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UK - At the PLASA Show this year, a trio of the UK's best-known TV lighting directors will gather together for what promises to be an entertaining session on the ups and downs of the business of lighting for television.

John Watt, Mike Le Fevre and Ian Dow are all TV lighting directors who by default have specialised in different genres of television - as well as just lighting whatever comes next! They hope to be inspired by questions from the floor to explain how they attempt to keep the quality of lighting in television, whilst battling budgets and the idiosyncrasies of producers. They may well illustrate their remarks with stories of the triumphs and disasters of their careers!

Chaired by PLASA's executive director and former L&SI editor Ruth Rossington, the session will take place from 3.30-5.00pm on Tuesday 12 September, in the seminar theatre on Level Two of Earls Court.

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UK - PLASA - the Professional Lighting and Sound Association - has announced a new events strategy to drive the development of its market-leading PLASA Show and to advance its range of business and networking events. Central to this major initiative will be the roll-out of a number of satellite events, including the launch of a regional networking event in the north of England, details of which will be announced shortly.

The move will be underpinned by the launch of PLASA Events Ltd, which will implement the new strategy, and also allow PLASA to build on the success of its established PLASA Show, paving the way for a major relaunch of the event in 2007. The new division will be headed by two faces familiar to the industry: Nicola Rowland joins the PLASA team as director of events and Sophie Matthews joins as operations manager. Formerly with Clarion Events, both have wide experi

Doughty - Banner - from 6 June 2025

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Hawaii - The Maui Arts & Cultural Center's (MACC) was founded in 1994and hosts over 1,700 events a year in nine facilities.

Two of the MACC's premier venues, the 1,200-seat Harold K.L. Castle Theater and the 250-seat McCoy Studio Theater, have just been given major audio upgrades with the installation of new self-powered Meyer Sound systems. The Castle Theater's new MICA compact high-power curvilinear array loudspeakers, 700-HP ultrahigh-power subwoofers, UPJ-1P compact VariO, UPA-2P compact narrow coverage, M1D ultra-compact curvilinear array, and CQ-1 wide coverage main loudspeakers, are put to use with the aid of Meyer Sound's RMS remote monitoring system and a SIM 3 audio analyzer.

The system was installed by Docktrdave Audio, specialists in theatre sound system retrofits. Company president Dave Lawler and his partners, Craig Doubet and Eric Laliberte, saw the opportunity

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UK - UK cable specialist VDC Trading supplied a large amount of cabling to A.C. Lighting's Special Projects division, which recently installed a background audio system for the newly refurbished Wembley Arena. A.C. Lighting was contracted by Wembley London Limited through Stace Project Management to provide the background audio system for the Arena's five separate sound zones, including specification and supply of all equipment, custom-built AV racks, electrical power and data cabling, trunking, routing and programming.

The installation of the system was scheduled to take place during the final stages of the building works, so A.C. was under both budget and deadline pressure to complete all work in time for the re-opening. A.C. chose VDC because the characteristics of its cables were ideal for their requirements, plus the company was able to respond quickly to their brief, which

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UK - Top DJ, Paul van Dyk, has adopted Allen & Heath's new Xone:3D mixer-controller as the core control element in his live performance set-up. PvD has purchased two Xone:3D's, one for touring, and one installed in his studio.

"The 3D is perfect for my live set up as it's not just a mixer, it's also a controller, which means I can programme in real time using the unit's MIDI sends and returns," explains van Dyk. "As soon as I got the 3D I configured it with all my software and it worked straight away. Iuse two computers - one loaded with Scratch Live using time-coded CDs, and the other with Ableton Live and all of my sequences and elements. I also have an E-MU keyboard, which records and plays back sequences. And at heart is the 3D, controlling and syncing it all. It's liberating - I'm constructing and creating tracks on the spot, and every performanceis unique.&q

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UK - For companies involved in the sale, hire or use of radio microphones, in-ear monitoring systems, talkback systems or wireless links, then next week's PLASA '06 will be the place to be.

On the Tuesday of the Show (which runs from Sunday 10 through to Wednesday 13 at Earls Court One), BEIRG - the British Entertainment Industry Radio Group - will be hosting a Forum to inform attendees of the current situation with regards to the impending sell-off of the RF spectrum.

At present, it appears that if the industry doesn't act, the entire RF Spectrum from 470-862MHz will be auctioned to the highest bidder. The Forum is a chance for anyone affected to have their say and contribute to the debate about how the industry can preserve enough spectrum for it to continue to do what it does, in the way that it does it.

