Projects

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24 October 2024

USA - Las Vegas-based independent lighting designer Gregg Maltby used an array of Ayrton fixtures and a pair of grandMA3 light consoles for Peter Frampton’s The Positively Thankful Tour, which led up to his induction ceremony at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in October. Ayrton and MA Lighting products are exclusively distributed in North America by ACT Entertainment.

OSA International in Nashville was the lighting vendor for the tour, a role they played for Frampton’s 2023 North American tour, which Maltby also designed.

“I had used Ayrton fixtures before and knew they’d be really bulletproof on the four legs of this tour,” says Maltby. “We were playing theatres, arenas and some outdoor sheds and had just two trusses up and downstage and fixtures on the floor, so we could use the rig everywhere we went. There wasn’t a lot of

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24 October 2024

USA - On their current Good Together Tour, the multi-genre band Lake Street Dive uses varied contrasts to make every show impactful and memorable. Audiences experience diverse colour palettes, striking staging and special effects elements, intriguing lyrical themes and an overall attitude that the quintet has described as “joyful rebellion”.

“One of the things the band kept saying during the lead-up to this tour, was that it’s a ‘joyful rebellion’,” lighting director Andrew Froehlich explained. “The album is also all about that feeling: there’s joy, but a little bit of sourness in there. Everything kind of sucks sometimes, but we’re here, we’re living, we’re breathing, so let’s make it better, together.”

From his spot at front of house, Froehlich makes deft and artful use of contrast to enhance the impact of every

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24 October 2024

USA - The city of Niagara Falls stands adjacent to its famous namesake and is home to 50,000 residents. The city is rich in history, culture, outdoor life, shopping, and adventure, featuring hundreds of attractions and things to do year-round. It’s also home to 5 Day Productions.

5 Day Productions is an AV integrator in western New York that focuses on providing clients with purpose-built, high-performance audiovisual solutions. Led by CEO Nathan Gambino, 5 Day Productions has been involved in several installations in and around Niagara Falls, including Niagara Community Church, Sēvā Kitchen and Bar, and Niagara Falls High School.

Gambino regularly recommends LEA Professional’s Connect Series amplifiers to meet various AV requirements, from high intelligibility to ease of use to built-in DSP. The Connect Series of two-, four-, and eight-channel

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23 October 2024

UK - Polar will stage a demonstration day for the Turbosound Manchester Series of loudspeakers at the Old Savoy Theatre, Northampton on Tuesday, 19 November.

The Turbosound Manchester Series is designed for large-scale sound reinforcement at concerts, festivals, and stadiums. It features advanced waveguide technology and custom transducers. Its modular design allows scalable configurations for indoor and outdoor venues, ensuring superior performance and reliability for touring professionals and large events.

The event will provide an opportunity for sound engineers, audio professionals, and industry peers to listen to the Manchester Series in action. Visitors will experience its sound performance, discuss specific technical features, and get hands-on experience and insight into how the Series can be deployed in a wide variety of professional audio en

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23 October 2024

UK - QuickLink has been instrumental in easing the remote production challenges of ITV Studios’ popular Saturday Night Takeaway television series.

Lifted Entertainment, part of ITV Studios, produces over 500 hours of television for UK audiences every year, ranging from Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, The Voice, Countdown, and University Challenge.

Saturday Night Takeaway is a mixture of live and pre-recorded entertainment, with gameshow-influenced segments and regular surprise interactivity with viewers, including children facing health challenges and their families.

At the remote end, which could be literally anywhere in the country, laptops were initially used with either video capture cards or webcams. To take Saturday Night Takeaway remote segments to the next lev

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23 October 2024

The Netherlands - The historic Kunstmin Theatre, a cultural landmark in the heart of Dordrecht, has undergone a communication transformation with the installation of Clear-Com's Arcadia Central Station System. The recent upgrade replaces the theatre's outdated intercom system and seamlessly connects its two locations, Schouwburg and Energiehuis, through a unified communication platform.

Kunstmin’s head technician, Bart Meester, comments: “We had been using two different systems for years – an early Clear-Com digital system, FreeSpeak II digital wireless system, combined with an analogue ASL partyline system. While these systems served us well, it was time for a modern solution.”

After careful research and multiple demonstrations, Kunstmin chose Clear-Com’s Arcadia system for its ability to integrate both wired and wireless digital communica

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23 October 2024

USA - Established in 1985, Hilarities 4th Street Theatre in Downtown Cleveland comprises a cocktail bar, VIP cabaret space and Pickwick The Restaurant – a 185-seat eatery specialising in rustic American cuisine. One of the largest comedy venues in the USA, Hilarities features a sound solution from Renkus-Heinz.

