USA - With its 400 lighting fixtures and video panels, the 103-universe main stage rig at this year’s Made in America festival packed an intense punch. That was very fitting, given that it was located at the foot of the “Rocky Steps” outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But like the famous underdog pugilist, the “Rocky Stage” rig drew its power from something other than size.
“This was our boldest rig yet, but ironically we used a little less gear overall this year than in the past,” says Patrick Dierson of The Activity, who oversaw production on this, and two of the festival’s other stages. “It’s never about the amount of gear you have, but what you do with it.”
What Dierson and his team “did” with their gear package, which included 68 Chauvet Professional COLORado Solo Batten fixtures supplied by 4Wall Entertainment, was creat

Vietnam - Ba Sao Investment Co., Ltd recently installed a Harman Professional Solutions networked audio, video, light and control solution at Van Lang University to deliver pristine sound and alluring lighting for performances, presentations and events.
Founded in 1995, Van Lang University is one of the first and most distinguished private universities in Vietnam. With three sprawling facilities across Ho Chi Minh City, Van Lang University offers an array of educational amenities, including an expansive technology center, a smart library and a world-class concert hall. In order to provide exceptional sound and lighting for events in the concert hall, Van Lang University hired Vietnam's premier AV distributor, Ba Sao Investment Co., Ltd to install an AV solution. After surveying the location, Ba Sao Investment assembled a comprehensive Harman Professional Solutions

India - Martin Audio has appointed Vardhaman Megatech Pvt. Ltd (VMT) as its exclusive distribution partner for India. The appointment was confirmed by David McKinney, managing director of Generation AV, who undertake Martin Audio sales strategy, account management and technical support duties in the Asia Pacific territory.
“VMT has a strength in all the vertical markets that Martin Audio is present in including both Touring and Installation,” he comments. “VMT are headquartered in Mumbai but have teams all across the country and are set up to ensure Martin Audio customers have quick support across all parts of India.
“Having a dedicated team will enable VMT to provide special support and attention to all Martin Audio customers in India. We are proud to be working with such an established distributor, with a rich history in professional audio.”
Martin

Chile - When Chile’s national police force, the Carabineros, needed a new intercom solution for the lecture theatre at its Santiago headquarters - one which would be unaffected by the building’s busy RF environment - the organisation turned to local AV integrator VGL.
The solution - a digital intercom system from Green-GO - would mark a technology milestone as the first IP-based intercom system to be installed in the country.
VGL had recently encountered Dutch manufacturer ELC Lighting and its Green-GO digital intercom system at the Prolight+Sound exhibition in Germany and thought it would provide the answer that the Carabineros were looking for.
“They needed an intercom system with a good quality of sound, which was easy to use and would be scalable in the time,” says VGL’s Daniel Vinagre. “They didn’t want matrix-based or RF technology, as they

Ibiza - Best known for his hit singles We Found Love, This Is What You Came For, Summer, and Feel So Close, Calvin Harris recently completed his six-week DJ residency at Ushuaia in Ibiza, flying out for each of his tour dates in-between. FOH engineer, Nathan Lettus, was brought on to the tour last minute, specifically requesting that an SSL console was used to support Harris mixing songs on the fly.
Having been with American rock band, Chicago, for 10 years, FOH engineer Nathan Lettus is very much used to working on rock and pop music. During that entire run with the band, he was happily using a console of his choosing, until he met up with a good friend - FOH engineer for The Killers, who was using SSL.
“I’d seen one of the SSL Live consoles before, but I hadn’t had a chance to play with it much; I ended up mixing most of the opening act

USA - When Juan Ocampo sets up a festival rig one of his primary goals is to make it versatile enough to accommodate the varying styles of different visiting LDs. True to this philosophy, he designed the rig at this year’s Winnetka Music Festival to be as flexible as possible, selecting Chauvet Professional Rogue R2 Wash and Strike 4 fixtures, in part because they can play so many different roles well.
However, shortly before the festival started Ocampo learned that most of the 28 bands performing at the event wouldn’t be traveling with LDs. Instead of relying on the rig to work with various individual styles, he and his team would have drawn on its versatility to create unique looks for the different acts themselves.
“Initially, the biggest challenge I had was to make sure that the lights were positioned and placed in a way that would make the visiting LDs hap

