Sweden - Oslo's new wedge-shaped Opera House - built specifically to house the city's Den Norske Opera an Ballett company - has completed commissioning of two TiMax delay-matrix systems with full programming of multiple on-stage and 3D surround effects audio images.

Alf Berntson of Swedish consultants Artifon AB created the advanced source-oriented reinforcement (SOR) specification for the venue's impressive main classical opera auditorium, 'Stage One', which is partnered with an adjacent contemporary drama and music black-box theatre space known as 'Stage Two'.

A TiMax IM16 matrix is integrated with each theatre's Salzbrenner Stagetec Nexus dsp and routing core via AES3 and optical networking, allowing either TiMax matrix to be used in any room without physical re-patching. Salzbrenner Stagetec previously approached TiMax manufacturers Out Board to help implement the delay-ma

Canada - Canyon Creek Chophouse, one of Toronto's most popular restaurant chains, recently opened a new location at Carlson Court near the Toronto Pearson International Airport. With systems integration firm ET Group's design and installation of a complete audio/video system featuring zoned audio with JBL Control Contractor Series ceiling speakers, Canyon Creek provides one of the most relaxed and elegant dining environments in Toronto.

"We needed an audio system that was not clearly visible to the patrons, but most definitely could be heard," said Dirk Propfe, partner and vice president of the ET Group. "We also wanted to be able to provide discrete control over the sound in each room, to help create an even more hospitable experience for diners and flexibility for the restaurant."

The ET Group designed and installed a zoned ceiling speaker system, drawin

UK - A beyerdynamic Revoluto conference system has been installed in the headquarters of Invest NI, Northern Ireland's economic development agency. The system was installed by Niavac as part of an AV requirement.

As the economic development agency for Northern Ireland, Invest NI's role is to grow the economy by helping new and existing businesses to compete internationally and to attract new investment to Northern Ireland. Based in Bedford Street in the heart of Belfast, Invest NI's headquarters boasts striking architecture with its elegant curves and glass detail. Inside the building the strong design features continue, particularly in the main boardroom which forms part of the building's apex.

The installation took place in Invest NI's rounded main boardroom. Due to the shape and acoustics of the room, traditional gooseneck microphones were not suitable. Stephen Briggs, cont

UK - SAE Liverpool has introduced a launch short course on Ableton Live aimed at the nation's DJs and electronic music performers. The course takes place in the evenings and includes an insight into the Vestax VCM-600 purpose-built Ableton Live controllers.

SAE Liverpool manager Gavin Attard said, "SAE Liverpool has always focused on preparing our students for professional careers, but we also need to address the needs of those who need quick, hands-on and practical help to get up to speed with the greatest industry-standard tools that are set to shape the next generation of DJs and electronic music performers. And that's where our new Ableton Live Course comes in.

"In the space of four weeks we aim to revolutionise perceptions and expectations. Using the most powerful DJ software in the world and one of the most intuitive controllers yet released, we're certain our

USA - Shure Incorporated has announced that Rick Renner has joined the company as a regional sales manager. In this role, he will be responsible for managing sales for Shure in the Northeast US.

"It's great to have Rick on our team," said Jim Schanz, director of US field sales. "He brings a proven track record of successful sales experience in pro audio and extensive industry knowledge to our team, which will help us continue to grow our business in the US."

Before joining Shure, Renner served for seven years as regional sales manager and sales representative at Sennheiser Electronics Corporation. Before that, he was a staff recording engineer at Streeterville Recording Studios in Chicago.

(Jim Evans)

USA - Showorks Audio Visual, a provider of A/V services for major corporate events throughout the Northeast US for over 20 years, is enjoying the benefits of the Pro64 Aviom digital snake.

As the event staging company for a number of Fortune 500 companies, meeting and event planners and producers across the United States, Showorks is responsible for some critical projects, and reliability, efficiency and crystal-clear sound are always essential elements. With that responsibility in mind, the company chose a Pro64 digital snake to connect the stage to front of house and for signal distribution to monitors and recording.

"Aviom's Pro64 system is the simplest way of splitting audio between multiple consoles while offering a low noise floor in a design that's lightweight," says Showorks project manager Mark Allen. "It's a lot easier to run Cat 5 or fibre than a piec

UK - Entertainment technology providers and industry professionals from the UK event and music production industry have pledged their generous support in raising money for Cancer Research. By sponsoring Vibes for the Vines '09 - a one-day, music festival - with state of the art equipment and their own valuable time, they will ensure a memorable event for all.