With a capacity of 400 and several internal venues to consider, Hilarities was on the lookout for a reliable and memorable sound system for the first time in 20 years. The club’s owner, Nick Kostis, contacted NPi Audio Visual Solutions, an integrator he knew he could rely on for a complete system overhaul. The project was split into three sections: Frolic Cabaret Bar, Hilarities main stage and the Martini Bar. NPi chose Renkus-Heinz’s IC Live X models, as well as the IC8 line arrays and point source C Series loudspeakers.

“I’ve used

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23 October 2024

UK - SOUL Church, one of the largest and fastest-growing churches in the UK and Western Europe, has opened a new, purpose-built auditorium in Norwich. The 1,250-seat facility features a state-of-the-art L-Acoustics Kara II line array system, designed to provide an elevated audio experience for the church's diverse congregation.

Founded in 2014 by Pastors Jon and Chantel Norman, SOUL Church has quickly become a leading faith community with over 2,500 members. The church hosts a variety of services throughout the week, from large Sunday gatherings to intimate Bible studies. The new L-Acoustics system will support these gatherings, as well as SOUL Church's annual Christmas spectacular, which attracts nearly 10,000 attendees.

"Building a new church of this scale in Western Europe is truly unique," explains Gareth Lee, of the Directional Leadership Team a

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22 October 2024

Germany - The Adele in Munich show was big in every respect. Taking place on a fully bespoke, purpose-built stage in front of a 220m x 19m LED screen backdrop (a Guinness Book of World Records holder) with a central thrust measuring 84m, the Adele Arena hosted approximately 80,000 fans each night for 10 performances in August. 

The spectacular production was Adele’s second concert residency and marked her first non-UK European concert since 2016, after which the entire site was taken down and reset to its pre-existing condition.

The creative team behind Adele in Munich spent 10-12 months working on the various aspects of this massive undertaking with everything designed around these unique performances, all of which was intended to bring the artist as close as possible to her fans in the audience.

Lighting designer, Cory FitzGeral

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22 October 2024

Poland - The Gdańsk Institute of Urban Culture is a multi-purpose venue that features an immersive experience with L-ISA technology from L-Acoustics. “Gdańsk has always been blessed with a pioneering, independent way of thinking. Everything starts here – one might say – and innovative spaces like Gdańsk Institute of Urban Culture with its L-ISA immersive experience help the community’s cultural vibrancy to flourish,” says Pawel Kuhn, marketing director at Audio Plus, which installed the new audio technology.

Housed in a converted water plant, which even features a river running underneath so that visitors can traverse via glass floors, the space is fittingly called the Kunszt Wodny (Water Art) building. The Institute creates and hosts a vast range of projects designed to promote culture and nurture the city's heritage. The building features a 50

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22 October 2024

UK - Bristol’s ArcTanGent ‘post-rock and experimental’ music festival kick-drummed its way to its Fernhill Farm location in September with headliners Mogwai and a host of alt-favourites performing amid live visual content. d&b Solutions company Production AV was challenged with supplying, rigging and operating the LED screens with all content driven by their own Hippotizer Amba+ Media Server.

To do the “infectious, thrashy rock” justice, Production AV’s Olie Goulding specified an 8m x 4.5m Desay M6 screen for the Main Stage, which was selected as the best size to fit the stage and structure. The team then coupled this with their playback and control solution with the Amba+ Media Server at its core.

“As each band was supplying their own content, the Amba+ made it easy to manage large amounts of data and provides a platform that makes

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22 October 2024

USA - The revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Sunset Blvd., directed by Jamie Lloyd, recently debuted at the St. James Theatre on Broadway with Nicole Scherzinger in the lead role.

This follows 16 weeks at the Savoy Theatre in London’s West End district, from September 2023 through this past January, where it won the Olivier Award for Best Sound Design. The winner of that award, Adam Fisher, is now reprising his role in New York, using the Fourier Audio transform.engine, a Dante-connected server designed to run VST3-native software plugins in a live environment.

