South Africa - First Love Generation, a church based in Ruimsig Roodepoort, has invested in an L-Acoustics ARCS WiFo system knowing that their ministry will, in the future, include international speakers, worship bands and become a home to equip Christians on their daily walk.
Ordained Pastors Pieter and Tilla van Tonder initially left a mainstream church in 2006, planted a church on their property with another pastoral couple in 2007, and served together for nine years. During this time, the couple obtained permission to build a church, auditorium and lecture rooms on what used to be their tennis court. In January 2016, First Love Generation was officially born. Since the new church was formally launched, the numbers continue to grow year-on-year from the original handful of people.
DWR Distribution’s Victor Vermaak has been a friend to Pastor Pieter for many yea

UK - McQueen in Shoreditch has been a feature of London’s club landscape for 10 years. Themed after the late American star Steve McQueen, the multiple award-winning venue has an overall capacity of 650, divided between two principal spaces and a 55-cover restaurant. Its strong reputation has been built on its ability to stage and attract high profile events, feature top DJs and deliver excellent hospitality.
Shoreditch continues to grow as one of the capital’s leisure industry hubs and entrepreneur Dezzi McCausland, head of design and concepts at McQueen, is aware of the need to take a progressive view in an evolving and highly competitive market. Recognising a trend towards increasingly multi-functional venues, McCausland took the decision to use the occasion of the club’s 10th anniversary to re-launch McQueen - updated, upgraded and able to deliver a wider spectrum o

UK - When Elliot Patterson from Evolve Install embarked on his third fit-out for the Kricket restaurant chain at the BBC Television Centre in White City, he worked in a new building with an industrial theme. This gave him the opportunity to suspend a series of down facing JBL pendant loudspeakers in the three open-plan zones and direct the sound away from the offices upstairs.
Owned by Will Bowlby and Rik Campbell, Kricket Television Centre is also the group’s largest restaurant to date, offering 100 covers inside and 40 outside. It features an open kitchen, booth and banquet seating, and a garden terrace with views of the studios.
Like the other two venues (in Soho and Brixton), Patterson turned to the Harman Pro audio catalogue for his solutions, sourcing the materials from their UK and Ireland distributors Sound Technology.
“It’s always nice to be invol

USA - It was still 32 days before the Cubbies kicked off the 2019 baseball season, but as one of the coldest winters in memory drew to a close, a group of 400 Windy City rock fans jump-started summer on the 20th annual Chicago Music Cruise, a weeklong Caribbean excursion on Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of The Seas.
Organised by local rock icons 7th Heaven, the cruise featured a group of leading Chicagoland bands and radio personalities. When cruise-goers weren’t walking the ship’s promenade or dining at its restaurants, they were packing its theatre to dance to a relentless procession of rock and country tunes. Keeping pace with the hard-driving music notes was a dynamic and colourful Zach Scott-designed lightshow, run with a ChamSys Maxi Wing and ChamSys Extra Wing Compact.
“Given that space is always an issue in a cruise ship environment, I wanted something wit

UK - Creative vision can often be frustrated by the limitations of technology, yet ever so quietly, UB40, with some help from Grant Hickey, Oli Metcalfe, Video Design, and the latest Notch effects software are revealing to their UK audiences that at least one technological barrier has been crossed. “Astro and Ali said to Grant, their production designer, that they wanted to ‘step it up a bit’ as far as this year’s tour was concerned; they wanted something that set it apart from other recent outings.”
As Metcalfe comments: “This was a case of right place, right time. It was an opportunity to try out some ideas I’ve been having about generative video and being creative in real-time.”
Metcalfe is video director for the tour, called in by Hickey on that ‘step-up’ initiative from Ali and Astro. “Grant and I have worked together many times before; he h

Bulgaria - On 12 January, the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv began its year as one of the two European Capitals of Culture for 2019. The opening ceremony was again under the artistic direction of Sven Sören Beyer of phase7 performing arts. For the third time, the Berlin artist collective took over the artistic design of the opening ceremony of a European Capital of Culture, and the opening show titled We Are All Colors attracted over 50,000 viewers.
The central element of the show was a 30m-high media tower in the form of a regular octagon, which had been designed and built specifically for the event. Running in a north-south direction, a 100m catwalk linked to the tower. The 360-degree light show spanned across all five levels of the entire tower, 1,500 show participants performed on five levels. The spectacular performance combined traditional Bulgarian show acts with f

