Italy - For its new complex in Villorba, in the province of Treviso, Benetton Group chose a Proel PA system.

The building, which hosts an exclusive event centre and the Museum of Racing Cars, now features a PROEVAC2 audio system, selected by Barzon & Dainese from Ponte S. Nicolò (PD), a company that operates in the field of industrial and civil electrical systems.

In detail, they installed a 10-zone PROEVAC2 system with 20 speaker lines - two lines for each zone - for a total load of 4000 W.

The whole system is located in the control room and controlled by a centralised rack with microphone console from which all vocal announcements and, if necessary, pre-recorded evacuation alerts are delivered.

Every room and area of the building features EVAC speakers, positioned and interconnected using redundancy logic (line A+B).

The EN60849-compliant evacuation system, which is n

UK - Adam Hall has signed a distribution agreement with FaitalPRO.

Faital S.p.A was established in Milan in 1958 as a small family run business, over the following 50 years they became a leading European manufacturer of loudspeakers for the automotive industry. The new millennium led to the diversification strategy for Faital that resulted in the development of the FaitalPRO brand.

Flavio Naggi, overseas sales manager for FaitalPRO comments, "We are definitely proud of this agreement that is certainly a step forward in our distribution scheme; working with such a prestigious partner as Adam Hall consolidates the European spread of our high-end professional loudspeakers and represent the beginning of a solid and very promising co-operation for both companies."

Andrew Richardson, managing director of Adam Hall UK adds, "FaitalPRO is a fantastic addition to our p

UK - APG's line array system, Uniline, was deemed a resounding success after its first outdoor UK appearance at FOM Fest (The Friends Of Mine Festival) Manchester over the weekend of 20-22 May. Uniline was in the company on the main stage with the Charlatans, the Buzzcocks, Bad Lieutenant, The Cribs, The Fall, and many more over the course of the three days. APG was also specified for stage monitoring using a combination of SMX15 and DX15 monitor wedges plus TB118 subs and M3000 side-fills.

All of the audio requirements for the festival were handled personally by Paul Nicholson from Red Square Audio/Midas ProSound, and APG's Mathieu Delquignies assisted with the Uniline system tuning.

"It's great to have such amazing support from the manufacturer," commented Nicholson. "We were particularly pleased to have Mathieu with us on this occasion, firstly because it's t

UK - Sennheiser UK reports that it has made some significant improvements to its Service Department, including the launch of an Online Spares Ordering function for its professional audio division and new additions to its workshop, aimed at further upgrading levels of customer support.

"Our emphasis is always on serving the end customer and improving the support we give to them," says Tim Sherratt, Sennheiser UK's engineering and technical services manager. "Initially, the new Online Spares Ordering section will serve three product areas: MKH Wired Microphones; Evolution Wireless; and Pro Audio Headphones. The site provides a quick and efficient way for customers to order spare parts. We will be adding more items and information as we progress this part of the site. We have also introduced a new online Service & Support centre which features an FAQ section, online

UK - The derelict Battersea Power station on the bank of the Thames in south London recently played host to a major corporate event when drinks brand Jägermeister, through experiential marketing specialists Lucid UK, held a massive rebranding party within the building's towering walls. RG Jones Sound engineering provided Synco PA and stage monitor systems for Jägermeisters' Ice Cold Event at Battersea Power Station, which featured Alice Cooper appearing in holographic 4D.

"We couldn't resist this," says Alice, "Working with Jägermeister to appear as holograms on the other side of the Atlantic is the ultimate experience, a cutting-edge conjuring trick that celebrates the future and our history."

The event was hosted by DJ Zane Lowe, who played an exclusive DJ set at the event; with live performances from Jägerband The King Blues; and further sets from XF

Germany - There was much praise throughout Europe for what Germany achieved in this year's Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) finals in Dusseldorf. "Bearing in mind this was staged in a football stadium the sound was outstanding," said Ola Melzig, production manager for the ESC since the year 2000.

For the team at d&b audiotechnik, the challenge of the Esprit Arena was sheet metal, nine hectares of it to be precise. "The roof structure is enormous, all corrugated metal," said NDR's head of sound for the live event Jochen Jensen.

"With a reverberation time of six to eight seconds it was absolutely critical we keep sound energy from hitting the roof, or reflecting off the floor up to it. My first thought was, who are the specialists who can help me with this? I called Ralf Zuleegat d&b audiotechnik and asked if he could help. It will require a bigcommitment f

Cyprus - The latest upscale addition to Cyprus nightlife, the Little Buddha bar in the island's capital Nicosia, is one of the stars of a list of recent installations by Renkus-Heinz distributor S&V MegaSound. With two club installations, a cathedral and a conference centre completed and more in progress, the company is having, said owner Stelios Petrides, a "hectic" time.

