Both Beijing Pacific Budee Technology and Audio Brains, part of MSI Japan Holdings, were welcomed into the Martin Audio family at the recent Prolight&Sound exhibition in Frankfurt.
Their response has been immediate, with Budee ordering a 36-enclosure MLA/MLX system to fulfil an order from Hong Kong rental company, Max Production Ltd. The system was immediately pressed into service at Hong Kong's AsiaWorld-Expo for the Japanese singer-songwriter, YUI, who was playing her first overseas live concert in front of 14,000 fans in the AsiaWorld-Arena.
MSI, Martin Audio's distributor in Japan, was the contractor for this event, and Max Production Ltd was the audio equipment supplier for the venue. "This collaboration proved to be a great success, and the coverage provided by the MLA system was excellent," reports Budee's deputy general manager, Mingsong Cao.
Meanwhile, Audio Brains' 30-enclosure rig has enabled sister company MSI Japan - the second largest rental company in the country - to debut it on the major Rock In Japan festival (equivalent in size to Glastonbury) in early August.
The Japanese company first became aware of MLA after seeing it promoted and publicised in the territory by Patrick Lau, Martin Audio's international sales manager, Asia. "The company's president flew to the UK to see it performing on War Of The Worlds, and MSI now believe they are looking at the next generation sound system for the pro audio industry," he said.
Audio Brains' Fujii Shuzo agreed. "We chose Rock In Japan for MSI to debut the system as we knew it would be a good opportunity to expose MLA to the many Japanese sound engineers and rental companies that will be present.
"With so many potential customers for this system it was certainly worth making this level of investment for our demo stock."
MSI fielded the MLA rig on the second largest stage - the most challenging one, since it is circular in shape. Martin Audio's Martyn 'Ferrit' Rowe set up and tuned the system using the company's Display software,.
Fujii Shuzo also took the opportunity to introduce the new platform to his own technicians. Meanwhile, Budee have also been promoting MLA heavily into the Chinese market, having staged two well-attended seminars - one in Beijing and one in Shanghai.
(Jim Evans)
