USA - Charlotte Sports Park earned first place in USA Today's Readers' Choice Awards for Best Spring Training Facility, an honour it owes in large part to a $27m renovation in 2009 that gave the park every accommodation for which a baseball fan could hope.

In an effort to further enhance the amenities of this facility, local A/V integration firm DB Sound Systems of Punta Gorda, Florida along with Crossman Electrical Services, Inc., stepped in before the 2015 Spring Training season with a new sound reinforcement system centred on Ashly Audio processing, amplification, and user control, along with distributed Community loudspeakers. During the regular season, the new sound system will support the minor league Charlotte Stone Crabs.

Inputs to the new system include Shure wired and wireless microphones and a Denon CD/MP3 player. A powerful Ashly ne24.24M Protea modular di

Africa - December 4th 2015 saw an audience of over 500,000 people attend an all night concert of gospel music in Lagos, Nigeria. This was the 10th annual concert in the popular Experience Series, which sees Lagos-based church House on the Rock bring together some of the biggest names in gospel music from Africa, the US, and the UK to perform on the same stage for 10 hours of music.

For the third consecutive year, London-based production company Subfrantic Production Services Limited was there, working alongside local suppliers and technicians to help deliver a world class event.

This year Subfrantic supplied technical staff to handle FOH and stage audio, patch, stage video, broadcast mix, multitrack recording, lighting design and operation, stage management and production management for a list of artists including Donnie McClurkin, Don Moen, Micah Stampley, Sonnie Badu, Kim

USA - Lighting designer Jason Ayala was understandably excited by the thought of doing an event for the Global Spin Awards at Manhattan's Metropolitan West, not just because of the prestigious client, but also because of the venue itself.

Like many New Yorkers, the LD had a special affinity for the sturdy two story building at 639 W. 46th Street in the city's Hell's Kitchen neighbourhood. Prior to becoming the go-to place for chic events like Versace's NY Fashion Week Runway Show, the 12,000 square foot building had achieved iconic status in the city as the home of H&H Bagel, the world's largest bagel factory, which at one time turned out over 80,000 of the hard circular rolls a day. The closure of H&H facility after its owner was indicted for tax fraud and its subsequent rebirth as a premier event centre only enhanced its mystique.

As Ayala and his production manager Jeffry

USA - Altman Lighting has announced the appointment of Pacific Lighting Ltd as its Global Distributor of the Year for 2015. Pacific Lighting is based in Hong Kong with offices in Singapore.

"The entire team at Pacific Lighting are truly delighted to have received the award" said Hugh Chinnick, Director of Pacific Lighting. "It not only represents a great achievement by the company, but also the success of Altman's expansion into the global market."

"Pacific Lighting embodies everything you could hope for in a true industry partner" said Nicolas Champion, Altman Lighting Vice-President of Sales. "The entire Pacific Lighting team has a knowledge and integrity that is unmatched with a true passion for theatre that puts the craft and the art at the forefront."

UAE - Media Interactive Agency, under the artistic direction of Cynthia Chbat Mounir, contacted GDL to turn the presentation of a luxurious Japanese car into a show.

Under the art director's supervision, production director Mirco Resta and lighting designer Emiliano Morgia sought the best possible venue to present the car. They looked for a place that would meet the customer's specifications regarding logistics, and stage and lighting equipment, and found an appropriate venue at Studio City, Dubai.

They chose a completely soundproofed, large, fifty-foot high-room (with net area of 44 x 87 yards), which perfectly met the customer's special request: to put together impressive scenery, lights and video projections.

The venue was technically perfect and there were no constraints as regards the structures Emiliano Morgia wanted to use. This made it easy to create an "eleg

South Africa - Cape Town-based events company, GB Sound, recently invested in Allen & Heath's new dLive digital mixing system, making it the first company in South Africa to acquire one.

"As an avid fan of Allen & Heath and owner of many of their digital desks, I was keen to see what this range had to offer. I was instantly taken with the desk's look - it's spectacular. The layout, the screens, the work surface and overall design are at a different level. I knew I had to have one," says Grant Brooks, owner of GB Sound.

Having seen the desk at the Mediatech show, Brooks selected the S5000 control surface with DM64 MixRack to add to GB's hire inventory.

Established in 1999, GB Sound is an Audio Visual hire and sales company, which has worked with some of South Africa's biggest companies. A majority of the business is managing band and large event work.

