Robe - LEADERBOARD - Feb 2025
City Theatrical - Banner - July 2025

Installation

Details
UK - Monday 7 March marked the culmination of eight years of planning, fundraising and building as The Junction in Cambridge opened three new facilities for the creation and presentation of new art as part of its £7.5 million Arts Council lottery funded redevelopment programme.

The three new facilities - a theatre, an education space and an art and new technology laboratory will help enable The Junction to realize its ambition of establishing a national centre of excellence for contemporary culture and entertainment.

At the heart of the new development is Junction 2, a modern and uniquely versatile 220 capacity performance space. Affectionately nicknamed The Shed, the timber clad structure will house a growing programme of contemporary drama, dance, spoken word, comedy and world music. Inspired by Georgian courtyard theatre, the auditorium bridges the distance between audienc

Details
UK - XS!TE is a new major events arena planned for Yorkshire, which will be one of the largest live music and conference venues in the region. Scheduled to open in May at the Xscape site at Glasshoughton, Leeds, XS!TE will offer potential capacity for over 2,000, and provide state-of-the-art facilities for exhibitions, conferences and entertainment spanning live music concerts, sport events, club and dance evenings, comedy, and religious conventions, as well as facilities for video shoots, fashion shows, product launches and top-line band rehearsal space.

Located at the Xscape site next to junction 32 of the M62, the new venue has excellent transport links including its own railway station, making it ideally placed within 45 minutes drive time for most of the Yorkshire region. It has over 1,500 free parking spaces, offers over 15,000sq.ft of space and, say its owners, meets a c

LSi 40 - Banner - July-Nov 2025

Details
UK - PLASA 2005, Europe's definitive exhibition for professionals and decision-makers within the entertainment, event, corporate, architectural and installation industries, takes place at London's Earls Court from Sunday September 11 to Wednesday September 14 2005.

This annual event attracts visitors from all over the world and is run by people from within the industry - and the 2005 show promises to deliver precisely what the market requires - information, ideas and a strong forum for doing real business.

Over 300 companies are committed to making PLASA 2005 a solutions-led event: between them they will roll out over 1,000 new products and services designed to push existing technical and creative possibilities a stage further.

Both show floors will be packed with new ideas in audio, lighting, AV, rigging, system integration, engineering and effects: visitors will get to

Details
UK - Lighting Effects Distribution provided project architects Satmoko Ball with a complete lighting set-up for new London West End nightclub Umbaba.

Cara Satmoko and Adrian Ball, partners in the practice, were introduced to LED's Ian Kirby by Umbaba director Jeremy Hartley, and between them they have evolved a series of changing scenes and moods to highlight the West African theme of the adobe/earth-style architecture.

In total, the Kent-based distributors supplied three Alkalite Octopod 80's; 35 x Solar MR16 3W high-power Luxeon RGB lamps and eight metres of Coemar Linea flexible RGB Strip, along with four Geni Mojo Spinmaster 3Y barrel-effect scanners for the dancefloor. Control gear consists of a 256-channel Sirocco desk for the LED effects, working under Mode programmable control, and a Geni PC Brain for the dancefloor lighting.

The owners had wanted to achieve a slo

Details
UK - Design practice KBA has been commissioned to create a luxury hotel on the site of a former Standard Life office in the centre of Edinburgh. The hotel is the brainchild of Montpeliers (Edinburgh), the award-winning style bar, hotel and restaurant operator.

The development, yet to be named, is located within an imposing five storey Georgian townhouse at the west end of Edinburgh's stylish shopping district. The building will offer 33 bedrooms, including deluxe suites, a restaurant, bars and private members lounge.

Kerr Blyth, managing director of KBA comments, "Montpeliers has long been a supporter of our integrated design approach. I am delighted that we have been commissioned to bring this landmark project to fruition, all the way through from developing the brief to the final product.

KBA celebrates its third birthday this year. Its portfolio of completed projects

Details
UK - Taking less than four hours per line to install, the DGS steelband counterweight drive from Hall Stage promises "powered flying at highly affordable prices".

The first operational units - a DGS 250 & a DGS 500 - are working in the Milton Keynes Theatre and will be touring the UK and Europe over the next few months, supporting Hall Stages 2005 Exhibition schedule.

"Once installed, the venue saves the time and effort involved in loading and unloading counterweight cradles," says Hall Stage director Phil Wells.