On August 8th in a field in Horam, East Sussex, Gary Moore will top the bill, supported by Mo Foster and local legend Ray Russell. There will also be a special guest appearance by Geno Washington of The Ram Jam Band fame and Chris Difford from Squeeze.

Vibes from the Vines '09 follows the first hugely successful festival in 2006, when organizers raised an impressive £32,000 for Cancer Research UK. This year, with a much bigger show and substantially improved production facilities organizers will be loo

Italy - Gandalf Il Grigio (Gandalf The Grey) is a new, Lord Of The Rings-styled bar and karaoke club in Campobasso, central Italy. Popular with students, the venue's low ceilings and many hard, flat surfaces - plus the habit of its patrons of dancing on the tables - mean that the acoustics are challenging.

Supplied by La Cicala of Dragoni, near Caserta, the audio system was designed by one of Yamaha Musica Italia's consultants to overcome both the acoustic challenges of the venue and to provide an audio solution which delivered maximum versatility and an excellent price/quality ratio.

The heart of the system is a Yamaha DME24N digital mix engine, which takes feeds from four different audio sources, including background music from CD, the soundtrack of DVDs, karaoke vocals and audio file playback from a PC, via a Yamaha MW8CX eight channel USB audio interface and mixer.<

Germany - Dynacord has unveiled the two latest members of its D-Lite family - the D12R and D12T weatherproof boxes. Both of these polypropylene cabinets are impervious to rough handing and inclement weather and the precise sound reproduction, lightness, and elegant, unobtrusive design of these newest D-LITE boxes make them suitable for a wide variety of sound reinforcement applications, says the company.

The D12R is a 12-inch, two-way, polypropylene cabinet for professional fixed installations (swimming pools, ice rinks, hotels, amusement parks, etc.) as well as small to medium-sized events. The box is equipped with an Electro-Voice DL12BFH 12" woofer (for the bass and midrange) and a Constant-Directivity HF horn [radiation pattern: 80° (horizontal) x 40° (vertical)] armed with the newly developed ND2 driver from Electro-Voice. The cabinet also features 300-watt (co

Switzerland DiGiCo has become a sponsor of the Montreux Jazz Festival. "We are up in the mountains, up with the cows and up in the sky," says festival founder Claude Nobs. "But for me it is so important that the Festival remains leading edge, that we adopt new technologies that bring improvements to the audience's experience.

"The introduction of FPGA design and the benefits for the engineers are quite impressive. DiGiCo are frontrunners in this change in audio processing and it is a great result for the Festival that DiGiCo has chosen to become part of the sponsorship programme."

DiGiCo had already won half the battle with Patrick Vogelsang, head of audio for the Festival, before he'd even experienced its consoles firsthand. "It's refreshing to me that the company is so in tune with the industry and the engineers' needs," he says. "When

The Netherlands - Located close to the major conurbations of Amsterdam, Utrecht, Den Haag, Rotterdam and Leiden, the Levenstroom (Livingstream) church is a large format house of worship with a dedicated congregation. The church's recent move to a new building has seen it embrace the latest in audio visual technology to produce an all-inclusive experience for its worshippers and to spread its message via the internet, radio, television, DVDs and CDs - all of which are fully produced in house.

To achieve this, the church needed to undertake a major upgrade of its audio system, which has seen a pair of DiGiCo CSD5 consoles installed, one at front of house, the other in its integrated studio facilities.

"We had been using a 36 channel analogue console since 1992, but had issues with not having enough channels and were looking for a long-term solution, one which would be enoug

UK - Hire and Sales company Point Source Productions Ltd has been using Doughty PAR can floorplates for many years to speed the preparation of lanterns in its warehouse. During this prepping procedure, technical director Ben Marshall realised that, whilst the floorplates negated the need to remove the hook clamp from a lantern, this time-consuming action still had to be done when mounting the lantern on a stand.