The forum moderators will be Duncan Bell of Autograph Sound recordin

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UK - The Birmingham Conservatoire, a faculty within The University of Central England, selected the summer break to undertake a major refurbishment of The Adrian Boult Hall - a refurbishment which included the first UK installation of the RCF TTL33A line array.

The hall, built in the 1970s was designed and equipped for recording orchestral concert works having a technical control room, but as an acoustic concert platform had only very limited public address equipment. The largest element of work involved sound system infrastructure and equipment. The shortcomings with the public address have now been resolved with the help of the new RCF TTL33A line array loudspeakers. Two arrays with five TTL33A segments in each and two TTS 18A sub-bass units were floor mounted rather than flown with the arrays.

The TTL33A is a compact active box with 1250W of amplification (2 x 500W + 1 x 25

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Worldwide - Like floating cities, Carnival Cruise Lines offer their passengers a lot of variety. Now grandMA's play a key role in the line's entertainment show control. "The grandMA system is an important component for technical operations in the main showroom on our ships," says Preston Bircher, entertainment technical projects manager for Carnival. "Most ships have between two and seven production shows and although they're completely different, they utilise the same basic rig and light plot. The difference is in the programming with all the moving lights and colour changers. The flexibility of the grandMA system is fantastic," he continues.

Demfis Fyssicopulos of dfdesign served as grandMA lighting programmer for Carnival's 2,052-passenger Sensation, with the next installation scheduled for the line's 2,052-passenger Fascination. "These vessels are si

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UK - When the Rose Bowl was constructed at the start of the millennium, offering a new headquarters for Hampshire County Cricket Club, it offered all the facilities expected of a modern stadium. Shaped like a circular amphitheatre, its flexible capacity of 9,000-plus rose to over 19,000 for the 2006 Twenty20 International between England and Sri Lanka. In addition to offering cricket at the highest level, the stadium also hosts rock concerts and numerous functions and conferences.

But five years after Hampshire played their first county match at the Rose Bowl, there were signs that the public address system was leaving a lot to be desired - particularly in terms of speech intelligibility and even distribution. This is vital, not only for voice evacuation purposes, but for spectators to keep up with the commentaries from the scorer's boxes.

Rose Bowl plc, the owner of Hampshire

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UK - The Rizla Unleashed Music Festival delivered a weekend of music from a breath-taking cliff-top location overlooking Watergate Bay in Newquay, UK in early August. The sold-out event, Cornwall's largest music festival, attracted 14,500 people for the weekend. Friday's headliner Feeder were joined by The Automatic, Mystery Jets, Captain and others, while Starsailor and Graham Coxon headlined the Saturday show.

Concert Sound UK was in charge of sound production and provided their new Adamson enclosures to use. Concert Sound's new T-21 Subs garnered excitement from System Tech, Andy Walker, who commented: "They deliver all that was promised and more. What a stunning sounding, innovative product!"

The sound system design was perfected by Didier Del Fitto of DV2 - Adamson Europe, who chose 24 Adamson Y10s and six Adamson Spektrix as downfills for the main arrays. A tot

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UK - Denon DJ have signed a sponsorship deal with MOBO Award-winning DJ Shortee Blitz. Nominated again for a MOBO in this year's Best DJ category Shortee remains one of the UK's most influential hip hop exponents, with two weekly radio shows on KISS FM. The DJ will be using a pair of Denon's flagship DN-S3500 CD/MP3 players on future dates around the world, and to premix his radio show.

An avowed devotee of vinyl, Shortee's signature skills of cutting and mixing have been honed over a long career. But in the new millennium he has had to face the reality of the market. "The fact is that less and less music is being pressed on vinyl these days and I needed something that would make the transition (to CD) easily. I have tried various vinyl emulation devices but they just don't have that feel."

He was urged to try Denon's flagship CD/MP3 player, the DN-S3500 by Simon Fra

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USA - Eat to the Beat flew 6 top catering crew from the UK over to Chicago to work alongside the 18 strong predominantly Chicago based team for Lollapalooza 2006. The event was produced by Capital Sports & Entertainment and Charles Attal Presents, with catering provided over 11 days on site.

For three days Grant Park was transformed into a celebration of music with fans gathering from around the world to enjoy one of the summer's most powerful line-ups including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kanye West, The Raconteurs, The Flaming Lips and more than 120 other bands.

