Brazil - For the sixth Brazilian edition and the 30th anniversary of the original Rock in Rio, production company Gabisom Audio Equipment debuted its new MLA system on the Palco Sunset stage which featured artists such as Korn, John Legend, Magic, Deftones, Steve Vai and Al Jarreau across the mix of rock and pop line-ups.

The purchase, comprising 46 x MLA elements, two MLD Downfill cabinets and 24 MLX subs, followed a very successful trial of MLA at Rock in Rio, USA last May. At the Las Vegas event every FOH engineer had been very complimentary about the system saying it was one of the easiest shows they'd done.

Gabisom has been in charge of the sound at Rock in Rio since 2001 including all 14 international editions and the latest incarnate followed a similar equipment list as to the Las Vegas event. Sixteen MLA enclosures with one MLD per side along with 32 MLX subwoofers gro

Sound Investment - The British music industry invested nearly £500m in new music in 2014, with the signing up of new artists by major labels up 30%, according to data released by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and Music Publishers Association (MPA). The number of new acts signed by major labels last year hit a five-year high of 156, the figures say.

The 156 new artists signed by Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music was 26 more than in 2013, and just 12 fewer than the recent peak in 2009 of 164 new deals. Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI and Brit Awards, said, "It's no fluke that 2014 was such an outstanding year for British music. Alongside the artists themselves, the passion and commitment labels show in unearthing, nurturing and developing the next wave of talent is one of the main reasons our music is the envy of the world right now."<

USA - Audinate has announced the immediate worldwide availability of its new Dante Via software. Having already revolutionized the delivery of audio-over-IP with its widely adopted Dante networking solution, Audinate now makes it even easier for end-users, integrators, consultants and sound engineers across a wide range of markets to experience the advantages of Dante-based networking.

The Dante Via software connects any audio application or device from your computer to a Dante network. Dante Via enables USB, FireWire or Thunderbolt devices - including microphones, legacy mixing consoles or I/O boxes - to join any Dante audio network. The new software also allows a Dante network to be created without the need for dedicated Dante hardware, providing a straightforward approach to routing audio using only computers. Sporting an intuitive, easy to use 'drag and drop'-style interface

Papua New Guinea - Optical Audio is a boutique provider of high-end audio processing, communications and control equipment working out of Melbourne, Australia. Technical Director Jason Read heads up a full time team of three employees, working with a team of regular contractors on the big gigs.

"We supply a service, managed within our current staffing, that ensures we deliver the product," explained Jason. "We're there from quote, to design, to delivery and we're the guys on the ground doing the job. When we started eight years ago, we were supplying backbone PA equipment like drive gear and processing. Communications became a natural progression from our work on fireworks and show control systems. Comms came naturally to us, and we've stared to specialise, and take on high profile projects."

Optical Audio has chosen equipment from Clear-Com to fill their c

USA - As technical director of The Heights Baptist Church in Richardson, Texas, Bobby Dennis is accustomed to creating big concert looks on stage. Leading Christian artists and Dove Award winners like Aaron Shust and Point of Grace have regularly performed at this dynamic church outside Dallas, which counts international recording artist Sixteen Cities among its worship leaders.

Yet when the time came to upgrade The Heights' lighting system, Dennis was intent on going beyond the church's concert tradition by putting together a rig that could do more than animate music with bold bright hues. He also wanted lighting with the depth and flexibility to create engaging scenes for his church's sermon series. Being on a limited budget, he needed to do this with as few fixtures as possible. He accomplished this ambitious goal with the multi-tasking Rogue RH1 Hybrid from Chauvet Professio

Italy - Nile Rodgers performed an evening of disco music at the Lucca Summer Festival with percussionist and drummer Sheila E., who has worked with Prince for more than a decade and who thrilled Barack and Michelle Obama during her recent show at the White House.

Italian lighting designer Massimo Tomasino, who followed the artist on his 2010 tour, designed the lights and counted on Clay Paky equipment for its reliability and reputation.

In every city where the concert was hosted in the UK (London, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham), the production team had no difficulty in procuring the same Clay Paky lights or, at least, equally effective alternatives made by the same manufacturer.