Music is a famed part of the Buddha Bar experience and features Latin/oriental lounge beats that gradually move into more upbeat house tunes as the evening progresses. With sound quality central to its enjoyment S&V MegaSound were called in to design a system capable of delivering exceptional fidelity and precise directional control - along with the ability to deliver flawlessly night after night.

The system is specified as 16 TRX81 two-way full range loudspeakers and four PNX112 subwoofers, powere

UK - Late April saw Paul Carrack play three nights at the Royal College of Music with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, where a trio of Yamaha digital mixing consoles helped the venue's sound to be mixed, while also being recorded for DVD release.

Having recorded his latest album A Different Hat with the RPO, Carrack squeezed the entire ensemble into the confines of the Royal College of Music's 400-capacity Britten Theatre. Playing three such intimate shows meant that space was at an absolute premium, so a pair of Yamaha M7CL48-ES consoles handled front of house and monitor sound, while an 02R96VCM was used to track the show for a DVD recording.

Using three Yamaha SB168-ES stage boxes, the house system was extremely compact but maximised the show's all-important sound quality. With the orchestra generating plenty of acoustic sound, the key to mixing the show was ensurin

USA - This year's InfoComm Convention will be a busy time for Renkus-Heinz. The company will be sponsoring a full calendar of events and demonstrating a wide range of equipment throughout the show's three-day run.

The Renkus-Heinz booth will host a Technology Theatre throughout the show, with regular informative seminars on a wide range of topics given by presenters including Bruce Olson of Olson Sound Design; Stefan Feistel of Ahnert Feistel Media Group; John Murray, principal of Optimum System Solutions; Doug Fowler of Fowler Audio Services; Rik Kirby and Jim Mobley of Renkus-Heinz, and still more to be announced.

The booth will also host a 'geek bar' with ongoing demonstrations of Renkus-Heinz products and technologies including SysTune, EASE, EASERA and RHAON.

The Renkus-Heinz demo room will offer detailed demonstrations of a selection of the newest Renkus-Heinz loudspea

USA - Over the past year, Neon Trees has cemented its reputation as one of the top up-and-coming indie rock acts in the US, with a chart topping single, a featured performance at this year's SXSW festival, and a tour with My Chemical Romance. With a number of one-off fly dates punctuating the tour, stage manager and monitor engineer Mike Bangs and FOH engineer Neal Duffy selected a pair of Allen & Heath iLive T112 consoles to meet the band's needs.

Neon Trees is a straightforward rock band, with two guitars, bass, keyboard and drums along with four vocals. "We are using 24 inputs," Bangs notes. "We are sharing preamps between monitors and FOH and doing a digital split from the monitor console's iDR-32, so our FOH snake is just one Cat 5 cable.

"The second iDR-32 MixRack is currently being used for the FOH console's DSP. That will change when we start headli

USA - Merging Technologies' Pyramix digital audio workstation and VCube video playback system played keyroles in the recording and post-production of the 120th anniversary concert for the internationally renowned New York venue Carnegie Hall, which was televised in the USA at the end of May.

One hundred and twenty years to the day since the opening of the classical music venue on 5 May 1891, a gala concert was held at Carnegie Hall to celebrate its on-going position as one of the world's foremost cultural centres. The New York Philharmonic, conducted by Alan Gilbert, performed an evening of music with a strong historical connection to the Hall, the city of New York, or both: Dvo?ák, Beethoven, Ellington and Gershwin. Guest performers included cellist Yo Yo Ma, pianist Emmanuel Ax, violinist Gil Shaham, and vocalist Audra McDonald.

The concert was filmed live by flagship New Y

USA - The Screen Actors Guild Foundation will soon celebrate the third anniversary of the Actors Centre, a one-of-a kind resource centre located in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles.

Theatre designer Allen Pellerin of Systems Integration Group designed the 125-seat screening room's digital audio and video systems, including a pair of Community iBOX i2W8 two-way loudspeaker systems. The system is used during professional seminars, workshops and celebrity interviews, as well as for a wide range of one-off performances.

"The i2W8 loudspeakers sound incredible," reports the Centre's Director, Casey Lewis. "They are so amazingly crisp, clean and clear. I am really impressed by their performance."

For Los Angeles, a city that is home to more than 70,000 actors, the SAG Foundation Actors Centre is the first facility of its kind where actors can network, p

UK / USA - Tannoy has announced it is to debut a new range of 'open ceiling' hanging-pendant loudspeakers at InfoComm 2011 in Orlando. Entitled OCV Series, Tannoy's new pendant loudspeaker promises to "deliver the renowned acoustic performance and exceptional value of the ubiquitous CVS Series in-ceiling products but in an architecturally sensitive, self-contained, lightweight cylindrical enclosure".