Paired with a DiGiCo Quantum7T front-of-house console supplied by Masque Sound, this musical is Fisher’s third time using the transform.engine’s ability to let him access any and all plugins he needs in real time, with low latency. “I first used it on Kiss Me, Kate in April of

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22 October 2024

Germany - Set in a rock labyrinth, with certain upstage scene elements offset at heights up to 25m above the main stage area, Wunsiedel’s Luisenburg Festspiele, on Germany’s oldest outdoor stage, turned to TiMax SoundHub to create intelligible immersive audio for every seat in the 2,000-strong audience, via sophisticated object-based soundscapes rendered by the platform’s dynamic delay-matrix processing.

System sound designer, David Horn, maintains four TiMax SoundHub show control systems at his disposal, but used a single 64-channel unit activated for seamless real-time vocal localisation driven by a new TiMax TrackerD4, recently purchased from the TiMax German distributor, Pro-Audio Technik.

Eight TiMax Tracker sensors, some mounted on trees and even rocks, covered the 38m-wide and 25m deep performance area, complete with one section of stage

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22 October 2024

Germany - The lighting for Adele’s record-breaking Adele in Munich residency featured over 250 Robe Forte moving lights, split into 223 iForte LTXs used for multiple key lighting positions for the artist and 36 iFortes dedicated to lighting the band.

13 Robe iBolts were also part of the lighting aesthetic developed by Cory FitzGerald and the creative team, led by show director Kim Gavin, to embrace all the challenges and demands of this epic proportioned show by the global superstar. All lighting equipment was supplied by UK-based Neg Earth Lights and the screen was constructed by Solotech.

The 10 blockbusting shows took place over five weekends during the month of August 2024, and were production directed by Paul English. The performances were enjoyed by 730,000 people, also breaking the record for the highest attendance of any ‘concert residenc

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22 October 2024

Albania - Green Coast is a luxury tourist retreat located in the resort of Palasë. Known as the Albanian Riviera, and overlooking the Ionian Sea, it is also a popular recreational hub, with a number of bars and restaurants.

One of these is the latest LAST, run by restaurateurs Revo Hospitality Group (RHG). Described as a “one-stop shop for food and beverage experiences, providing something for everyone from daytime dining, nightlife and events” it recently turned to Martin Audio’s local distribution partner, Prosound for a sound system installation. This was after they had successfully carried out other work for the Group (including SALT restaurants, and Lift Steak & Rooftop Bar).

Having used the Prosound/Martin Audio combination successfully on previous installations, RHG had no need to change a winning formula. Tasked with reinforcing a

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22 October 2024

Europe - Onboard reliability is key for Norwegian singer-songwriter and record producer Marie Ulven Ringheim’s indie pop project, Girl in Red. The latest tour has seen the band grow, not only in size, but venue capacity. Larger venues meant higher complexity and production values, and sound engineers Kris Derry and Matt Wickens knew they needed the most stable equipment available, that also sounded great and could withstand the rigours of worldwide touring. For them, only DiGiCo could fit that bill, and the two Quantum 338s, KLANG:DMI, and Fourier Audio transform.engine, all provided by Entec Sound and Light, have been working for Girl in Red across the world in arenas and at festivals ever since.

Derry mixes at the front of house position. He has been with the band since 2019, and has witnessed a huge change in the way they tour.

"When I started,

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22 October 2024

UK - Specialist real estate development company, Long Harbour, recently added two new urban developments to its growing portfolio: The Sessile in Tottenham, North London and Riverstone Heights in Bromley-by-Bow, East London. Both developments are residential co-living spaces, where apartment residents enjoy access to shared amenities for life, work and play.

London-based systems integrators, Tateside, were approached by Long Harbour to complete the integration of user-friendly AV systems throughout both developments.

“We’ve worked with the Long Harbour group on and off for several years,” reflects Joby Morris, project manager at Tateside. “In the past, we’ve designed systems for other Long Harbour projects, but this was our first time working on a project of this scale with the client. Whilst there are differences between the two sites, it

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21 October 2024

Poland - Theatre Muzyczny (Musical Theatre) in the seaside city of Gdynia on Poland’s north coast is the largest musical theatre in Poland, with three stages able to accommodate over 1,580 people.

Also known for its world-class performances and high production values, the venue has recently invested in 43 Robe Forte moving lights, which are rigged in its 1,070-capacity main stage venue. These were supplied by Robe’s Polish distributor, Prolight, who won a competitive tender to supply the new tech.

