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14 March 2016

The hall was built as a church in 1823 and designed by Sir Robert Smirke, architect of the British Museum. It would have been built to suit a congregation who needed to clearly hear the spoken word, but the clarity the room provides brings an unexpected benefit to 21st century concertgoers.

Ian Stickland, team leader for Charcoalblue, said he and his colleagues were initially surprised by their acoustic measurements. "Looking at the objective results of our reverberation time measurements, without knowing which room it was, we would not have rated the results very highly. However, digging deeper, we find that the clari

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14 March 2016

For the first time, they specified Robe's BMFL Spot fixtures, 22 of which are being supplied by the tour's lighting vendor, Theatrical Media Services (TMS) from Omaha, Nebraska.

The band is well known for their long annual summer tours and sets featuring involved improvisations of their songs - always played differently - accompanied by eye-catching visuals and lightshows, an aesthetic that has been carefully crafted by Fenton since he started working with the band in the early 1990s.

Fenton and Aaron developed the design together, often drawing on architecture and art for inspiration as they build a visual stage concept.

This is the

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14 March 2016

In light of the above and after 17 years as PLASA's chief executive officer, Matthew Griffiths has decided that now is the right time to step aside which would help kick start and facilitate a fresh set of ideas and approaches needed for the next chapter in PLASA's dev

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14 March 2016

The power of original painting created in real-time and projected onto stunning architecture accompanied by live music is a special collaboration between projection artist Ross Ashton, virtuoso percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie and acclaimed visual artist and painter Maria Rud.

The location for this magical outdoor experience - Venue 316 of the Fringe Festival - is the quadrangle at George Herriot's School. The high impact art is being projected onto the side wall, of the beautiful 17th century chapel - which becomes part of the world renowned Festival, famous for showcasing new, innovative and thought-provoking works.

Says Ross, "We are extremely excited to be performing at the Fringe and exceptionally

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14 March 2016

Renzo Arbore has always loved jazz and Neapolitan music classics. For the release of ... e pensare che dovevo fare il dentista... (...and to think I was supposed to become a dentist...), he is leading his Orchestra Italiana, with his voice, clarinet and boundless charm, on a new summer tour that culminates on 7 September in Milan.

Gazebo Giallo (Arbore's management company) turned to Paco Toscano to interpret the atmospheres of Arbore's music with lights. "I joined the production team that organize

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14 March 2016

The first of these options, the ARC-3 wall panel remote, was introduced to the systems integrator community at ISE 2015. Arriving in a single SKU with both surface- and flush-mount capabilities, ARC-3 incorporates a brand new capacitive touch interface with LED feedback, as well as a multi-lingual graphics-capable OLED display that is expected to resonate strongly with Symetrix' global customer base.

The second new option is the ARC-WEB browser-based dialler, which allows owners of iPhones, iPads, Android phones, tablets and network-enabled computers to control audio via embedded web servers running on SymNet Edge and SymNet Radius DSPs.

"With this option, end-users can

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14 March 2016

Mario Held, system engineer for Rental Pro Austria worked with FOH engineer Andreas Putz to design a Geo S12 line array that would provide balanced and transparent sound reinforcement appropriate for the classical performance, featuring the 200-piece orchestra, numerous solo singers and a choir of 300.

"The venue, like many big halls of this size, has some problem frequencies in the sub and bass area," says Held. "Rental Pro Austria has nearly all the varieties of Nexo subs in its inventory, but I decided to use four RS15 subs per side

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14 March 2016

The tour, in support of alt-J's second album, This Is All Yours, visited a variety of indoor and outdoor venues around the US including a show at Colorado's Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

The video design, created by Jeremy Lechterman and Jackson Gallagher from FragmentNine, uses horizontal rows of LED, interspaced with gaps which can be used with lighting.

At the O2 show, XL Video supplied a solution using their regular touring frames, and special brackets.

"For the US tour design, the designers wanted to reduce the size of spaces between the LED rows," said XL's US touring projects director, Gareth Jeanne. "As our touring frames have

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14 March 2016

The Jubilee Sailing Trust brings together disabled and able bodied crew members, accepting all degrees of disability including wheelchair users, visually or hearing impaired, stroke victims and more recently regularly welcoming Help for Heroes military veterans.

Having recently updated the general audio broadcast systems on the Lord Nelson ship, a similar upgrade is about to occur with Tenacious on its return to port. Using a number of Cloud paging microphones, with automatic messaging functionality, the audio broadcast system is an essential tool for keeping ships' crews informed of daily routines and emergency situations

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14 March 2016

"We wanted to create a 3D experience for the audience," agrees lighting designer Paul Normandale, "And bring some of the video content to life, blurring the lines between screen and reality. We went to Specialz as they did such a great job on the last tour and this mechanical, visual, yet tourable challenge is very much their area of expertise."