UK - Following on from the resounding success of its production of The Flying Dutchman in summer 2017, Theater Regensburg has once again pushed the boundaries of open-air opera with its latest offering - a version of Puccini’s semi-staged concert performance in three acts, Tosca.
Like its predecessor, the event was held at the West Port of the bayernhafen business park, a freight traffic hub in the East Bavarian town of Regensburg. The stage was situated on the historic Municipal Warehouse side, while the audience of nearly 3,000 was seated opposite on the North Quay. The side of the warehouse itself served as a gigantic projection surface upon which visuals were beamed, courtesy of Digital Projection Titan laser projectors.
“The video aspect was the main part of the show,” comments video operator, Wolfgang Frauendienst. “The actors and their audi

UK - The 1975’s video for new single People sees the band performing the alt rock track inside an LED cube, supplied and installed by 80six Ltd, displaying swirling lyrics and quickfire, colour-changing content. Filmed at London’s Black Island Studios, the production was an ambitious surround-video setup, powered by a Hippotizer V4 Taiga servers from Green Hippo. Directed by Warren Fu, the video featured premade content inspired by the band’s lyrics, created by Jon Emmony.
Simon Harris, project manager at Bryte Design, was approached by The 1975’s tour director James Valpy to project manage the video content delivery. “Set up was simple, utilising Hippotizer’s Output Manager and VideoMapper to map the five sides of the cube, outputting six HD signals via Evision LED processors,” says Harris. “As the content was running to timecode, playback was simple

USA - Indie singer-songwriter Mitski has endeared her to a growing fan base. She followed up a successful 2018 tour with a 2019 spring outing that also saw the artist playing summer dates before wrapping up in September with two New York shows at Summer Stage in Central Park.
Lighting design for the Be the Cowboy tour was by John Foresman, who employed an Elation rig of Platinum HFX moving heads and SixPar 200 colour-changing PAR lights to complement the emotive singer’s lyrically rich songs. Lighting supply was by Pisgah AVL of North Carolina.
Mitski’s songs are played along melodic lines that can vary in tempo, with carefully choreographed movement key part of the show. Foresman describes his design as dynamic with a lot of energy during the high points and still calmness during the quieter points of the set. The design, he says, was focused around the ch

UK - The MK Gallery in Milton Keynes is a new arts venue designed by award-winning architectural firm, 6a architects. The development, which opened in March, encompasses the original MK Gallery and adds a new structure to more than double the space available, providing five exhibition galleries, a learning and community studio, and The Sky Room, a flexible auditorium on the upper floor.
With 150 retractable seats (300 standing), the Sky Room is the home of independent cinema in Milton Keynes (in partnership with Curzon) and also hosts live music, theatre, lectures, conferences and more. The venue is equipped with an EM Acoustics sound system based on the EMS Series and the dedicated installation i-Series range supplied by event production specialists, Hawthorn.
An EM Acoustics system was specified as part of the global design of the Sky Room. “It sounded great but I

Europe - Iconic German hard rock band Rammstein have been on the road again as part of the European Stadium tour, a visual and sonic extravaganza of lighting, video and pyro effects.
Roland Greil from Woodroffe Bassett Design (WBD) created the lighting design together with Patrick Woodroffe and specified 56 Robe BMFL WashBeams, 12 BMFL Follow Spot LTs (long throws) and six LEDBeam 150 moving lights - among many others - for this tour.
WBD was contracted to produce and coordinate the tour’s production design including lighting, set and video design plus technical integration.
The lighting was a collaboration between Roland and Patrick Woodroffe who is also the show designer. Florian Wieder and Cuno von Hahn looked after the set design, and Jeremy Lloyd from Wonder Works directed the technical aspects of the design and integration. The band are also very

USA - City Theatrical’s Multiverse wireless DMX/RDM technology is currently being used to provide DMX data for the windmill and carousel lighting features at Historic Hudson Valley’s The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.
After 10 years of working on The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze, the lighting design team from Jay Woods Design chose Multiverse wireless DMX for its ability to broadcast multiple universes of DMX data across an open field to receivers that are in constant motion. With an anticipated total audience of 170,000+, the Multiverse wireless DMX system was also an ideal solution for its ability to have a small radio footprint despite transmitting in a crowded radio spectrum.
“With the Multiverse Transmitter, we were able to focus on setting up and talking to a single device, as opposed to setting

