USA - Philips Strand Lighting has announced that the NEO lighting control system is now expanding with the introduction of the Submaster and Playback Wings along with the rack-mount Playback Controller. Designed for use in theatrical, house of worship, and themed entertainment productions, the expanded NEO lighting control system can help you realize the full potential of your lighting designs quickly and intelligently.

"The NEO lighting control console has been proven to be a powerful and easy-to-use lighting control system and we are excited to now be expanding its power and control even more," said Bobby Harrell, Philips Strand Lighting product specialist. "With the addition of the Submaster and Playback Wings plus the Playback Controller, the NEO family now offers more control options and innovative control technologies for whatever type of production or light

Canada - The AES 59th International Conference, with an emphasis on Sound Reinforcement Engineering and Technology, will take place July 15-17, 2015, at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. This is the first AES International Conference in over 25 years dedicated to large scale sound reinforcement, public address and live sound, and the conference is being supported by an impressive list of sponsors, including some of the preeminent forces in live-sound technology. At the conference, sponsors will be displaying cutting-edge technologies with experts available to discuss and demonstrate their products.

Confirmed sponsors include Meyer Sound, Solid State Logic, Yamaha Commercial Audio, Audio-Technica, Professional Sound Magazine, KV2 Audio, Erikson Audio, McGill University's Schulich School of Music, Gerr Audio, SMAART, Solotech, Flex Acoustics, DiGiCo, Ashly Audio, Shure, Tanno

Italy - RCF has introduced two new members to its V-Max family - V6 and V10 high-power two-way bass reflex full range systems. The V-MAX Series represents "a no-compromise compact design and construction, offering a very natural sound in recorded music and live situations," says RCF.

All V-MAX Series cabinets are in birch, heavy duty coated with weather resistant polyurea paint. Free from spurious vibrations, they offer a reinforced construction at the highest levels in the professional market.

"The V10 mid bass transducer is designed to provide an excellent frequency response linearity with very low distortion. A very strong magnetic structure guarantees dynamics and precision, whereas a new and unique 2.5" voice coil design provides a very high power handling."

The V6 is the smallest member of the V-MAX family and is a flexible and powerful tool

UK - Following its sell-out debut success in Australia, Vision Nine and BBC Worldwide recently brought the Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular to the UK for an arena tour. A musical celebration of the BBC series, the Symphonic Spectacular featured Doctor Who's most captivating music, video sequences from the past 50 years of the show, along with a host of live monsters including the Cybermen and Daleks. White Light was the choice supplier for providing the lighting, rigging and crew to deliver the full tour; comprising of 13 performances across London, Cardiff, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle and Glasgow.

Working alongside the show's producers, White Light expertly recreated lighting designer Paul Collison's original vision, whilst making subtle adjustments to suit the logistical intricacies of each venue. The highly ambitious project incorporated 100 different performers, including t

UK - In the Great Hall of St. Paul's Girls' School in London, two new Meyer Sound CAL 64 column array loudspeakers provide vibrant and life-like reproduction for speech, live music performances, and video soundtracks. Custom-coloured to match the surrounding oak woodwork in the historic 1904 auditorium, the two slender columns employ precision beam-steering and -splitting technology to deliver uniform coverage across the seating areas.

CAL was selected for the venue after Ian Hawes, the school's theatre manager, and Jonny Burns, head AV technician attended a convincing demonstration. "We listened to the sound quality, saw the slender profile, turned to each other and said, 'This is exactly what we need for the Great Hall,'" recalls Hawes. "The system is in constant use, mostly for speech but also for pre-recorded playback, and occasionally for singing voices or fo

Chile - Fifty Robe Pointes added to the fun and excitement of the Opening Ceremony kicking off the 2015 Copa America international football tournament for South America's national teams which is being staged in Chile.

The fixtures were part of a lighting design by Toni Amoros for the event staged at the Estadio Nacional de Chile in the Chilean capital, Santiago. The event was attended by 60,000 football fans packing the stadium and experiencing the carnivalesque atmosphere as well as seeing Chile getting off to a rocking start in the first game, beating Ecuador 2-0.

The Pointes were positioned around the field of play and used for beams and aerial effects for which they are renowned. They were chosen by Toni for their power and brightness, for the precision of the beams and the variety of possible effects.