On show days, the Eat to the Beat team were catering for 850 people, three meals a day. Menus were planned in advance to take into consideration the hot weather and the many dietary requirements. Key favourites during the festival included the full Anglo-American breakfast to cater for varying tastes of the international

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Worldwide - Marquee Audio have helped solve a logistical problem for Britannia Row Productions at the mixing desk on the current Robbie Williams Close Encounters European tour.

Faced with a large returns system, Brit Row had been amalgamating all sources at front-of-house and then running the signals via a digital matrix to create the various sends to the speaker system.

"The loudspeaker controllers were also digital input - which meant that a large number of digital channels were travelling from FOH to stage left and right," notes Marquee's digital manager, Andy Huffer. Seeking a more efficient solution, Britannia Row settled on an Optocore system, due to its simplicity and reliability.

Roly Oliver, the production company's equipment manager, says: "Optocore was always top of our list in terms of audio quality, history and configurability - and the fact that

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UK - Digidesign have completed an outstanding summer in spectacular fashion.The Reading Festival, which traditionally brings the curtain down on the UK festival season, saw the company's Venue live sound environment mixing each of the headline acts over the three nights of the Bank Holiday event.

Furthermore, Venue's D-Show console was the only digital desk used anywhere during the festival (SSE's main production system being a pair of analogue boards in the monitor and front-of-house positions).

The Friday night headliners were Scottish chart toppers Franz Ferdinand, where Parker was piloting the mix. The following night classical festival band Muse closed the show as a curtain raiser to their Autumn European tour. Marc Carolan, already a Venue veteran, was at FOH on a Skan PA-supplied D-Show while a second desk was at monitor city, under the command of Adam Taylor.

On Sund

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UK - There was something for everyone at this year's Global Gathering on the 28-29 July, and with acts such as Daft Punk and Fatboy Slim. Held at Long Marston Airfield, Stratford Upon Avon, there was a capacity crowd of 25,000 camping on Friday, and 45,000 on Saturday. Global Gathering boasted eight Primary stages (seven tents and 1 outdoor) as well as numerous sub stages, and was promoted by Angel Festivals (a joint venture by Angel Music Group and Live Nation).

Simon Barrington, production manager says: "As co-designer for the stages, and lighting designer for the site my concentration on the looks for all the stages was always going to be biased towards lighting. I have always had the belief that punters should walk away from the gig, having experienced the ultimate in audio and visual shows."

Barrington says: "My reasons for choice of fixtures were threefold

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USA / Czech Republic - Color Kinetics and Robe Show Lighting today announced a global licensing agreement whereby Robe will have access to Color Kinetics' complete patent portfolio, enabling the development and sale of its LED Series and Anolis product lines.

Robe is a 15-year manufacturer of moving light systems that are widely used in theatrical, touring, television and other entertainment applications. Its LED-based product lines apply Color Kinetics' proprietary control methods to generate millions of colours and colour-changing effects. The global license will apply to sales of Robe products in all markets covered by Color Kinetics' patent portfolio.

Bill Sims, president and CEO of Color Kinetics, says: "The entertainment lighting market was among the first to embrace intelligent LED lighting technology, and with ever-increasing LED performance, we believe that deman

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Germany - Angelo Kelly has been counting on the both compact and powerful HK Audio active PA systems, for quite some time.

Kelly recently published his first solo album I'm Ready which he is now on tour with. To make sure that the rock and pop songs reach the audience perfectly, Kelly has chosen HK Audio equipment again and this time, it's even two Actor DX systems. That's a total of 6.400 Watts out of twelve compact cabinets (four active subwoofers, four passive subwoofers, four mid/high units) which the company says, are filling up the halls with clarity and dynamics even under full load, thanks to HK Audio's DDO controller.

Kelly and his live band - as well as the quality of the Actor DX systems - can be experienced live on stage until 1 October, when final gig of the tour will take place in the Stollwerk venue in Cologne/Germany.

(Chris Henry)

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Baldwin Boxall Communications Limited will be displaying the new Vigil Eclipse2 stand-alone voice alarm/public address system at Firex North, 17-18 October, Harrogate - stand A27.

Visitors to the stand will be able to witness a demonstration of the increasingly popular Vigil CommuniCare Advance (disabled refuge system) and VIGIL FireCare (fire telephone system).The cost-effective, wall-mountable Vigil Eclipse2 voice alarm (VA) (or public address (PA)) system has the ability to handle up to seven single or four dual circuit zones. Eclipse2 contains the EVAS DSP controlled routeing matrix at its heart and, as a result, has many features. The unit, which is smaller than its predecessor (480mm x 200mm x 680mm), houses one 2U amplifier mainframe providing space for the power supply and up to two amplifiers from Baldwin Boxall's Vigil2 Class D range. Up to 128 Eclipse2s can be linked togethe

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USA - XL Touring Video is video contractor for the 58th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards on Sunday 27 September. Ken Ehrlich of Ken Ehrlich Productions brought his production team to XL in early August to work with XL's Bob Magee, Chris Mitchell, Dave Hyslop and Matt Pearson to ascertain what LED technology would be used to create a new look for this year's Awards.