Spain - Every year, Arenal Sound - an open-air music festival held in Arenal de Burriana - presents an unbeatable package of music and party by the beach. In 2019, more than 300,000 flocked to the event, with tickets selling out 14 hours after going on sale, even without the full line-up being announced.
DAS Audio has accompanied the festival over the past 10 years, providing new solutions and optimizing resources and service. In this last edition, DAS Audio has been on all the stages deploying the necessary equipment to cover the acoustic needs of this large-scale event and rising to the challenge posed by the location of the stages near a residential area.
With this in mind, Audioprobe, the company responsible for the sound system and its installation at the festival, deployed on the Desperados main stage 32 AERO-40A, 18 flown UX-218A subwoofers and six sta

USA - Summer’s not over yet, at least not for country singer-songwriter Thomas Rhett who continues his headlining Very Hot Summer tour of North America. A large complement of Claypaky Mythos 2 and Scenius Unico lighting fixtures is accompanying the tour, which is in support of Rhett’s fourth studio album, Center Point Road. The tour kicked off in Montreal last April and will conclude in Nashville in October.
New York City’s Fireplay is serving as the lighting and production designers for the Very Hot Summer tour with Upstaging, the lighting vendor. “We’ve worked with TR for about five years as his shows keep expanding and growing,” notes Nick Whitehouse, co-founder of Fireplay. “This tour is based on a concept we all developed together. Looks progress throughout the show and are different for each song so there are lots of cues an

UK - iMAG, Poole-based creative technical production and LED screen supplier, has just invested in a whopping 300 panels of ROE Visual Diamond 2mm indoor LED screen and has chosen Brompton Technology’s SX40 processors and XD 10G data distribution units as its perfect accompaniment.
Working with a diverse range of clients, from well-known brands such as Dyson, Samsung and Calvin Klein, to a multitude of festivals and conferences, iMAG knows that having the best products available in its portfolio is vital.
“ROE Visual is an industry leader. We’ve been using their LED screens since the very beginning and they’ve always worked really well for us,” says iMAG co-founder and director, Charli Harding. “With requests for hi res indoor screens increasing significantly, we decided that now was the time to add ROE’s Diamond 2mm to our inventory.”
W

UK - The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently installed two Shure Microflex Advance MXA910 ceiling array microphones at its headquarters in Cambridge.
Tthe UK-based charity required a multi-functional, reliable microphone system for one large collaboration space with the option of dividing into smaller spaces and not compromising sound quality. By selecting two MXA910’s the foundation can configure the microphones for complete coverage and ensure optimum capture of the talker when connecting with its UK and International sites or for two smaller programs happening simultaneously such as their ‘Code Club’ and ‘Raspberry Jam’ social events.
With both spaces attended primarily by children, the system needed to offer excellent audio quality while being efficient and effective in its performance.
AV specialists Snelling Business Systems were on hand to

UK - On the surface, My Favorite Year and Children of Eden are very different shows. The Stephen Flaherty-Lynn Ahrens musical takes a farcical behind the scenes look at 1950s television, as a hapless writer tries to keep an irascible matinee idol from a bygone era out of trouble before his appearance on a live show. By contrast, Steven Schwartz’ Eden recounts the story behind creation in the Book of Genesis.
Different? Indeed! But both shows offer audiences the shared experience of departing from everyday reality and cry out for brightness and colour on stage - which is what Nic Farman provided for recent productions of the plays at Mountview’s new theatre. Aiding him in this undertaking was a collection of Chauvet Professional Ovation fixtures supplied by White Light.
“I’ve worked on a number of productions for Mountview before,

The Netherlands - As part of a 15-hour performance spread over three days, Dutch National Opera performed major parts of Karlheinz Stockhausen's aus LICHT cycle.
One of the world’s top five opera companies, the Dutch National Opera opted for a combination of Christie Terra for AV distribution and processing, and Christie Pandoras Box for content management and control of the four LED video walls, cameras and projectors used throughout the performance space.
The performances were produced in cooperation with the Holland Festival, the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and the Stockhausen Foundation, and held at Amsterdam’s Gashouder, a former industrial hall that now serves as an event space. The audience experienced some of the highlights from the artist's seven operas, named after weekdays, during the three-day performance. This is the first time that a summa