USA - Tour provider Clair Global, has invested in two of SSL's newly-launched Live L550 consoles.
“We are thrilled to offer the new L550 to our clients, who are putting out some of the most demanding tours on the road today,” says Clair's account executive, Justin Weaver. “As we continue to invest in our global inventory to keep it fresh and up-to-date, adding the latest SSL consoles to our arsenal was a positive step in that direction.”
The L550s are already out with two major international acts - Childish Gambino's This Is America tour and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd's North American Saucerful of Secrets leg.
The L550 enhances SSL's previous L500 console, and boasts increased system power delivering accelerated screen responsiveness, a total of 288 processing paths, 36 Matrix outputs, and 48 VCAs. To ensure current L500 customers continue t

UK - A Martin Audio WPM loudspeaker system has taken pride of place in the local community-owned and operated Festival Drayton Centre in Market Drayton. The installation was carried out by long-standing specialists, B.S.B. (Sound) Ltd - set up 50 years ago by Elwyn Bickley and two partners. Today one of the largest outdoor PA contractors of its type in the UK, the company also undertakes pro audio installations.
“We had been looking forward to getting involved with Martin Audio for a long time and when this project arose, we knew the brand would be a strong contender,” stated director Martin Bickley. And with the assistance of Martin Audio product support engineer, Robin Dibble, with whom they had already developed a close relationship, the new design was brought to fruition.
B.S.B. (Sound) Ltd has been involved with the venue for many years, engineering their liv

Australia - AGB Events reports the successful conclusion of its involvement in Parrtjima: A Festival in Light which the company curates and produces on behalf of the Northern Territory Major Events Company - playing a key role in bringing the indigenous art festival to life.
The United Nations declared 2019 to be the International Year of Indigenous Languages and AGB Events highlighted an element of this theme in each of the installations they brought to life.
Parrtjima is set against the backdrop of the 300 million year old MacDonnell Ranges in Australia’s Northern Territory. AGB Events engaged the regular First Nations consultant, Rhoda Roberts AO to curate the festival for a third year. Parrtjima celebrates new ways artists can push the boundaries of how indigenous art is presented, while staying true to the ancient philosophy of connection and country. T

USA - Displaying more than 6,800 instruments from around the world, the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix, Arizona, allows their guests to not only see and hear the instruments, but also allows them to observe the music being played in its original context. Hosting a number of historic and educational performances inside the intimate MIM Theatre, the technical production behind each event must be able to accentuate the experience of the sound.
With a state-of-the-art audio and projection system already in place, the theatre worked with theatre consultants and lighting designers Schuler Shook and Clearwing Systems who installed a silent yet powerful LED lighting design using PHX 150W profile luminaires from Altman Lighting.
“We have had the opportunity to work with the MIM on a few previous projects and this time we were brought on board to complete an LED li

USA - Drawing more than 2.5m visitors to Houston’s NRG Stadium over its three-week run, this year’s RodeoHouston was a record-breaking success on multiple counts.
Featuring daily double-bills of spirited rodeo action and major concert events hosted by the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo (HLSR), attendance records for the event were topped no less than three times in 2019: when Cardi B performed for an audience of 75,580 fans; when Los Tigres del Norte slightly overtook the lead with a crowd of 75,586; and finally on March 17, when George Strait packed in an all-time NRG Stadium record attendance of 80,108 for his 30th Rodeo performance.
Keeping this many music lovers happily singing along with their favourite artists required a massive concert sound system, and Houston-based LD Systems once again took the bull by the horns and deployed 360 L-Acoustics loudspeaker

Europe - Although North American audiences were justifiably disappointed when Nicki Minaj cancelled her fall 2018 tour after deciding to "re-evaluate elements of production” and devote more time to rehearsals before hitting the road, her overseas fans recently got the chance to reap the benefits of a solid show.
Teaming up with Juice WRLD on the aptly named Nicki WRLD tour in support of Queen, her fourth and most recent album, the latest trek stopped at 22 arenas throughout Europe and the UK from 21 February to 28 March.
Cleveland-based Eighth Day Sound supplied the tour’s PA and control package, which featured DiGiCo SD5 consoles for both FOH and monitors, paired with five SD-Racks and an SD-Mini Rack, all on an Optocore loop.
“We used a traditional splitter for some inputs, but also shared inputs via the loop,” describes FOH engineer Kevin Brown, who ha