DGS installations are designed to "massively reduce" the time taken on fit-ups and show rigging. A bar is available immediately as required and can be loaded and flown in minutes, without the need for re-weighting. "Although not currently illegal as such, various aspects of the tasks involved are definitely inhumane and the practic

Details
UK - The Association of British Theatre Technicians will launch its annual Summer School 2005 at the A.C. Lighting North Trade Show being held at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds on 26 and 27 April.

ABTT Summer School 2005 will be held at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry. Four Awards are being offered this summer. In addition to its Bronze for Stage Technicians, this year sees the launch of a Silver Award for Stage Technicians, a Silver Award for Sound Technicians and a Silver Award for Stage Electricians. For the first time, these Awards will have full accreditation from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, making the ABTT Awards the first accredited courses for technical and production practitioners in theatre.

The Bronze Award is five intensive days taking the following subjects: Electrical Fundamentals, Portable Appliance Testing, Knots & Spl

Details
UK - Energy giant BP has operated on a 13-hectare site at Sunbury for the past 80 years, but at the start of the new millennium plans were put in place to re-develop this into a brand new Business Park. The Park integrates BP's business, commercial and technology activities and is the base for some 3,000 staff.

Part of this integration involved relocating some of the resources from offices in central London and recognized the need for a series of 11 meeting rooms to be equipped with multimedia and videoconferencing support. Located in Building B - where some of the company's Gas, Power and Renewables businesses are located - each would be differently configured but with a standard template and control. Given the number of staff on site the rooms could expect little down time.

All have now been equipped by Pendax UK, and the largest - The Willow Room - utilizes two dnp 84in New

Details
UK - Adlib Audio has completed a stylish sound installation, blending art, science, acoustics and aesthetics at Panacea in John Dalton Street, Manchester.

Panacea is the brainchild of one of the City's smartest young local party people and entrepreneurs, Joe Akka. Superlative acoustics was seen as absolutely crucial to creating Panacea's essential atmosphere. Akka contacted Adlib Audio's Andy Dockerty via recommendations from Kennedy Street Enterprises, and asked him to design an appropriate system - keeping the speakers as invisible as possible.

Dockerty - renowned for his attention to detail and quality and Dave Fletcher, who produced all the cabinet work, designed, specified and built a tailor-made system for Panacea. This involved embedding four speakers into each of Panacea's structural pillars with a minimal extrusion to ensure the preservation and integrity of the inter

Details
UK - Arena Structures supplied over 23,000sq.m of temporary structures to this year's John Smith's Aintree Grand National, with sister companies Arena Seating supplying 1,250 grandstand seats around the course, and Arena Events managing corporate hospitality packages. Arena Structures first became involved with the event 10 years ago, and projects director Ron Smith still oversees one of the largest temporary structures installations seen at any sporting event.

Arena Structures installed a number of structures at Aintree including The Aldaniti Pavilion, The Sky Pavilion, The Red Square Vodka Mood Bar, The Cottage Pavilion and The Aintree Pavilion. Each pavilion was individually designed and built to cater for different needs such as varying hospitality arrangements, preferred situation along the course and each companies individual tastes and corporate identity. The Aldaniti Pav

Details
USA - The founders Pennsylvania's Sight & Sound Theatres, Glen and Shirley Eshelman have always pushed the technological envelope. As the nation's largest Christian theatre, Sight & Sound creates spectacular live events drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors from across the country to the magnificent 2,000-seat venue.

One of the latest additions to the theatre's extensive portfolio of professional live sound gear is the InnovaSON Sy80 digital mixing console which has been installed in the Millennium Theatre, the anchor of the Sight & Sound theatre complex, sporting three stages and more than 85 loudspeakers. The theatre produces elaborate stage events, which can include live animals, animatronic figures, life-size props and even helicopters that fly in. The sheer number of microphones, combined with the vast number of scenes and settings meant the mixing and recall capabiliti

Details
UK - Event company Number One Venues has secured Westminster City Council's planning committee's approval to develop one of London's prime central locations into a high quality corporate and indoor sports events venue.

Number One Piccadilly - The London Pavilion - is a listed building on a triangular site bounded by Shaftesbury Avenue, Great Windmill Street and Piccadilly Circus, overlooking Eros, a site previously occupied by Rock Circus. Building owner Burford Group considered a number of options for the space, and director Mark Boyes commented: "Number One Venues' concept is the first one which not only envisages a versatile and stunning interior facility, spread over five floors, but also provides a unique new venue for the heart of London."