UK - Owned by AB Hotels, Sopwell House is a luxury country house hotel set in 12 acres of Hertfordshire countryside. Steeped in history, the house was once home to the Mountbatten family and remained as a private residence until 1969 when it became a hotel. In 1986, it was acquired by Bejerano family who are still at the helm of the business.
With more than 100 rooms, two restaurants, bars, conferencing, wedding and spa facilities as well as a swimming pool and gym, the hotel is equipped to meet every kind of business and recreational requirement.
Just as the gym plays an important role for guests who do not wish to interrupt their training regimes whilst away from home, its audio system is critical to delivering a complete experience. Fitness spaces with high quality background music reinforcement are now very much the expected standard.
Not satisfied that its e

UK - White Light has recently supplied the lighting equipment for the UK tour of The Lovely Bones.
Based on Alice Sebold’s novel, The Lovely Bones is a coming-of-age story about Susie Salmon who is observing her family from the afterlife as they try and deal with her death in different ways. Adapted by Bryony Lavery, the production is directed by Melly Still and features a lighting design by Matt Haskins.
Haskins comments: “Bryony Lavery's adaptation is a mesmerising piece of theatre that, despite its often dark subject matter, proves uplifting and cathartic. The text actually expanded and changed heavily through the rehearsal process and what emerged was a very physical, and visually experimental way of storytelling.”
As such, Haskins soon realised that he needed to have a flexible rig to respond to the new ideas as they unfolded throughout the pr

USA - 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the ultimate special-event address, but that venue tends to be booked up at least four years in advance. So the team at Everlast Productions did the next best thing: they projection-mapped a detailed simulacrum of the presidential residence on a three-dimensional stage they constructed in the International Ballroom of the Washington, D.C. Hilton Hotel for the annual leadership event of Power Home Remodelling Group.
And it was, thanks to Everlast Productions’ use of an Avolites Ai Q3 media server as the mapping engine paired with a Tiger Touch II lighting control console and the manufacturer’s Synergy software.
“This was a huge projection event - it had to be very detailed, and it had to be built literally overnight,” says Washington Arias, Everlast Productions’ CEO, referencing the large-scale mapping project in which multip

Italy - RCF celebrated its 70th birthday in spectacular fashion with A Night in Laguna at the famous old Venice Arsenal, the hub of Italian shipbuilding in the 16th century.
To help them celebrate this milestone, they flew in nearly 500 distributors, dealers and customers from all points of the globe, who arrived at the ocation via a 45-minute boat journey on 19 September.
First, guests were treated to cocktails and a buffet, courtesy of two-Michelin starred chef Massimiliano (Max) Alajmo (of Le Calandre fame), along with a special 70th birthday cake.
Suitably replete, guests were then invited next door, where RCF Group CEO Arturo Vicari was introduced to spontaneous applause. He emphasised the fact that what RCF had really been selling this past 70 years, as much as transducers, was “emotion” - a fact confirmed by a short company video.
This was

Japan - Celebrating its 20th anniversary year, and extended to five days for the 2019 edition, the Rock In Japan festival also marked the Japanese debut of Martin Audio’s Wavefront Precision Longbow (WPL).
Running on seven stages over two weekends at Hitachi Seaside Park, music lovers from all across Japan congregated at the location. Unlike other large-scale festivals, this specialises in home grown talent and featured some of Japan’s biggest acts.
Martin Audio systems are now regular fixtures at this event, with the award-winning MLA adopted for the largest, 70,000 capacity Grass Stage. “It was back in 2011 when we first introduced MLA on the Lake Stage,” reports Shuzo Fujii, president of MSI Japan. “This is now the ninth year that the system has been adopted, and its high degree of control has become essential for the festival. Grass Stage has more than 20

Italy - Billionaire is a club in Porto Cuervo, an Italian seaside resort on the Costa Smeralda in Northern Sardinia. Named as one of the most expensive resorts in the world, the area is a magnet for luxury yachts and a playground for wealthy visitors.
The club caters for a chic, jet-setting clientele of international showbiz, fashion and sports stars who are entertained by leading DJs and artists. Atmosphere and style are everything to this world-renowned venue and high-end audio is a must.
Billionaire’s management recently wished to upgrade its DJ booth monitoring system to keep pace with the expectations of its A-list performers and after taking account of the market, settled on Pioneer Pro Audio’s stylish and powerful XY Series speakers to take care of business. Two XY-2 mid-high speakers were installed, complemented by two XY-215S dual 15" subs.
Pioneer P

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