick Cave, Pulp, James Zabiela, Fedde le Grand, Underworld, Marco Cariola, Beirut, Laibach were enjoyed by over 100,000 people over four days, with the Festival welcoming its two millionth visitor over the weekend. Some performances were also broadcast live on national television, adding an extra pressure to the production lighting and visuals teams.

Lighting, audio and scenic LED screen for Exit 2011 was supplied by locally based Studio Berar. They have been supplying cutting edge production equipment to the festival since it started in 2000, and have also been using Robe products

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UK - Ghost has returned in the form of a West End musical. Combining live acting and music with complex lighting, video and special effects, the show's sound designer Bobby Aitken specified a DiGiCo SD7T for Front of House mix requirements, which has allowed the team to stretch its remit to handling more than the audio.

Directed by Tony Award-winning Matthew Warchus, the show opened in July at the Piccadilly Theatre and is currently booking through until January next year. Working closely with associate Simon King and Ghost's head of sound, Ben Evans, Aitken designed a system that had to work very closely with the other production disciplines.

"The SD7 is more of a production hub than just an audio mixer on this show," he says. "It does so much. Of course it mixes the band, the vocals and audio streams from various playback machines, but it also serves as

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Belgium - Even while the news of the stage collapse tragedy in Indiana was still being digested by a shocked production industry, the almost unbelievable news of another stage collapse in Belgium reaches us - again the result of a severe storm, and with reports of five fatalities, as of Friday morning, and over 70 others injured.

Although they had not yet been named, it has been reported that the five dead are all Belgians: four died at the scene and one died later in hospital.

Video footage recorded at the Pukkelpop Festival, at Hasselt, Belgium, yesterday shows the site being struck by very heavy wind and rain prior to the collapse of the stage. The storm hit at around 6pm local time. Belgian news reports have said that the strong winds uprooted trees which then smashed into the stage structure: photography from the aftermath of the storm seems to show trees amid the stage d

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UK / Belgium - ArKaos has chosen PLASA 2011 to launch its radical new network protocol, Kling-Net.

Kling-Net has been designed to allow the distribution of real-time video data to remote display devices, such as LEDs or LED panels, over Ethernet.

"Many basic and first time users are afraid of using LED lighting because of the complexity of networking and control issues," says ArKaos CEO, Marco Hinic. "Traditionally, using and networking LED lighting has required a high level of technical knowledge which has been a deterent for many. We wanted to remove all this complexity and replace it with a simple to use protocol which automatically takes care of the magic numbers for the user."

Kling-Net uses a Media Server to do all the work to make operation simplicity itself. It adds a layer of 'intelligence' to even the most simple LED device and enabling it to ta

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Germany - Creative production agency Drive Productions has provided a new 4D installation for Polo Ralph Lauren, to support the launch of the brand's new 'Design Your Own Polo Shirt' collection. The atrium of one of Europe's largest luxury department stores, the KaDeWe in Berlin, has been taken over for the entire month of August, with a bespoke 4D digital arts installation from Drive Productions running six times a day.

Creative Technology (CT) is on hand to assist in the 4D mapping process. Working from Drive Productions' brief and drawings detailing the venue's limitations and the production restrictions of the pillars positioned in the middle of the floor, CT provided three Barco FLM R20 projectors, complete with lenses and fibre to feed the projectors from Drive's D3 processor.

Overnight rigs between the store shutting on the Saturday evening and the installation needing

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UK - Having secured a major presence in the late night high street bar and club market over several decades, Middlesex Sound & Lighting (MSL) are showing no signs of letting up.

For the past three years, they have been working with owner / operator Franco Lumbar, whose portfolio includes Club Essence in Kingston and the Pink gentleman's club in Windsor; however the most significant has been the recent renovation of Club Vanilla, situated at Windsor's Royal Arcade.

MSL project manager Bradley Watson says that wherever possible the audio distribution will be placed in a digital BSS Soundweb London environment to preserve signal fidelity and increase flexibility and processing power; Club Vanilla is no exception.

Club Vanilla had been operating from its subterranean site for a number of years before MSL were called in to overhaul the venue's lighting and audio system.

Followi

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UK - Brighton-based Traction Sound will be exhibiting its SDS loudspeaker range on AC Entertainment Technologies Stand (1-E10) at the PLASA show.

The company's SDS sound systems uses "the latest technology to deliver accurate sound reproduction at high SPL. The results are heavy duty loudspeakers that sound and look great".

The SDS Horn uses an array of soft dome tweeters producing the same energy as a compression driver from a much larger source area. Replacing compression drivers excludes the inherent air distortion (wave steepening) and diaphragm break up common to pro-audio loudspeakers. This gives the SDS Horn exceptional clarity, balance and control, says the company.