The event - which featured a cast of 600 actors, musicians and dancer

Finland - In a different approach to indoor arena lighting, Finland's Hartwall Arena features an innovative LED video system integrated with its ice hockey rink. The arena, which is home to the Jokerit of the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) and Finland's National Men's Hockey Team, was recently modernized to enhance the fan experience with significant upgrades to its lighting, video displays and digital signage.

As part of the arena's modernization ice hockey rink equipment designer, manufacturer and supplier, Icepro OY, created a concept to integrate lighting within the stanchions supporting the rink's glass safety dividers. To realize their vision Icepro worked with Finnish A/V Integration firm, Studiotec, to develop a lighting design that included more than 940 of Martin Professional VC-Strip LED video fixtures.

The system is built into the stanchions between the glass divi

Europe - When the world's best cyclists set off on the Tour de France, the fans that line up along the roadsides will be joined by many more via the race's extensive live radio and TV coverage. Produced by Euromedia, this year's event will make use of a new Lawo-equipped OB truck.

The 102nd edition of the world's biggest cycling contest will take 22 teams of nine riders - a field of up to 198 starters - over 3,360km of road, through 21 stages in the Netherlands, Belgium and France. After starting in the Dutch city of Utrecht on 4 July 2015, the tour will close in its traditional manner on 26 July, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

The new Euromedia OB hybrid production vehicle C42 supports 10 to 12 cameras, and is designed specifically to meet the demands of sports, variety, games and entertainment production. On the Tour de France, it will co-ordinate all the RF a

USA - Rat Sound, a leading sound reinforcement specialist for the concert touring industry, integrated a Dante audio network from Audinate at this spring's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and consequent Stagecoach festival.

Faced with the challenge of covering enormous areas of roughly 750 x 1200 feet, Rat Sound simplified the installation by installing a Dante network to ensure robust and reliable carriage of high-quality audio across 21 delay positions. In addition to reducing the labour installation costs, the Dante audio over IP solution provided exceptional performance at the renowned music festival. The annual festival featured over 200 artists and attracts several hundred thousand fans to the desert climate of Indio, California over two subsequent weekends every April.

For Coachella, the 21 delay positions were divided between the main Coachella festival stage

UK - West London based lighting and visuals rental company Colour Sound Experiment now holds the largest stock of Robe BMFL Spot moving lights in the UK with the purchase of 50 new fixtures, which have been delivered by Robe UK.

The new BFMFLs join Colour Sound's stock of over 800 moving lights of which around 450 are Robe products. They will be in action all over the country this summer, helping to service an impressive run of 60 plus major music festivals for which Colour Sound is already confirmed as lighting and LED screen supplier, including We Are FSTVL, Glastonbury, Creamfields, Reading / Leeds and numerous others.

Says Colour Sound's Haydn 'H' Cruickshank, "BMFLs are starting to appear on riders. I know that any Robe product is likely to be reliable and 'a good bet' for us, and we also needed a new bright and versatile moving light for the festivals generally. The

USA - The trusses above the CMA Music Festival's main and satellite stages at Nashville's LP Field sported a fleet of ten RF Venue collapsible CP Beam helical antennas. The four-day festival shattered attendance records and featured country music's biggest stars.

The show's RF designer and technician, Jason Glass, principle at Clean Wireless Audio, retained by veteran touring audio provider Sound Image, used CP Beams for both transmit and receive antennas which were available to all guest engineers.

"This is my third year doing the LP field show," says Glass. "The lighting rig that encompasses the stage is a veritable faraday cage. We deploy a number of antennas up in the trussing. This configuration is designed to give the best possible line-of-sight link between the performers on stage and the antennas."

Jason and Sound Image wanted to give guest artist

UK - As well as the major stars, Glastonbury is also known for hosting a series of other types of performance, such as dance, circus, comedy and theatre. This year renowned dance group Michael Clark Company took to the stage and performed over two days at the festival. Making their Worthy Farm debut, they called upon White Light, a company with which they have a long-standing relationship, to provide production support

Richard Godin, lighting designer for Michael Clark Company, states, "The company performed an extract from an existing piece called Come Been and Gone. There were three performances in total during the festival: one on the Pyramid Stage and two more in the Astrolabe Tent. It is extremely rare for a dance group to perform on the Pyramid Stage and I can only think of one other time this has happened."

The piece performed by Michael Clark Company w

Romania - When Cultural Centre House of Arts District 3 in Bucharest promoted a two-day summer garden party in the Romanian capital's Titan Park recently, Temple Media Romania were brought into provide sound, lighting, LED screens and staging. This included a number of premium discharge and LED fixtures from PR Lighting, for whom they handle local distribution.