GB Sound

UK - Core Lighting's battery powered LED ColourPoint uplighters and PinPoint pin-spots were the lighting fixtures of choice to illuminate two venues at the 2015 Art Couture Painswick (ACP) event.

Two separate but related elements of the event - themed An Evening With ACP - in Colour - were staged in St. Mary's Church and The Beacon Hall respectively. The Beacon Hall has been recently refurbished and is a community based multi-purpose space in the picturesque Cotswolds, UK village, while the striking St Mary's Church is a grade I listed building dating back to the 15th century.

An Evening with ACP - in Colour is a fundraising event in aid of the village's summer ACP Festival - which attracts over 5000 art and fashion loving visitors to Painswick. It is a small and classy production which includes a catwalk show revealing some of the previous ACP competition winn

USA - The influential US Hip Hop act Jurassic 5 has been on the road again with a 2015 US and European tour. Rappers Chali 2na, Akil, Zaakir aka Soup, and Marc 7, plus DJs Cut Chemist and DJ Nu-Mark bring a tight, energetic mix of vocals and decks to stage, along with some inventive toys that include Chemist's infamous record-guitar and Nu-Mark's record-necklace.

The band's Front of House engineer, Aron 'M-Sound' Mandelbaum, has been travelling with an SSL L300 live console and ML 32.32 Stagebox, using them on 18 tour dates, including five festivals.

Inputs for the main show include all vocal mics (and spare), plus the outputs from the DJ mixers. "The environment I get to work in is not only super-consistent, but I have rappers that have excellent mic technique," he explains. "So my channels come back the same way every day. The band is a kind of litmus test f

USA - Bandit Lites and PULSE Lighting recently wrapped another successful venture with Warren Haynes' Christmas Jam. Held on 12 December, the rock and blues guitarist's annual charity benefit show celebrated its 27th year and donated the proceeds to Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity, which has built 33 houses with donations from the Jam over the years.

Warren Haynes originally organized the Christmas concert to gather musicians together in his hometown of Asheville, N.C. for a marathon of good music for a good cause. This year featured artists such as the Tedeschi Trucks Band, the Doobie Brothers, Electric Hot Tuna, Dawes, Blackberry Smoke and Bruce Hornsby.

Lighting designer Paul Hoffman created a simple design consisting of four snake-like trusses in addition to a loaded front and back truss, while a circle truss hung over the audience. Additional fixtures were placed on

The Netherlands - Neushoorn (Rhino) is a new entertainment venue in the heart of Leeuwarden, a multi-functional locale in the north of the country that opened in October with Elation LED lighting rigs in several of its performance spaces.

Housing two rooms with stages along with a café, exercise and cultural production areas, and rooms for workshops, Neushoorn can host a wide range of events - dance and club nights, rock and pop concerts, and theatre and dance performances. It also serves as a school for developing talent. Its two main stages, the 350-capacity Arena and the venues largest live performance space, The Big Room, feature all-LED Elation lighting rigs, as does a small performance space in the café.

The Neushoorn lighting set-up was designed from a concept created by Klaas Visser, head of audio, video and lighting at the venue. He explains, "The

USA - Christie answered the call Monday night to bring a special experience to guests attending the world premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens by providing spectacular red carpet displays.

"Disney and Christie have been sharing projection and display ideas and innovations for several years now to provide audiences with unparalleled movie-going experiences," said Michael Kern, Disney's VP, special events production and technical services, "so there was no question regarding who we would enlist to provide spectacular red carpet displays to make this a special night for everyone attending."

The Christie team provided technical consultation at every stage of the installation, from concept creation, to pre-staging, onsite setup and delivery. To ensure this specific live setup went well and faced with an aggressive timeline, Christie pre-configured a

UK - This year, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew have been transformed into a festive wonderland, with a one-mile sparkling path offering a magical, after-dark experience. Packed with lights, festivities and vintage fairground rides, Christmas at Kew is curated by Culture Creative, who once again approached White Light to provide the lighting equipment. In order to create something unforgettable, WL drew on its extensive range of state-of-the-art lighting technology, which included the SGM G-Spot and P-5 LED Washlight.