Paul Atherton, pro audio sales manager at Traction Sound's main partner RW Salt comments, "We're used to a lot of product demonstrations but when the Traction Sound guys started showing us

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USA / UK - As part of a multi-million dollar renovation of the World Cruise Centre at the Port of Los Angeles, Electrosonic has designed a new audio, video and show control system, crafted digital signage, created a kids-friendly videowall and installed a zoned sound and paging system.

The Port of Los Angeles is one of the busiest cruise ports on the West Coast, with Disney Cruise Line and other major cruise lines calling at the World Cruise Centre. Electrosonic was tasked with the design of an audio, video and show control system that would meet the needs of the Port of Los Angeles and the cruise lines operating out of Berth 93. Once the design was approved by all parties, Electrosonic engineered, manufactured, installed and programmed the new system.

"One of the main challenges was scheduling", says project manager Guy Fronte. "As is often the case, a cruise s

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UK - Pharos Architectural Controls has announced the new Pharos Touch Panel Controller. The TPC is an advanced, standalone, solid state lighting controller with an integrated 4.3" customisable touch screen, 512 channels of eDMX output and vast interfacing potential all over a single PoE network connection.

Programmed in Pharos Designer, the TPC has the same advanced playback and show control engine as the popular and award winning Pharos Lighting Playback Controllers. Over an Ethernet network it can interface with other Pharos controllers, button panels and remote devices. The companion Interface Editor application allows you to build themed user interface pages, creating and organising multiple pages of buttons, sliders and colour pickers to suit the installation and customer needs.

The wall-mounting design features a magnetic overlay within the plated bezel to produce a

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UK - When Know1 Production, specialists in the integration of lighting and video for live performance, were asked to design DJ Kissy Sell Out's Wild Romance tour, it was to White Light that they turned to provide the show's touring lighting rig - featuring a core of 16 Martin MAC 101 moving LED fixtures.

From the brief from Kissy Sell Out, Know1's Matthew Pitman and Cy Dodimead realised they needed a design that was "pretty adaptable but quite technically advanced". To achieve this, they designed a pixel-mapped video screen background formed from Martin LC video panels, surrounded by vertical booms loaded with MAC 101s. The show was controlled from a Martin M1 console and Maxedia Compact media server, the system configured so that the lights could be operated manually or switched to mimic the video screen.

"Both Cy and I have grown up working with White L

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UK - Video projections co-designed by Nina Dunn from UK creative agency Knifedge will feature prominently in the headline show at this year's Edinburgh International Festival - a production of Richard Strauss' spectacular opera Die Frau Ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow).

This epic production from St Petersburg's renowned Mariinsky Opera is masterminded by two British artists, stage director Jonathan Kent and production designer by Paul Brown. The play contrasts an imaginative spirit world with the stark reality of human existence.

Dunn's video designs are key elements in evoking the mystery and beauty of the spirit world. From a technical perspective, the rig consists of one 20K Christie front of house projector and four on-stage Barco DML 1200 moving head projectors. The show, originally plotted on a Grand MA and run on the Catalyst media server, has been re-p

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UK - JoeCo Limited is now shipping the new BBR64-MADI version of the Blackbox Recorder. Designed for audio acquisition and capturing live performance, the recorder enables multi-channel audio to be captured directly to a USB2 drive, in Broadcast WAV format, without the need for a computer.

Based on the tried and tested BlackBox Recorder design, the BBR64-MADI records / replays up to 64 channels of MADI data while still occupying just one unit of rack space. The recorder can capture the full 64 channels at standard sample rates, with double sample rate MADI recording (up to 96kHz) also accommodated. The unit sports both coaxial and optical MADI connections for interfacing with any MADI equipped console or other equipment. Additionally, it caters for 56-channel legacy MADI and can record a further 8 channels of analogue (balanced line in) for capturing the audience reaction or gen

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UK - Capital FM's Summertime Ball at Wembley Stadium was the first major outing for LS-Live's new modular Space Roof stage system.

Keith Wood of promoter AEG and production manager Sarah Hollis of Production North hailed the installation "a huge success", with Hollis stating it was the fastest build she had witnessed of a stage of such size at Wembley.

The 23m wide stage hosted performances by JLS, Jennifer Lopez, The Wanted, Nicole Scherzinger, Ne-Yo, Katy B, Cee Lo Green and Enrique Iglesias.

The stage included side wings to accommodate one of the biggest video screens that Wembley has seen (provided by XL Video), PA supports for speaker hangs (supplied by Adlib Audio) and incorporated specific loading points as requested.

LS-Live introduced the Space Roof to the UK earlier this year, following their merger with Acorn Event Solutions. Acorn's Andy Nutter, who i

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