UK - After finding more shows coming to the theatre were requiring more demanding lighting control, the theatre decided to invest in a new ETC Gio console. Previously using an older generation lighting console, they felt it was appropriate to seek an industry standard upgrade.
“We have a long-term relationship with Theatre Royal Plymouth,” says Neal Tomlinson, technical sales consultant at Stage Electrics “The venue was already using an older ETC console, that wasn’t able to support the level of lighting control required for incoming touring shows. Requiring a solution that offered intelligent lighting capabilities was important, they needed to accommodate more of the latest LED fixtures and moving heads.”
With most of the shows touring through the venue being programmed on ETC consoles, compatibility was critical, and as the largest UK distributor for ETC,

USA – When he took on the project of lighting the Easter Passion Play at his local Pentecostal Church in Pensacola FL, Jacob Warren knew there would be one key element essential to conveying the spiritual and emotional impact of the production: colour.
A lighting specialist at All Pro Integrated Systems, Warren told director Lanette Kinsey and music director David Geri that he wanted to choose fixtures that could render deep, saturated and realistic colours for the play. Looking at the church’s rig, he determined that its house collection of Chauvet Professional COLORado and Rogue fixtures fit his needs.
“There were a couple features about these fixtures that stood out for me when I put together my rig,” said Warren. “First and foremost was colour rendering. The COLORados are a very cost-efficient colour mixing fixture, which is why they are included in most

USA - Taking in a Utica Comets hockey game at the Adirondack Bank Centre at the Utica Memorial Auditorium (the Aud) in Utica, New York is not only an enjoyable experience in its own right, but also an opportunity to experience a watershed moment in the history of architecture.
The 3,800-plus seat auditorium relies on the world’s first cable roof system, forerunner to other such structures like Madison Square Garden. Lev Zetlin designed the Aud in the 1950s using two-inch steel cables as circular spokes that support the roof, and its place in history is remembered with a permanent display at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art and recognition as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. Pittsburgh-based sound contracting firm Edward Simon & Co. LLC recently installed a Danley Sound Labs loudspeaker and amp/DSP system at the Aud.
“From a fan’s perspective, the a

Australia - Hot on the heels of his tenth studio album, Kamikaze, and the extended reissue of The Slim Shady LP, Eminem has broken attendance records around the Southern Hemisphere with his second Rapture tour of Australia and New Zealand.
The five Rapture 2019 stadium shows, which featured guest appearances from Hilltop Hoods, Royce da 5'9", Boogie, and more, included an 81,000-strong audience at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 24 February, and were acclaimed “a full-blown spectacle" by the New Zealand Herald.
These epic shows were augmented by a total of 1494 LED panels which displayed ‘cinematic’ visuals and scenography and were driven by the powerful Brompton Technology Tessera SX40 4K LED processors and XD 10G Data Distribution Units, all supplied by video equipment and production specialists Big Picture - part of the NEP Worldwide Netwo

Indonesia - Widely known for its lively, contemporary services, IFGF Semarang recently built a new main campus in Semarang, Central Java, to better serve its dynamic weekly congregation of over 650 worshippers. The main auditorium boasts a new audio system built around the install-focused IS-Series from Adamson Systems Engineering, which was selected to enhance the church’s musically-rich services and maximize community engagement.
IFGF Semarang administrators invited five manufacturers to demo their solutions in the previous auditorium. The IS-Series system, supplied by longtime Adamson Network partner Big Knob Audio, was the clear winner.
“We heard the other four systems first, and none had the clarity or impact of the Adamson IS-Series,” says Dibya Krisnanda, IFGF Semarang’s senior engineer. “As soon as we heard it, we knew we’d found what we were look

South Africa - The Mosaïek Church and Theatre in Fairland has invested in the first grandMA3 console in South Africa, they had a bigger plan in mind.
Estian Els, head of technical at Mosaïek Theatre, works closely with colleague Mduduzi Msibi. While the pair may be audio technicians, first and foremost, they provide technical support in every ministry of the church, including lighting, audio, LED screens and AV. Every sermon is broadcast on KykNET where there is a remarkable viewership between 75,000 and 80,000 each Sunday.
The theatre is not only used for church events but is hired out as a venue with some headline productions under the belt including Idols and the upcoming The Voice finale. The income generated is then planted back into various outreach programs hosted by the church.
“The biggest fulfilment is being part of working in the changing lives,”