Tomassino himself cannot hide his pride when he says "I am glad Clay Paky is an Italian name since it is highly appreciated abroad." He put eight Alpha Spot HPE 1200s on the bac

Canada - Ottawa's Centrepointe Theatre has become the first Canadian venue to permanently install a Meyer Sound Leopard linear sound reinforcement system. The system is the third generation of Meyer Sound systems to be installed in the 954-seat theatre, which has relied on the durability and longevity of Meyer Sound since its opening in 1988.

"The coverage of Leopard is incredibly uniform," reports Neil Collier, senior project manager for Ottawa-based Wall Sound, Inc., which designed and installed the system. "With the same evenness in the upper and under balcony as in the rest of the house, every seat is a great seat. In addition, the flown 900-LFC low-frequency control elements have opened up sightlines for extreme front row side seats that were formerly obstructed by stage-stacked subwoofers."

According to Matt Lamarche, production supervisor for Centrep

USA - Nashville based lighting and visuals designer Chris Lisle was invited by production manager Jim Dorroh of LEO Events to light seven performance stages at the inaugural Kaaboo festival recently staged in Del Mar, California.

Chris specified 20 x Robe BMFL Blades as a major part of the lighting scheme for the Sunset Cliffs (main) Stage of the three day event, a music 'experience' and a specially curated 'sound voyage', combining rock music and some EDM with comedy, food, contemporary art, great vibes and premium amenities.

Chris worked closely with co-designer Erik Parker and assembled a hand-picked team of lighting programmer / operators to run and coordinate lighting for all the stages. Music headliners included The Killers, No Doubt, Snoop Dog, The Zac Brown Band and many, many more.

The goal was to make each stage look different and dynamic while keeping everything u

Italy - Clay Paky was a main attraction at Campovolo 2015 thanks to lighting designer Jo Campana. Campovolo was a three-and-a-half hour music festival organized to celebrate Ligabue's 25-year career. The 150,000 tickets sold for 7m euros makes it an all time record for Italy.

This year, the production team concentrated on two priorities: making sure the entire audience, including those furthest from the stage, had a high level of concert visibility and outstanding sound quality. To meet these requirements, an imposing sound system was installed and an impressively big curvilinear stage architecture was built, featuring a magnificent LED wall (960 square yards, 0.6" pitch).

Jo Campana comments, "We wanted everyone there to be able to see the event as if they were in the front row as well as enjoy the music. A lot of airtime was devoted to live images on the huge LED w

Germany - Audio and video play a key role in the new Medical Simulation Centre at Technical University Munich in Germany. The new facility has been designed for the training of physicians and healthcare staff and realistically recreates the critical situations they will encounter in their professional lives.

The training takes place in fully equipped medical rooms and is carried out on modern simulation dummies, in which bodily functions such as breathing, heart rate and blood pressure can all be measured. The dummies can even talk, being connected to the microphone of a tutor. The tutors provide instruction from separate control rooms with audio and video links. These links also allow recording for later debriefing sessions.

The AV equipment for the project was supplied by prodyTel Distribution GmbH, who worked closely with the technical staff at the university to design a sy

UK - Live event production specialists PR Live supplied all technical elements - lighting, sound and AV - to the recent Friends Fest event, a five day expo-style extravaganza staged at the Boiler House in Brick Lane, east London which celebrated the popular landmark American sitcom, Friends.

PR Live's team, project managed by Justin Hammond, were working for live communication agency Premier PR. The Boiler House was transformed into a replica set of Monica's apartment, complete with Central Perk style café and pop-up hair salon where visitors could get a Rachael Green style blow dries plus a load of Friends props and memorabilia. Organised by Comedy Central, tickets for the event sold out within minutes of going on sale.

PR Live's crew worked closely with the builders Scena from Croydon. First, they installed a combination flown / ground supported rigging

UK - The Shure Distribution UK Systems Group provided leading AV Integrator Snelling with technical support and product expertise for a major upgrade of the installed audio system at Reading University's G10 Theatre.

As the sole AV integrator for the University, Snelling has consolidated Reading's AV systems and standardised on Shure and QSC for audio, along with Dante for network audio. The university was previously using a mix of analogue products across the estate that were limited in their ability to change frequency due to interference from other channels/external factors. These limitations were compounded by the high level of maintenance and licensing management required by the system.

Snelling worked alongside the Shure UK Systems Group to configure a scalable and resilient networked audio system comprised of Shure ULX-D Digital Wireless System, QSC DCA cinema amplifier

UK - Kids will be kids and at the end of a long week at school, a Big Friday Wind-Up is just the tonic which is why this CBBC favourite, presented by 'Sam and Mark', is currently filming its 5th series.