This is the third year that Christmas at Kew has taken place and the third year in which WL has provided the lighting. Zoe Bottrell, creative producer at Culture Creative, comments, "Christmas at Kew is a really exciting event for us and we worked closely with Kew Gardens and Raymond Gubbay Ltd to create a breathtaking design within the landscape garden.&quo

Czech Republic - Powersoft has appointed Prodance as its new distributor in the Czech Republic. The experienced company, which started life in 1992 as a sales and rental agency before moving to dedicated distribution, has added the brand to its burgeoning portfolio of pro audio companies with immediate effect.

Martin Holas, Import Manager at the Prague-based company, said that Powersoft more than met their requirements after dropping their previous amplifier supplier. "We had been looking for a high power amplifier manufacturer for some time, as it represented an obvious gap in our portfolio. We had already experienced the sound and build quality of Powersoft's modules inside the active loudspeakers that we distribute, so it was not a difficult decision to make.

"On our first meeting at PL+S 2015 we discovered that Powersoft was already looking to extend its busine

UK - The new Trailblazer Live Event Rigger apprenticeship made a leap towards a 2016 summer launch following Assessment Plan approval by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

After the government approval of 59 group standards for Trailblazer apprenticeships earlier this year, the 'Live Event Rigger' working group lead the way in further developing the initiative to help more youngsters embark on careers in the live events industry. Employers who have supported the standard of the Live Event Rigger have been designing the apprenticeship over the past year.

The National Rigging Advisory Group's (NRAG) working subgroup, comprised of key industry representatives including PLASA and Blackout, helped design the assessment process to meet relevant business needs in terms of knowledge, skills and behaviours. NRAG agreed the range of assessment methods, grading a

USA - For singer-actress Ariana Grande, diamonds are definitely a girl's best friend. Lighting designer Chris Kuroda used a diamond motif for Grande's The Honeymoon Tour, deploying Clay Paky Stormys and A.leda B-EYE K20 fixtures to deliver a sparkling, jewel-like look.

The tour, Grande's first international tour, is playing 88 dates worldwide in support of her second studio album, My Everything. Kuroda, who is also lighting designer for Phish and Justin Bieber, designed the touring rig for the North American and European legs of Grande's tour as well as lighting for individual shows in Asia and South America. VER supplied the fixtures for the touring rig.

Prior to the start of the tour Kuroda sat down with Grande to discuss the feel of the show. "She really likes the look of diamonds," he says. "So we decided collectively to make the thrust diamo

Australia - TDC - Technical Direction Company is bringing Sydney-siders their large-format video projection technology to two prominent events this year.

Lights of Christmas 2015, St Mary's Cathedral: Once again, TDC has used its expertise to turn the façade of St Mary's Cathedral into a huge 75m backdrop of an imaginative representation of Christmas and what it means to Sydney. TDC created giant 17,640,000 pixel animated images using 264,000 lumens of projected light to illuminate the facade.

To manage the full HD content images, TDC's hardware needs massive processing power - two terabytes of content management, 48 cores of processing and 144 gigabytes of RAM.

"TDC projection video designers created special code and electronics so that the entire system is 'virtually wired' and controllable using an iPad device," says Michael Hassett, managing director at TDC

USA - Electrosonic recently provided audio-visual equipment and integration services for the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame when it remodelled its first-floor gallery and added a stunning interactive mobile in the Grand Rotunda. The additions are part of a two-phase renovation of the museum's galleries and public spaces.

Located in Fort Worth, Texas, the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame is the only museum in the world dedicated to honouring women of the American West, past and present. Its archives house more than 4,000 artefacts and information about more than 750 remarkable women; the Hall of Fame has 220 honourees, including author Laura Ingalls Wilder, Hollywood's Dale Evans, and Lewis and Clark's guide Sacagawea. The 33,000sq.ft museum is part of the Will Rogers Memorial Complex in the heart of the city's cultural district.

"Even though the museum

USA - Known affectionately as the 'Bud' and 'The Basketball Palace of Mid-America,' University of Arkansas' Bud Walton Arena has been the home of the UofA Razorbacks Basketball team since 1993. Over time, the 19,200-seat venue has undergone numerous upgrades. The most recent, includes a new scoreboard and an audio system driven entirely by Lab.gruppen D and C Series amplifiers - specified for their BSS integration and Lake Processing capabilities.

The project was decidedly entertainment driven, and designed to further enhance the game day experience, says UofA associate athletics director, Justin Maland. "It's not just about the game anymore, it's about entertainment, video, promotions not just playing canned music between time outs.