Number One Venues' plans will create a flexible central London venue ideal for events for up to 1,000 guests - including ro

Details
UK - Turbosound QLight products, together with models from the company's TSW, TXD and TCS series, have been installed at Volar, a new club in the Lan Kwai Fong area of central Hong Kong. Volar joins a growing number of venues in the area with Turbosound-based sound systems. Phoenix Audio and Lighting Technology, Turbosound's exclusive distributor for the Chinese territories, has been responsible for the turnaround, the top-end members-only club Volar being the latest installation.

Mac Lo, Phoenix's technical director, said: "Volar's owners and interior designer, X Act Limited, wanted a top-quality audio, lighting and visual-display system. The brief was to create something extraordinary for the relatively stale clubbing scene in Hong Kong. Due to space constraints, the design called for compact loudspeaker enclosures, and Turbosound QLight systems can certainly produce the

Details
UK - SPS Vision provided a 5.4m x 4.1m Barco LED screen to organisers Clarion Events for another spectacular London Air Show at Earls Court on April 8 to 10.

The screen was flown in the centre of the main exhibition hall. Underneath it, 30 computer pods with flight simulator games were in place for the public to test their skills. As well as relaying giant images of the flight simulator games, the screen carried key information such as the seminar programme and promotional material for exhibitors. SPS's Bryan Leathem comments: "It was a great example of making the technology work hard to earn its keep."

(Sarah Rushton-Read)

Details
Australia - Laservision has announced it has recently won first place in four major national awards that recognise the creative and technical solutions Laservision provided to Hong Kong's Harbour and its Symphony of Light spectacular.

The awards were for Australia's Best Small Business, Entrepreneur of the Year, presented by the Australian Institute of Engineers, Best Creative Small to Medium Sized Enterprise, presented by the Hong Kong Australian Business Association, and NSW Exporter of the Year in the category of Arts and Entertainment, presented by Austrade and the Australian Institute of Export.

The Hong Kong spectacular was produced for the Hong Kong Tourism Commission. Described as the largest of its kind ever attempted, the Symphony of Light celebrates the permanent illumination of 18 of Hong Kong's most prominent buildings. The sensory medi

Details
UK - PLASA Media has received a warning about a con-man operating in the London area who has stolen several thousand pounds worth of equipment from a London-based AV hire company. The culprit gave his name as David Jones from BBC Worldwide, and presents convincing paperwork - and an internal answerphone message at the BBC itself - to back up the claim. He then collected, via courier, a range of equipment including laptop computers and plasma screens, and disappeared.

The BBC is aware of the problem, we are told. If anything suspicious arises, please contact Simon Brown at the BBC's investigations department on 0208 752 5094.

(Lee Baldock)

Details
USA - Rarely is absolute perfection a goal worthy of the effort required to achieve it. But in the case of San Francisco nightclub Ruby Skye, the quest for perfection has not only pushed the limits of club sound, but it has also fostered a more profitable business. A large, visually stunning nightclub converted from a Victorian-style theater in the heart of San Francisco, Ruby Skye routinely hosts world-class DJs, and has even received top venue honors from DanceStar magazine. Yet co-owner George Karpaty begrudgingly admits that audio has been the club's Achilles heel. "I shouldn't have scaled back on the original sound system," Karpaty laments, explaining how certain budgets were shuffled during the massive renovation project.

His pet peeves? Patrons were shouting over each other, and leaving with ears ringing after only a few hours, and DJs were commenting that the s

Details
Uruguay - Teatro Solis in Montevideo, one of Uruguay's leading opera houses, recently re-opened following an extensive refurbishment programme and decades of closure, complete with a Robe moving light rig. The restoration project - led by architect Eneida De Léon - included the construction of a new and larger stage, and the installation of a complete new state-of-the-art technical infrastructure. This has made Teatro Solis a premier venue for hosting all types of 21st century productions.

The moving lights - consisting of 12 Robe Show Lighting ColorSpot 1200 AT fixtures were specified for the theatre by Hoffend Argentina via Nemiler, their- Uruguayan representative. Hoffend & Sons is the Robe distributor for both Argentina and Uruguay, and it was they who spec'd Robe fixtures onto the project after extensive discussions between Hoffend Argentina's Jorge Escudedro and Robe Show

Details
UK - Brähler ICS UK Limited, working with AV installation specialist Willow SoundVision, has completed the installation of a new integrated discussion and voting system in the main council chamber at Northampton Borough Council. To bring the chamber up to 21st century standards, Brähler supplied its standard microphone and electronic voting system, built around their reliable stalwart CDS-200 conference management system. The flexibility of the system is further enhanced by the power of Brähler's CDS-VAN virtual audio network, a DSP-based audio processing environment.