Dock 10 in Salford Manchester has fast become the home of children's television and so who better to be in the seat for designing the lighting show, than Lee Allen who is now so involved with the studios and CBBC that he even has a second home in the area!

It's always so exciting when a new LD gets hold of show, just to see what they will do with it and Big Friday Wind-Up is no exception.

The set and lighting is bright and bold, the perfect back drop for the fun and games that take part on the show. Lee's lighting rig, supplied by Richard Martin Lighting (RML) is a mix of the old and the new, including VL2000 Wash, Golden Scans, Mini Scans, Nexus 4x4, Chroma Flo

USA / Switzerland - Audio over IP pioneer Barix announces that Music Matters, a New York City-based custom music provider for luxury lifestyle brands, is among the first customers to deploy its groundbreaking SoundScape IP distribution and management platform. The initial deployment covers hospitality clients including Commune Hotels + Resorts, Hyatt and IC Hotels with additional rollouts to luxury retail and hospitality brands to follow.

SoundScape is a fully integrated, subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) for streaming business music and advertising over IP networks. The complete platform brings together cloud-based content management, reliable end point players and global, centralized monitoring capabilities. Quick to deploy and infinitely scalable, users enjoy dynamic content scheduling, system-wide reporting and monitoring, remote device management, and high-qua

UK - On 21 October, 2015, history caught up with itself for fans of the Back to the Future film series, and a collection of Chauvet fixtures was used to help a large gathering of British fans mark the occasion.

In 1989's Back to the Future II, the time travelling Doc sets the destination time in the plutonium powered DeLorean DMC-12 sports car to 21 October, 2015, thus transporting Marty McFly and his girlfriend Jennifer into the future to save the past. To mark this date of mythical cult status, Vision SL was commissioned by Tattooed Bakers to help create a life-sized DeLorean cake for a Back to the Future Day celebration.

Vision SL brought this edible automobile to life with help from two Geyser RGB foggers that simulated plumes of smoke emanating from the cake-car's exhaust. To add extra realism to colour the DeLorean, Vision SL also used four COLORado

USA - Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago recently celebrated its 40th anniversary at the 20,500-seat United Centre in Chicago. Audio production was a major undertaking, deploying nearly 350x Nexo STM modules, used in the round - the largest single use of STM in the US to date, and the first use of the new Yamaha Rivage PM10.

Audio production was spearheaded by the light and sound division of Morris Light & Sound (Nashville, TN) with the assistance of Reach Communications (Champlin, MN), TC Furlong (Lake Forest, IL), and Yamaha Professional Audio, headquartered in Buena Park, CA.

With all of the requirements for this huge task, company crews were on hand to assist, measure, test, and train staff when necessary. Fusion Productions, Inc. of Algonquin, IL, handled the production under the direction of company owner Todd Elliott, who acted as production manager for the annive

The Netherlands - Robe moving lights have been installed at the new Doornroosje (Sleeping Beauty) live music venue in Nijmegen.

Originally founded around 1968 and since 1970 operating out of a disused school building in the south suburbs of the city, the club became a popular hippy hangout in the 1970s, and through 40 years at the cutting edge of live music and entertainment, legendary for showcasing ground-breaking artists on the cusp of success and popularity from Pink Floyd to the Gaslight Anthem. It also hosts Holland's longest running club night, Planet Rose.

As well as being renowned for some of the best techno sounds in the country, Doornroosje was also well known in the day as one of the first places in the Netherlands where marijuana was openly available.

Now housed in a new building right downtown, sandwiched between central station on one side and the police const

Italy - After a string of concerts throughout Italy, Eros Ramazzotti (one of the most successful Italian artists abroad) brought his Perfetto World Tour 2015 to Europe with a series of 14 live dates.

EVO, the new D.T.S. moving head, was chosen for the tour. 30 units were mounted vertically beside the large central LED wall and on the ground behind the platforms of the musicians.

"The EVOs create remarkable backlight effects, and energetic extra-bright beam projections. The exclusive Dyna Prism (D.T.S. Patent Pending) is also very effective, enhancing with spectacular animations any gobo projection," says DTS.