The event was designed to bring together Romanian music and dance of various genres. From the traditional costumes and folkloric music of the opening day, headed by the violin orchestra Lautarii Chisinal to the pop rock line-up headlined by Connect-R on day two, Cristian Simon's inspired lighting design for the event dubbed Music & Art in Titan Park brought the setting to life for an audience of up to 10,000 people.

Simon's stage design was built around 16 PR XR 200 Beams, 10 XLED 1061 Wash and 16 XLED 2007.

The two f

UK - SKY Arts Sessions is a new TV music series which invites a host of artists to perform some of their favourite songs in an intimate setting. With no presenter or audience, the focus is solely on the music as the guests play songs fully live and reflect on their influences and inspirations.

Richard Martin Lighting (RML) has a long standing relationship with SKY and its lighting team. LD Richard Bowles returned the light the show after the success of the first series and we were also asked to return. The main lighting rig is made up of Sharpy, Sharpy Wash, 2 Lites, Jarag-L and Patten 2013. It also includes one of RML's most recent purchases the Clay Paky Mythos.

"Mythos is a highly advanced form of hybrid light: first of all, it is an excellent 470 watt-lamp spotlight, which produces an outstanding large light beam, featuring a zoom that ranges from 4° to 50&

UK - Serious Stages designed, manufactured and installed the new 'Other Stage' at this year's Glastonbury Festival. Artists have been appearing on Serious Stages for four decades at the world's most famous festival. But their focus is on the future, as Serious Stages managing director Steven Corfield states:

"The ever-increasing production expectations of bands combined with Michael and Emily's desire to give audiences the best experience led to discussions about creating a new Other Stage better suited to Glastonbury. Those conversations went through our CAD designers and engineers, on to keeping our fabrication facility this spring manufacturing the new flat roof system. Then our on-site team under project management of Simon Fursman have done a phenomenal job constructing this new stage for the first time at Glastonbury."

The new look Other Stage presented an impr

Korea - A comprehensive HK Audio Elements system has been chosen to provide sound reinforcement at the recently completed 500-capacity Siksa-dong catholic church in Korea.

The three-floor church, which was built over a five-year period and completed in early 2015, required a powerful yet inconspicuous sound system, and Daikyung Prosound Seocho - an appointed dealer of HK Audio's South Korean distributor, Sama Prosound - was called upon to perform the installation.

To match the church's size and interior stylings, Daikyung Prosound Seocho settled on an Elements system composed of two E435 A Install Kit units, six standard E435s, two E110 Sub As and two E110 Subs for the main speaker system, alongside two E435 A Install kits with two E435s for subs. In addition, two E435 A Install Kit units and two E435s were installed to act as a monitor system for the church's choir.

Jin-woo

China - Allen & Heath's iLive digital system has been installed as the FOH mixer in the central theatre at the New Yuanming Palace of Zhuhai. A reproduction of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, which was destroyed in 1860, the popular tourist attraction covers an area of 1.39 km², and includes an imperial garden, lake, pagodas and a new central outdoor theatre to stage theatrical performances.

The theatre is a multi-functional venue with a 10, 000 m² seating area that can accommodate 6,000 people, and hosts regular cultural performances and festival events. The FOH system comprises an iLive-T112 Control Surface with iDR-48 MixRack, fitted with an M-DANTE network card to support 64 channels of multi-track for live recording and playback.

"iLive provides flexible control and extensive operational capabilities, including live recording, which means our sound system can eas

Mongolia - The art delegation of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), comprising 106 members, recently held the first of three shows at the Ulaanbaatar Central Palace of Culture during a 10-day visit to Mongolia.

The delegation consisted of people from the Song and Dance Troupe of the PLA General Political Department, the PLA Academy of Arts and the Acrobatic Troupe of the PLA Guangzhou Military Area Command (MAC).

During their visit, the delegation carried out artistic exchanges with the song and dance troupe of the Mongolian military, where spectacular effects from PR Lighting were provided by the Chinese manufacturer's Mongolian partner, D-light. This involved 36 pieces of XR 200 Beam and 36 XPAR 336.