The DV200 delegate units incorporate voting buttons, microphone, ChipCard reader and loudspeaker for voice-raising, while the Chairman's unit includes a priority button for remote control of speaking rights. The units are portable and can easily be moved to various locations, depending on the layout of the room.

Details
UK - Scottish lighting specialist black light has been at the heart of a major but delicate installation in Rutherglen, South Lanarkshire. Rutherglen's Town Hall is Grade 1 listed, which meant that the £12.5 million refurbishment project had to be undertaken extremely carefully and use some innovative techniques. As the main sound and lighting contractor for the venue's Grand Hall, black light had to achieve the difficult task of providing a 21st-century installation, but working around the stringent restoration requirements of an historic building.

One of the first major hurdles to be overcome was in the Hall's back wall. For historic reasons, traditional lath and plaster had to be used, the plaster takes literally months to dry. Therefore all the cabling had to be installed a year ago in order for the plaster to dry. Once the plaster dried the cables would be inaccessible, he

Details
UK - Creative sound design and installation specialists CP Sound has completed its latest installation - at 'Blush', the newest venue to open in central Cheltenham. The club is part owned by Glendola Leisure and part by operator/manager Stuart Hunt. The space - previously a club - has been completely gutted, re-fitted and installed with new sound proofing, aligning the building as a stylish downtown 'chameleon' venue.The key to running this specific type of operation is its ability to have the facilities to react quickly to the diverse demands of a dynamic and mixed clientele, all of whom may want slightly varying elements out of the same space. CP Sound's Colin Pattenden is well experienced in chameleon installations, and has an extremely good ear for the acoustic properties that the different ambiences within it might require. Colin comments "The disco needed to be powerful

Details
UK - Adlib Audio's Andy Dockerty is passionate about many things in life. One of them is stimulating young people to take an early interest in the art and science of production and technical 'backstage' elements at a practical and professional level. "Schools very much target 'the performer' in their courses," he says. "But for every performer, there's probably six or eight backstage and technical staff engaged in making their performance happen."

Dockerty is still frustrated by drama and music departments' lack of priority regarding the technical skills needed to support a production. He's adamant that it's unfair that young people without the acting, dancing or singing skills still rarely have the opportunities available to explore the performance environment. Adlib is determined to do its bit in the local community (Merseyside and beyond) to ensure that th

Details
UAE - A Midas XL4 console has been installed into one of the world's first seven-star hotels - the Emirates Palace - situated on the beachfront of Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates. The opulent establishment opened in February at a rumoured cost of over $3 billion. One of the many facilities the hotel offers is a conference centre, and the Midas XL4 was chosen as the centrepiece of the 1,200 capacity auditorium, where a programme of live entertainment runs alongside conferences and corporate events.

The sound, lighting and stage engineering systems were designed and specified by Theatre Projects Consultants, with Bond Communications winning the tender to engineer, supply and install the sound and communications systems.

"As analogue desks go, the XL4 is superb," says Mark Clay from Bond Communications. "It is normally situated in the control room, b

Details
UK - An LED solution to an unusual interior design challenge has been devised by three experienced nightclub industry professionals - lighting specialist Ian Kirby (of Lighting Effects Distribution), project coordinator Shaun Doyle and interior designer Graham Taylor of Easy Design Solutions. Collectively they have devised a brash, stylised 1970s/80s interior for The Nightclub Company's new Bamboogie music venue concept, annexed to their Creation nightclub in Brighton.

Doyle invited both Taylor and Kirby, with whom he has worked many times in the past, onto the project - and the latter has delivered an intelligent LED solution, which was installed by Ken Morgan of K Morgan Electrical Ltd. "When the Nightclub Company were outlining their idea for the new concept, I told them the only guy they needed to talk to for the lighting was Ian Kirby," declared Doyle. "He wo

  1. Sound Division on the Town
  2. Denon in La Banque
  3. XTA in Amsterdam's latest music venue
  4. Intellivox for St Peter's, Belfast
  5. EV solution for Brighton Metropole
  6. Sound Division with Itsu
Page 103 of 191
LSi 40th sponsors - Large MPU - July-Aug

Latest Issue. . .