The 'palatial' theme of previous years was continued with events at Hopetoun House, South Queensferry (near Edinburgh), Ragley Hall at Alcester in Warwickshire and Pennyhill Park in Bagshot, Surrey.
"We appreciate that travelling sometimes very long distances and giving us a whole day out of their schedules is a very generous commitment from our customers, so we really did all we could to make the days as useful and pleasant for them as possible," says Sennheiser UK's Ken Morrison.
"We aimed to fill the days with a lot of useful topics and this year introduced breakout workshop sessions between the main topics, all delivered in a very comfortable and convivial environment."
Primary topics for the days started with a thorough (and necessary!) update on the spectrum sell off situation, delivered by Sennheiser UK's resident expert Alan March. This led neatly into Sennheiser UK's chief engineer, Andy Lillyhwhite, giving an entertaining and informative overview of the full range of Sennheiser radio microphones.
After lunch and the keenly-anticipated draw for Sennheiser HD 800 and HD 25 headphones, APart and D.A.S. loudspeakers and other prizes, the days continued with an eye-opening business presentation titled Being In The Entertainment Technology Business, delivered by independent consultant Lauren Rogers of RH Consulting.
This was followed by sound engineer and all round system guru, Dave Wooster's Sound In Architecture K-Array speaker demonstration, which was certainly one of the highlights for all present. Dave then led the visitors outside to a powerful finale, as he put the latest K-array and D.A.S. Audio line array systems through their paces across the rolling grounds of the country houses.
Meanwhile, the breakout sessions included an impressive speaker comparator workshop with APart's Ian Hodgkinson; Dave Wooster introducing the latest technologies in digital microphones and Nick Pemberton giving an impressive overview of the HAL 1, Rane's latest DSP product. Nick and Dave presented their topics in relative silence, in the same room, as their audiences listened in comfort via Sennheiser's multi-channel 2020D digital tour guide system.
"It was definitely our most successful and enjoyable roadshow tour yet and the feedback from our visitors has been very rewarding indeed," says Morrison. "Attendance was well up on previous years, with record-breaking attendances throughout the tour.
"We were all left champing at the bit for more, so hopefully we will be back out with more dates and revamped topics before the end of the year."
(Jim Evans)