UK - The Green-GO digital intercom system was recently employed to simultaneously manage multiple locations for a corporate event spanning 10 sites across the globe. Manchester-based sound specialist Audio Alliance, working for Media 1 Productions, required dependable, quality communications to seamlessly connect venues in Japan, India, China, Poland, Sweden, Canada, the USA and the UK.
“We needed a reliable, managed talkback system that would work over our own VPN IP infrastructure,” says Oliver Driver, managing director of Audio Alliance. “Multiple Green-GO bridges were deployed worldwide, with each site a ‘spoke’ from our European data hub. The Green-GO system allowed us to manage all the comms channels at each of the remote sites from our central hub.”
The system implemented by Audio Alliance comprised more than 100 Green-GO devices, all of which were d

UK - The George Inn in Denby takes a proactive role in supporting its community, hosting many charity events and holding off-site fundraisers. This commitment was in evidence in March, when it sponsored Film Night at the historic St John the Evangelist Church to raise money for the Denby Church Community Project.
The evening’s featured film, The Greatest Showman, might not have been the most memorable, but it’s safe to say that few guests failed to be swept up in the evocative setting, as the 13th century church glowed mystically from the richly coloured light created by Chauvet Professional fixtures, installed by Sound & Light UK.
Recognising the importance and potential that light can have within the church, Sound & Light UK utilised six CHAUVET Professional COLORdash Batten-Quad 12 and four COLORado 3P IP wash fixtures. The resulting mixture of

UK - Troldtekt 100% wood wool acoustic panels have been used at London’s Open Air Theatre in Regents Park. The rehearsal building, designed by architects Reed Watt, comprises a double-height dance and rehearsal studio in its centre encircled by offices, kitchen and green room. The details of the structure have been designed to reinforce the magic of the setting in which trees, plants and sky surround the visitor.
The walls are clad with dark stained larch which helps to blur the distinction between building and landscape while creating a natural extension to the existing buildings along the edge of the site. Inside, Troldtekt wood wall panelling in natural grey also complement the natural setting while helping to dampen and keep reverberated sound to a minimum. The rehearsal studio has been acoustically rated so that the maximum noise level that can happen in the studio be

USA - Paul McCartney released his latest album Egypt Station last September and embarked on his Freshen Up world tour to support the album. Lighting designer LeRoy Bennett, who has been with the star for over 17 years, dresses the nearly 40-song playlist in complementary visuals using a lighting, video and effects package that includes over 500 Elation Professional Dartz 360 luminaires. Lighting supply is by Upstaging.
Some 528 of the compact LED beam/spot lights are used in the Freshen Up show under the lighting direction of Wally Lees, who has been McCartney’s lighting director for 17+ years and serves as lead programmer for all his tours and events.
Located above the stage in three identical pods are 240 Dartz, each pod comprising 80 Dartz in five rows of 16 fixtures wide. The pods are located centre stage and run upstage to downstage on the

UK - Lighting designer Jonny Gaskell created an elegant fusion of understatement and a bit of mystery for the UK leg of David Gray’s Gold in a Brass Age tour, for which lighting and video production was supplied by London based Colour Sound Experiment.
Jonny explained that Gray doesn’t like a busy stage, so he keeps things fairly minimalist and towards the edge of subtle, focusing the attention on the artist whilst sculpting some interesting surroundings. For this tour, he wanted to include a thread from the last tour in 2015, so revisited some of the favourite treatments from that . . . and brought a more contemporary feel to the stage by using up-to-the minute LED lightsources.
The starting point for the show visuals was when David Gray presented Jonny with a series of tattoo art by Londonboy who had created a motif for each song of the new album. The chal

Croatia - City pool Pula-Pola, a new leisure complex in Croatia, has invested in a high-tech Work Pro audio system for its swimming pool area to ensure that customers can enjoy music while they swim and - more importantly - clearly hear any public safety announcements.
Located in the city of Pula, the pool is a focal point for the local community and regularly hosts events such as swimming lessons, competitions, aquarobics and swimming parties for children. As speech intelligibility was a key requirement of the new audio system, installation company Iskatrade had no hesitation in specifying products from Work Pro, the installation, pro audio and lighting division of Equipson.
“Wall to wall tiling and other hard materials make swimming pools one of the most challenging acoustic environments for an installation company to deal with,” says Robert Wolf, CEO of Rijeka-b

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