To address this, Ben devised a hook clamp spigot adaptor which would overcome this problem. Like the Doughty floor plate, this handy widget allows the hook clamp, complete with wing nut and washers, to be slotted into a secure fixing, which is mounted on a standard spigot fixing. This is then simply inserted into the lighting stand to present an immediate solution to stand-mounted lanterns without the fiddly process of removing the hook clamp.

"Preparation time is

USA - Renkus-Heinz Iconyx Digitally Steerable Array technology has helped another famous house of worship satisfy the demands of modern-day audiences for clarity and intelligibility in an acoustically challenging space - in this case, the Historic Church of St Patrick in Toledo, Ohio.

"The Historic Church of St. Patrick was originally built in 1892 so that workers on the Erie Canal could attend Mass on Sundays," explains Don Beyer of Torrence Sound Equipment Company, the firm responsible for transforming the church's audio presentation.

He adds, "During the 1970s and 80s, like many other Midwest cities, Toledo lost a lot of manufacturing jobs, and the neighbourhood suffered. But the building is a historic landmark, and the diocese decided to revitalise the church with an extensive outreach programme to the Catholic community in greater Toledo. We were called in

UK - Sound Division Group has extended its long relationship with London operators Piers Adam, Guy Pelly and Nick House with the opening of Tini Bar, a classic Italian 'aperitivo' bar in Chelsea.

This provides them with a trio of West End venues - all of which have had their technology and mood lighting implanted by Sound Division. First came Whisky Mist in 2006, a reconfiguration at the former Zeta Bar in the Mayfair Hilton - and both this, and its successor, Mahiki in Dover Street continue to thrive.

Tini Bar (a derivation of 'Martini') is the latest. As the name and concept imply, this is open early evening for cocktails before ratcheting up the tempo later on, when the background music of earlier makes way for louder house music and cool new age jazz.

With his long experience of working with the operators, Sound Division MD David Graham knew the best approach to take wit

Denmark - American saxophonist and music director Bobby Ricketts has adopted Copenhagen as his hometown like many expatriate musicians before him. And he has selected the DPA 4099 Saxophone mic to accompany him and his instruments on a packed international touring schedule.

The first thing Ricketts mentions about the 4099 is its sound - a logical observation given that the microphone design is based partially on acoustic test measurements of his sax playing, conducted by DPA design engineer Ole Moesmann.

"The sound is so natural," he says. "I've played about 25 concerts in the past few months across the Scandinavia, the US, Japan and East Africa, and the sound techs always comment on how the sound from my horn through the 4099 requires little or no EQ, and signal output is never an issue for them.

"The same is true onstage - I get a sound from the stage m

USA - Rock the Bike, a designer and manufacturer of bicycles with an eye on raising the awareness of the "bike culture," has employed JBL PRX portable loudspeakers at several of its live music events, which are run on human power generated on bicycles.

For its live events, Rock the Bike designed a pedal-powered stage, which enables one or many individuals to ride stationary bicycles in place, which in turn power the audio system as the artists perform. "It's been a steady progression to this - most of our performances used to be primarily in the streets and running off battery power," said Paul Freedman of Rock The Bike. "Then we started hooking up with people interested in human power and over the past year, we've put a lot of energy into creating our own pedal-powered stage."

Rock the Bike employs PRX535 speakers for its main sound reinforceme

UK - It's already been described by organiser Michael Eavis as the "best ever" Glastonbury and for audio rental company RG Jones Sound Engineering it marked the third year in succession in charge of the Pyramid Stage. This year the London based company, a member of the Synco Europe Network, supplied a full Synco package including Synco by Martin Audio W8L Longbow main PA line arrays and Martin Audio delays, a massive Synco cardioid sub-bass array and a complete Synco stage monitoring and drum-fill system.

Yasha Morgenstern, deputy production manager of Glastonbury Festival, commented, "We asked RG Jones to provide a redesigned arena system for the Pyramid Stage, to give better coverage and less overspill in that notoriously difficult arena. We are more than pleased with the result, with many reports of improved arena sound this year. Control, monitors and stage ra

UK/USA - Brighton-based technology consultants Visual Acuity has received two top industry awards for its role in developing the technology for specific areas of the California Academy of Sciences. The company has received recognition by Archi-Tech in the 'Best project over one million USD' category and the overall Grand Prize and Pro AV 'Best Museum' project category.