To this end, Specialz was charged with creating a huge 3m diameter reflector, a set of bespoke dollies pre-rigged with Sharpys and last but cer

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14 March 2016

Following the success of the BBC phenomenon that is The Great British Bake Off, Jo Brand has been welcoming a panel of guests each week to enjoy cake related discussion.

Filmed with Love Productions in front of a live audience at The London Studios, An Extra Slice reflects on the week's baking, with guest interviews with departing contestants, behind the scenes clips and a selection of audience based cake related triumphs and disasters.

To help lighten up the serving, Aurora has provided LD Oli Richards with an array of Martin Auras and Viper Performances which are kept fresh by moving light operator David Francis and tech Simon Willet.

The show features a number of set practical pendants which have added an atmospheric h

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14 March 2016

The play has opened in Windsor and will begin its UK tour next week, visiting venues in Leeds, Brighton, Richmond, Birmingham, Aberdeen, Newcastle, Norwich, Cheltenham, Woking, Milton Keynes and Cardiff.

Starring television's Ian Kelsey and Patrick Robinson, The Shawshank Redemption tells the story of Andy Dufresne, a man serving a life sentence in the notorious Shawshank prison. Realising he cannot survive life behind bars, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with prison fixer Red and soon begins to hatch a plan

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14 March 2016

To ensure everything possible was done to guarantee the safety of the structure, Colin Luke,senior project manager at Oswestry-based Load Cell Rental, was asked to supply a way of monitoring the stage weights during the build.

Following conversations with the event organisers, Load Cell Rental supplied a 20 cell BroadWeigh system. Colin said, "Following a spate of high profile events where temporary stages have collapsed, it was vital to leave no stone unturned in order to ensure the concert made the headlines for only the right reasons. No respectable concert organiser can afford to ignore the loadings on temporary structures and the BroadWeigh system is the perfect tool for the job."

The BroadWeigh load monitor

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14 March 2016

It was one of the issues that had to be considered when Jands Venue Engineering (JVE) and event AV services provider, Staging Connections, put their skills together to engineer a faster, safer and more efficient staging management system for the hotel. One of the biggest challenges faced by JVE and Staging Connections was the installation - it had to fit in with existing hotel commitments, to make sure all the rooms involved were empty, and it couldn't be done at night, with the risk guests could be woken by the drilling.

Working in fav

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14 March 2016

Paul Allott, commercial director of AMP Events commented, "We're delighted to confirm that the Festival Supplier Awards will return in January 2016 and that they will be held in London. The feedback from the inaugural awards was tremendous, everyone had a great evening and really enjoyed being part of the event. We want to build on that success and we firmly believe that bringing the industry together at the beginning of the year is a great way to achieve this.

"The festival industry in the UK continues to develop and has a much broader remit than music alone - food, sport, hobbies and culture all pl

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14 March 2016

The Woodroffe Bassett Design rig called on a plethora of high-output discharge lamp moving fixtures, as well as a wide assortment of blinders, video panels and other fixtures to create an explosive lighting display that flooded even the largest venue with visual delights.

A batten fixture that measures 39.3" (998 M) can easily be swallowed by this lighting Goliath. However, that clearly - and colourfully -- wasn't the case with the COLORado Batten 144 Tour from Chauvet Professional. A dozen of the RGBWA LED linear fixtures were used in the rig for the iconic metal band

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14 March 2016

The experience gained from daily rental work enabled them to undertake installations, while as a distributor "we have an input from the great technical support engineers of the manufacturers", according to owner Priit Kivimägi.

Among their suppliers is Powersoft, with whom they started working a little over a year ago, after placing an order for K Series amplifiers. They have gone further and invested in the Italian company's new X Series platform.

Kivimagi explains out how the relationship developed. "We had used another premier amplifier brand for a long time but had a chance to do a side-by-side comparison. Powersoft's wide model range covered our needs better a

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14 March 2016

Posthumous Hit - Cilla Black landed her first ever number one album, with her Very Best Of comp

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14 March 2016

Visitors traverse the meadow via sunken pathways so that they experience the bees' natural environment at head-height, and end up in the 14 metre high abstract beehive structure which hosts a multi-sensory immersive experience. TiMax propels a constantly changing composition of music and bee sounds around

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14 March 2016

For the impressive stage setup, no less than 100 x SixPacks blinders and 50 x P-5 wash lights from SGM were integrated into the light design. Lighting designer, Sebastian Pachciarek, explains that he chose the P-5s due to their many advantages such as powerfulness and viewing angle. He used the SixPacks as wall LEDs, and for this purpose, he particularly emphasizes the ease of combining a large amount of fixtures. He then adds, "The fact that both types of fixtures are IP65-rated was quite important - especially for concerts under the cloud." He adds that both the P-5s and SixPacks performed flawlessly.

Pachci