Production designers John Shaffner and Joe Stewart looked at all of XL's current technologies with show producers, Renato 'Ron' Basile and Michael Seligman before deciding on three Barco I6 LED Screens for the award intro graphics and two Barco MiPix Screens that presented the supporting graphics.

John Shaffner says: "The scenic metaphor for television was pixilation. The concept of pixellation was illustrated by the MiPix which gave us 5" on centre format. It takes many pixels to make a big picture just as th

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Russia - G8 Summits, annual meetings of the leaders of eight of the world's leading industrial nations, which are hosted by the country holding the rotating year-long presidency, require an enormous logistical and technological expenditure.

The mere task of translating the numerous speeches, press conferences and communiqués into the requisite number of languages involves a huge team of translators and interpreters working under considerable time pressure for long hours.

For this year's summit in St Petersburg, the decision was taken to employ a Voice-Over-IP system - the first time one had been used at a G8. Two of the Advanced Digital Audio Matrices (ADAMs) in Moscow were expanded with the addition of RVON-8 cards, and translation stations, connected by intercom systems, established by VGTRK in various parts of St. Petersburg to ensure that live interviews, press conf

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UK - Somerset-based Opus Audio recently designed and specified a complete audio revamp of the Monkey Club club, bar and restaurant venue in Swansea. Monkey - founded eight years ago by Paul Dyke and Annabel Davey, has a relaxed, Bohemian atmosphere and a busy live entertainment programme embracing a wide range of music and styles from around the world.

The 400-capacity venue is spread across three storeys and includes two dancefloors, a chill-out room and a roof terrace bar. Monkey has become a hugely popular off-high street phenomena in the city. Opus Audio's Andy Fox worked closely with owner Paul Dyke and sound engineer Paul Cunningham to devise the right audio package for the friendly, lively and multi-layered environment at Monkey, consulting with Leisuretec Distribution's Andy Duffield.

Duffield assisted with the specification of the front end equipment, which included u

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UK / Bulgaria - Switchcraft has strengthened its international representation by appointing Sofia based AT Company to stock and supply its connectors, patchbays and cable assemblies to the broadcast and professional audio markets in Bulgaria.

Stephen Waldron, Switchcraft's director of international sales, says: '"AT Company is a well established supplier within its market place and we are very pleased to enter this new relationship that will increase the availability of our products and introduce the Switchcraft range to new customers."

(Chris Henry)

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UK - Epic Dickens tales have been the name of the game recently for the in-house designers at Autograph. They have been involved in the new productions of Nicholas Nickleby and Two Cities at Chichester Festival Theatre and Salisbury Playhouse respectively.

Nick Lidster and Matt Mckenzie designed the David Edgar version of one of Charles Dickens' greatest novels, which formed part of the 2006 Season at The Chichester Festival Theatre. Broken down into two parts, the captivating story was told in a marathon six and a half hours of wonderful ensemble theatre, accompanied by new music written by Matthew Scott.

Not content with this ample workload, Nick Lidster also found time to design Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30 in the Minerva Theatre, the studio space at the Festival Theatre. Meanwhile in Salisbury, Chris Full has designed The Playhouse's new musical produ

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UK - With its broadest agenda in the show's history, the seminar programme at this year's PLASA '06 (September 10-13 at Earls Court One) will offer an insight into technical developments, as well as addressing some of the key issues facing businesses today.

New technologies lead the way with Sunday's opening seminar - Out of Home Leisure Entertainment - considering the application of interactive and 4D technologies and the growing crossover between the themed attraction and theatre sectors.

This trend continues throughout the four days, with a range of technical seminars providing the core of the programme: sound system designers and operators of public spaces and transport networks will be interested in Intelligible Intelligibility - how to make PA and VA systems understandable and meet intelligibility standards, whilst those more focused on lighting can attend

  1. Zero 88 Spice up Luxembourg rock venue
  2. Allen & Heath consoles at worship festival
  3. Laser Safety Course
  4. DJs and VJs head to PLASA '06
  5. Clock counts down to PLASA '06
  6. PSL provides screens for Cricket Board
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