The lightweight and compact XR200 Beam is equipped with a Platinum 5R or Osram 230 HRI lamp, to provide a parallel, laser like 'pencil' moving beam with a brightness of 67,76

USA - Every dimension of Air Supply was on full display at a recent concert in the Boston area, supported by a Troy Stubby-designed lightshow that featured Legend 230SR Beam moving fixtures in a variety of stage positions. JDI Productions provided the Chauvet Professional fixtures for the sold-out performance, substituting them for "more famous name movers" that were in the tour's original rig design.

"Troy's original design called for these other fixtures to be used, but we've been using the Legends back to back on so many shows that we felt very comfortable with them," said JDI's Freddy Thompson, who, along with his colleague Pete Therrien, oversaw the lighting rig. "So with Troy's approval we made the switch. In the past, Troy had been using the SR beams on the floor to cross shoot the backdrop with a rotating prism. It created a really great effect,

Belgium - Performing all over Europe and the Middle East, Exclusive Strings is an all-female string quartet that plays a mixture of classical and contemporary music. With Yamaha's new TF series consoles already shipping from dealers, a TF1 recently aided a very exclusive performance.

Developed and managed by Jan Ceulemans, Exclusive Strings all perform with Yamaha Silent Strings instruments, whose compact designs, detachable frames and high quality electronics provide the sound and feel of an acoustic instrument, with the portability and low maintenance of an electric one.

Freelance sound engineer Kevin van Lieshout of Advanced Music has been working with Exclusive Strings for the past five years. The ladies perform in any of three live packages - with backing tracks, a contemporary band or a full orchestra - so Kevin needs a flexible console, but one that is compact as he tou

Haiti - In the aftermath of Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed the infrastructure of its major cities, new construction is renewing hope among the Haitian people, albeit slowly.

The earthquake destroyed the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption in the capital city of Port-au-Prince, one of the struggling nation's prized architectural and cultural landmarks. Although plans are underway to rebuild the cathedral, its completion is still a decade away, in the best case.

To bridge the time between now and then, the Catholic Church recently completed a steel-frame open-air cathedral that seats 1,600 adjacent to the old church's ruins. Miami-based Revelation Sound, Inc. designed and installed the sound reinforcement and electronic clarion systems for the steel-frame cathedral, counting on Ashly Audio processing, amplifica

UK - "The Ayrton MagicBlade-Rs that we have purchased from Ambersphere Solutions are undoubtedly the lighting fixture of summer 2015," says Rob Merrilees, director of Dry Hire Lighting (DHL). DHL now hasa substantial number of MagicBlades in stock although they very rarely actually see them. "The Blades are constantly in demand," continues Merrilees. "We're grateful that their quality of build and excellent reliability factor means we can pretty much guarantee they can fly in and fly out of the warehouse in perfect working order. Even so, we are having to turn away requests for Ayrton Blades at the moment."

The continuous rotation on both Pan and Tilt axes is the central characteristic of this seven RGBW LED unit. Compact, light and economical, the MagicBlade-R offers the lighting designer imaginative and creative possibilities with an almost endles

India - Dutch trance music DJ and producer Armin van Buuren's radio show A State of Trance (ASOT) has been going strong since 2001 and its 700th episode on 6 June was celebrated in style with a huge live show in Mumbai, India, lit by Elation Professional's new Platinum SBX moving head along with the popular Platinum Beam 5R and ELAR 180 PAR fixtures.

Propelling him to superstardom with trance fans around the world, ASOT attracts 33m listeners weekly through 100 FM radio-stations in more than 80 countries. A State of Trance milestone is always an occasion to party and ASOT 700, held in association with Sunburn, saw The Dome in Mumbai decked out in a large intelligent lighting package for performances by Armin van Buuren, Cosmic Gate, Orjan Nilsen, Super8 & Tab and Ruben De Ronde.

Star Dimensions India provided lighting, trussing and LED screens for the event with lightin

UK - dbn Lighting returned to Heaton Park in Manchester to supply lighting to five out of the eight stages and video to two of those - for the popular Parklife Weekender music festival with which they have been involved since its inception in 2010.

The crew - which peaked at 24 technicians, programmers and operators - was led by dbn's Pete Robinson, and they started their various get-ins across the site on the Wednesday. There were a few logistical curved balls thrown into the mix for good measure, including a Friday night concert by the Courteeners which was slotted in by promoters SJM on Stage 4. While dbn were not lighting this, the licensing restricted access to other areas which therefore had to be ready ahead of time.

The main stage this year was up-scaled to a 24m Space roof from Serious three weeks before the event to accommodate the two headliners - Disclosure and Rud

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