"Also, the configuration of the way we place fans in the arena has changed; for example, we have courtside seats we didn't have 20 ye

UK - Central Presentations Ltd (CPL) supplied full technical production and design to the high profile Global African Investment Summit (TGAIS) event in central London, which attracted over 1,000 global investors, leaders and captains of industry - including several heads of State - to Africa's premier investment summit for power, agriculture, financial services, capital markets, oil and gas and critical infrastructure sectors.

The two day conference took place in the main event space at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, a grade II listed building designed by Edwin Alfred Rickards and built in 1905-11 to commemorate the centenary of John Wesley's death, in a premium location opposite Westminster Abbey and adjacent to the Houses of Parliament!

CPL was working for Swindon-based Live Communications who managed the event production for the organiser dmg::events. CPL's proje

USA - Friday nights in the fall are a big deal at Douglas County High School in Castle Rock, Colorado DCHS, and they just became a slightly bigger deal with the adoption of an awesome Danley Sound Labs sound reinforcement system.

Two fully-weatherized Danley OS-90 full-range loudspeakers and two fully-weatherized Danley OS-115 subwoofer powered by two Danley DLA7500 processor/amps give DCHS high-fidelity sound in rain, snow, or blazing heat.

"Despite all of the excitement at Douglas County, their old sound system was pretty weak when it went in and only got worse over time," said Jeff Brotherston, chief design engineer at AV Colorado, the company that designed and installed the new Danley system.

"Intelligibility was poor, and support for music wasn't really there. They were motivated to improve the system, but their budget was tight. We looked at their sit

UK - This year, White Light has supplied the lighting equipment to more than 40 pantomimes across the UK. Amongst these is the star-studded Aladdin which is currently playing at Derby Arena. The venue, normally used as a velodrome and concert arena, has been transformed into a theatre space specifically for the show. With its strong reputation in theatre, WL was called upon to provide the lighting support on this extremely ambitious production.

Aladdin opened on 7 December and the huge space has allowed for a truly spectacular show, featuring pyrotechnics, special effects, a flying carpet and even a live band.

Alex Marshall was tasked with creating the lighting design. He comments, "Derby Arena is a fantastic facility for the city, offering everything from a gym to an Olympic certified cycle track. The Arena was also designed to provide a large capacity pe

Mexico - Banda La Trakalosa is a large, 20-member Mexican ensemble that turns to the extra impact that Elation Professional's powerful Platinum BX beam light provides when the band plays bigger venues and looks to impress larger audiences.

"The Platinum BX is now a part of the great concerts of this band," stated Edson Rivera of Elation partner Adimsa, who supplies lighting packages for many of La Trakalosa's bigger shows, including Platinum BX beam lights. "When it's a big show they want to up the production value. If it is a venue where there are 10,000 people or more then they look to make a bigger impact and the BX fixtures help them do that."

The band, whose members come from all over northern Mexico, plays a diverse blend of music from traditional to more alternative and is one of the most popular bands in Mexico. Originally only a regular act in ba

Romania - The official Bucharest Christmas Market is a tradition from 2012 taking place in the University Square from end of November throughout December with more than 60 wooden stalls hosted by merchants of handcraft and seasonal foods. To extend the Christmas atmosphere, the market also includes a 15m Christmas tree illuminated by 20,000 lights, Santa's House, daily carollers, concerts, donation of Christmas gifts for the less fortunate while surrounding buildings are illuminated in seasonal colours.

This market offers the visitors a rediscovering of Romanian arts, traditions and customs. This year also features 19 evenings packed with concerts held by renowned artists, children choirs and orchestras.

Ever since this tradition was created, SGM's partner FIVE'S International has been the technical provider of the event which is planned by Bucharest City Hall, organized wit

USA - Known simply as Pod # 2, the second phase of the Rock Lititz campus development in Lititz,PA, is a multi-tenant facility designed to attract businesses that serve the live entertainment industry. The 250,000sq.ft building will be located on 10.08 acres of the 96-acre campus. Construction of Pod # 2 at Rock Lititz is underway and aiming for a December 2016 completion.

As of groundbreaking, the facility is at 75% occupancy with nine companies committed as tenants, two of which are relocating their headquarters to Lititz.

"Joining the Rock Lititz Campus is a natural move for us. Atomic has enjoyed a 20-year relationship with industry giants Clair Global and TAIT in our hometown of Lititz. Now we'll have the opportunity to collaborate in more ways, while starting new relationships with entertainment companies moving into the area." said Daniel McPhillips, Preside

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