"This project saw six years of meticulous planning, design, consulting and 'green' engineering and to have our role recognised by leading US trade awards for the California Academy of Sciences is an outstanding achievement. We're also delighted that many of our key partners and friends were also able to join us in celebrating the award wins at InfoComm," says Blair Parkin, managing director at Visual Acuity.

"These partners included the California Academy of Sciences as well as Thinc

Russia - Two years ago the city of Ryazan, 180km south-east of Moscow, embarked on a series of major arts venue refurbishments as part of a self-proclaimed Year of Culture. Coinciding with the start of the world's current financial tempest, the fact that these projects have all largely been successfully completed is a matter of some civic pride. That it hasn't all been plain sailing will come as no surprise, but from what quarter these choppy waters emerged was unexpected. "Unfortunately the new sound system was so good we had to re-record all our tracks due to high noise levels that we had previously been unable to hear," commented Semen Grechko, director of the Ryazan Drama Theatre.

Founded in 1787 and originally an Opera House, the theatre converted to drama and musical theatre after a complete rebuild in the early 1960s. The recent refurbishment in the Year of Cult

China - Software providers Stardraw.com has announced the appointment of Architectural Audio China (AAC) for the exclusive distribution of Stardraw Control throughout China. AAC has its main office in Shanghai with branch offices in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Shenyang and Nanjing, where each office services 40-50 sales channels (dealers and systems integrators) with a total of 400 channels around China.

AAC is a well-established distributor that already carries a number of pro audio and AV brands, including Peavey's MediaMatrix, Architectural Acoustics, Crest Audio and Opson International.

"AAC is an excellent fit for us," confirmed Stardraw's marketing director, Rob Robinson. "They take a system-based approach and deal with some huge projects: Beijing Airport Olympic terminal; Zhengzhou Xinzheng International Airport; the Shanghai Railway

UK - For two days every year, Ravensbourne College in Kent stages its annual broadcasting event, Rave On Air. The college has some notable ex students including Stella McCartney, Bruce Oldfield and Darren Woolfson, now group director of technology at Pinewood Studios.

Adrian Curtis, VP of Sales for Soundcraft Studer said: "We were contacted by the college to help them with a console for a mixture of live and broadcast applications, given the breadth of requirements they had, we loaned them our flagship Vista 5 SR to cope with these demands."

Rave On Air is an entirely student-led event with over five hours of live programming broadcast over the internet and local digital terrestrial television channels (800 and 801). Attended by broadcasting and creative industry professionals including BBC, Endemol and Channel 4, this graduate showcase gives Ravensbour

Italy - RCF has announced the appointment of Alessandro Barbieri as the new sales area manager for the Far East.

Barbieri is no stranger to travel, having previously worked as area manager for other Italian companies in Asia, Africa, Middle East and Europe.

Commenting on his appointment Barbieri said, "I feel that I'm joining RCF at very pivotal time, both for the group itself and the high level of products that they are manufacturing."

(Jim Evans)

UK - As well as an extensive PA system, RG Jones Sound Engineering has also installed the Ampetronic induction loop system to meet DDA requirements and ensure the enjoyment of its hard of hearing members and visitors to Wimbledon's All England Club.

"Outside of the two week Championships - when we are continually on site monitoring the courtside PA, umpires microphones and so forth - there are requirements from the Club to use parts of the system throughout the year," explains RG Jones's Jon Berry. "The main areas that are used are the Centre Court facilities, which include a range of bars and restaurants. These are used for private functions and it's in some of these that we've installed the loop systems."

There are seven spaces covered by the loops, and these are situated either next to or on top of each other. "It was quite a mission," says Ber

USA - Mackie has announced the winner of the 20 Years Running Contest. Marking Mackie's 20th anniversary, the contest encouraged Mackie customers worldwide to submit product stories, photos and videos highlighting their jaw-dropping experiences with Mackie gear over the years. Entrants had a chance to win a new Mackie live sound system featuring the new HD High-Definition Powered Loudspeakers.

"We're always stoked to hear about the beatings our gear survives, but some of these contest stories were totally insane," said John Boudreau music gear group VP at Loud Technologies. "We had fun going through all of the entries, but the final decision was tough - especially when you get stories like a VLZ surviving a dishwasher's pots and pans cycle. But we had to give the winning prize to Badger Koon with his 'muddy' disaster story - check it out on our contest page

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