Bartosz Wolak has worked at the Theatre for the last 11 years as chief LX and head of lighting, a multiplexing role that also encompasses designing and operating the lights for their own productions. He and his lighting team of eight were instrumental in choosing Robe for this major technical upgrade that ensures Theatre Muzyczny will continue presentin

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21 October 2024

Poland - Sound provider Gigant Sound/Letus, Europe’s largest Outline GTO inventory holder, was once again entrusted with delivering the sound for the National Festival of Polish Song in Opole. Along with the Sopot Festival, it ranks as one of the two most important cultural events in Poland, celebrating the achievements of Polish songwriters and performers over the past year.

The festival takes place in the Millennium Amphitheatre, a venue where every Polish artist aspires to perform. This site has hosted the event since 1963, making it one of the oldest European festivals.

Over the decades, it has seen the rise of numerous renowned Polish artists from various generations and genres, including Maryla Rodowicz, Marek Grechuta, Zbigniew Wodecki, and Justyna Steczkowska. The festival not only marks the start of summer each year with

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21 October 2024

Europe - Schoko Pro in Wiesbaden recently organised a corporate event at the Stockholm Exhibition Centre. For the lighting of the entire day's celebration, involving both conference and gala spaces, the team led by project manager Joe Wippel used Claypaky’s compact Midi-B Wash/Beamlight.

300 moving lights fitted with 19x40W LEDs replaced an older LED wash light of the same size supplied by a different manufacturer and used for this same event in previous years.

Jens Wetterkamp of NicLen, a dry-hire company in Dortmund, suggested that Schoko Pro try Claypaky's Midi-B. “As soon as I looked at the technical data sheet I realised that this solution was exactly what we were looking for. Then, once on site, the projector took us by surprise in several different ways: it is lightweight, bright, extremely stylish, generates delightful colours and has an

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21 October 2024

France - Young people from around the world participated in the 47th annual WorldSkills Competition in Lyon.

Founded in the aftermath of WWII when there was a global shortage of skilled workers, WorldSkills is dedicated to promoting vocational education. The 2024 edition of this biannual event fulfilled this mission in style.

Beyond being enriched by the exchange of ideas and knowledge, however, participants and guest from 70 countries left WorldSkills energised by the uplifting mood that resonated throughout Parc Olympique Lyonnais stadium during the closing ceremonies.

Enhancing this inspirational aura and taking its energy to a new level was the production design by Frédéric (Aldo) Fayard working with set designer Simon Fouillet, and lighting-multimedia designer Theo Broche Cannone, along with the rest of the team at Concept K that featu

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21 October 2024

UK - Tiger Bay, one of London’s late-night shisha lounges, has continued its expansion with the opening of a new venue in Enfield. This new location marks the brand’s fourth UK branch and its seventh internationally.

With this new venue, Tiger Bay wanted to create an environment that easily shifted from a dining experience to a lively party destination. As the evening progresses and guest DJs take over, the space needed to deliver ‘an immersive sound experience that elevates the entire atmosphere’. To meet these requirements, a quality, scalable sound system was essential – leading Tiger Bay to KV2.

“The client reached out to us via word of mouth, bringing a set of detailed drawings,” explains Toby Jones, AV designer at Middlesex Sound & Lighting, the team responsible for the sound system installation. “They were looking for a dis

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18 October 2024

UAE - Sphere Entertainment Co and the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi have announced that they will work together to bring the world's second Sphere to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

“The vision for Sphere has always included a global network of venues, and today’s announcement is a significant milestone toward that goal,” said James L. Dolan, executive chairman and chief executive officer, Sphere Entertainment. “Sphere is redefining live entertainment and extending the reach of its transformative impact. We are proud to collaborate with DCT Abu Dhabi to develop Sphere in their city.”

H.E. Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, chairman of DCT Abu Dhabi, said: “We are excited to bring Sphere to Abu Dhabi in partnership with Sphere Entertainment, providing our residents and visitors with an extraordinary new form of entertainment. S

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18 October 2024

USA - Bob Marley was larger than life, and the sheer scale of The Marley Brothers: The Legacy Tour reflected that. The recent outing, featuring five of his sons - Ziggy, Stephen, Julian, Ky-Mani and Damian - boasted a total of 19 musicians, singers, and one Rastafarian flag-waver onstage for the tour, which kicked off in Vancouver and concluded in Miami in early October.

The Legacy Tour is notable in part because it marked the first time that the siblings have performed together on the road in two decades. Monitors alone required two engineers manning two consoles - both DiGiCo Quantum338 desks - in addition to a Quantum852 used at front of house.

The three desks collectively shared three SD-Racks with 32-bit Stadius pre-amp cards on an Optocore loop, with one SD-Rack on the secondary loop at front of house providing AD/DA conversio