Lighting operator for the tour was Nicola Tallino, whilst Agorà was the rental company.

UK - PRG XL Video supplied video elements for the larger shows on popular drum 'n' bass massive Rudimental's 2015 tour, which started in March and culminated in a characteristically energetic performance at London's Alexandra Palace, complete with a vibrant visual design by Jonny Gaskell.

For this show, the company supplied LED screen and Catalyst media server control, a side projection system plus IMAG cameras and PPU.

The fundamental concept of Rudimental's full design was to make the stage an interactive and theatrical environment with several contrasting visual layers which peeled back as the all-action set developed, revealing more depth and new eye-candy every few songs. The space was defined by several impressive scenic pieces including a large replica of the Hackney Central (London, E8) railway bridge, and a tabbed double-sided back cloth which was in for the first few

Denmark - Following the news last week that lighting manufacturer SGM had filed for bankruptcy, the company has announced that it has "restructured" with "further investments".

"To maintain SGM as the absolute leader of intelligent LED light, further investments were needed. After a period of disagreement between shareholders about the future capital structure, the board of directors had no other option than to apply for a proceeding aiming to restructure the company. On 9 November at 18:00, SGM was completely re-established with its new shareholder and capital. The management ascertains that SGM will continue as before without any changes - and stronger than ever."

The company says that all elements of its business remain unchanged, and that the entire team, the worldwide distributor network and all warranty commitments remain identical to before

USA - Located in North East, Maryland, the Milburn Stone Theatre at Cecil College is one of the region's premier theatrical houses. Proactive in fostering an appreciation of the arts, the company recently produced Bring It On: The Musical set in the high stakes world of competitive high school cheerleading.

To create the lighting design for the explosive musical comedy, freelance designer William Price worked with Philips Entertainment to bring in a winning combination of his own that included Showline SL BEAM 300 FX, SL BAR 640, and SL NITRO 510 LED luminaires, along with Philips Vari-Lite VL4000 Spot luminaires and Philips Selecon PLCYC1 LED luminaires.

"When I was initially asked to create the lighting design for Bring It On, I wanted to pay homage to the original Broadway design by Jason Lyons," began Price. "Understanding the high-impact lighting de

Austria - The laser show at this year's Lake Festival in Austria was spectacular. Laserfabrik used four RTI NANO RGB 30 laser systems together with Lasergraph DSP controllers for covering the whole venue and creating spectacularly coloured effects.

The German Laserworld company Ray Technologies GmbH, located in Valley next to Munich, manufactures high end show laser light equipment, especially for demanding applications like touring, cruise ships and multimedia shows. The RTI NANO RGB 30 laser systems were especially developed for well-colour-balanced high power applications. Due to them being waterproof IP 65, they are the main choice of many pro laser show companies like Laserfabrik.

"The major challenges at this event were the various changes in requirements from the organizer's side. Due to our many years of experience it was no problem to get a spectacular show going

New Zealand - Pacific Simulators, a flight simulator design and manufacturing company based in Christchurch, New Zealand, has adopted Allen & Heath's compact ZED-10 and ZED-14 analogue mixers as standard in its products.

As part of the company's ongoing research and development, it recently underwent an audio design upgrade, which included the Allen and Heath mixers.

The company's training simulators, certified as official flight crew training machines in many countries, use the ZED-14 mixers, where 2 auxiliary sends are required to facilitate authentic flight crew training. Meanwhile ZED-10 mixers are now installed in the commercial 'Flight Experience' simulators, available from the company's global store network, which aim to provide a realistic experience of flying a passenger jet.

"Prior to working at Pacific Simulators, I was a sound and recording engineer for 30 y

USA - Seven standards are posted for public review on the PLASA North America's TSP website at http://tsp.plasa.org/tsp/documents/public_review_docs.php.

Some are reaffirmations of existing standards, some are withdrawals of existing standards, and some (the BSRs) are drafts of new standards. Comments are due before the end of the day on the date shown.

ANSI E1.3 - 2001 (R201x), Entertainment Technology - Lighting Control Systems - 0 to 10V Analog Control Specification. The standard describes a method of controlling current-sink devices and equipment by means of an analogue control voltage in the nominal range from zero to 10 volts positive, with the control signal current sourced from the controller. It is primarily intended for theatrical lighting controllers and controlled devices (e.g., dimmers), but any device could use this control method. The working group propos

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