The series is engineered specifically for applications where predictable high quality audio coverage is required in high or open-ceilinged spaces - such as airports, railway stations, malls or large double or triple height commercial floors - without compromising clarity, intelligibility and SPL.

The cylindrical form-factor has been conceived to meet the exacting demands of the architectural sector, minimising the impact on aesthetics and allowing the systems designer to

UK - Musicians and budding record producers turned out in force for the creative audio production workshops that took place at Liverpool Sound City 2011.

Hosted by Prism Sound and Metropolis Group, the workshops were delivered by producer/engineer Josh Blair, who has worked with numerous top artists including Duran Duran, Mark Ronson, Beyonce and Mos Def. Joining him was Metropolis mastering engineer Mazen Murad, whose mastering credits include Muse, Duffy, John Williams and Bjork.

"When Prism Sound asked me to get involved, I jumped at the opportunity to share my knowledge with other people," says Blair. "It was great to see that so many people are still interested in recording real people, with real instruments, in real rooms, with real top-end gear."

A wide range of recording and mixing techniques were covered during the course of the two days. With th

The Netherlands - The award for fastest TiMax system sale ever made has gone to Martijn Verkerk of Dutch distributor TM Audio, for a four-day turnaround from initial enquiry to curtain-up of a complete TiMax Tracker and TiMax2 SoundHub system for Dutch theatre group De Utrechtse Spelen.

Faced with a fast-paced contemporary performance of Hamlet staged in-the-round at the company's very own De Paardenkathedraal theatre space, sound designer and engineer Danny Hoogveld realised he needed help with panning the cavorting and battling actors voices across his highly original omnidirectional sound system design, comprising four Bloomline Omniwave speakers suspended over an oval stage located between the two opposite ranks of tiered audience seating.

Conceived by Dutch composer and producer Leo De Klerk, the Omniwaves were originally aimed at high-end hi-fi. Danny Hoogveld not

UK / USA - Adele, has just completed a tour of Europe and is currently on tour in the US with an Allen & Heath iLive digital mixing system managing both FOH and monitor sound. Requested by the sound engineers, the system comprises two iLive-112 Control Surfaces with an iDR10 modular MixRack and iDR0 mini Rack, connected via ACE and input sharing over MADI.

"iLive stands apart from other consoles because of its ease of use. Like painting, you want to be creating when you mix, not reading a manual. You can do that with this desk - you stand in front of it and it's logical. It's also reliable, you know that you can get up in the morning, turn it on, and it does exactly what it's meant to do every day," comments FOH engineer, Dave McDonald who has previously used iLive on tour with Florence and The Machine and AIR.

"I'm using iLive differently on this tour as there

UK - At 10.15am on Monday 23rd May 2011, BBC Radio 1 broadcast a special live-to-air performance by Leona Lewis, performing a cover of Labrynth's Let the Sun Shine and an amalgamation of Leona's Better In Time and Rihanna's Man Down, with two very different backing bands. This Live Lounge broadcast from London's Hackney Empire, hosted by the station's Trevor Nelson, helped launch Hackney Weekend 2012, where Leona and Plan B, both from the area, will play at a free music event to celebrate the London 2012 Olympics.

This one-off performance, utilised 24 Neumann digital microphones - a mix of seven TLM 103Ds, four KMS 105Ds and 13 KM 184Ds. The digital microphone set up was augmented with a few analogue evolution models, comprising two e904s, an e905, an e901 and two classic MD421's, demonstrating that the deployment of digital and analogue microphones t

USA - Penn-Elcom has announced a new US distribution deal with Fane Acoustics which sees a relaunch of the entire Fane professional speaker driver range in North America - including all Fane's pro audio loudspeakers and guitar speaker lines.

This follows a recent global distribution deal between the companies which gives both access to the other's international distribution networks.

Penn-Elcom Inc is headquartered in the US in Garden Grove, California and has offices and extensive warehouses facilities in New Jersey and Houston, Texas, providing distribution hubs all across the US.

"It was essential for us to find a company with the right mix of dynamics, enthusiasm and commitment to represent our brand correctly, as well as to make all the products available in the US," says Fane director Mark Barnes, "Penn-Elcom is the perfect match."

"Fane's pr

USA - Lakewood Church, located in Houston, Texas and one of the largest churches in the United States, has outfitted each of its two main audio control rooms with a pair of KK audio labs DS-8 eight-inch, two-way powered audio monitors. The two identical rooms, designed by the Russ Berger Design Group and featuring Euphonix 5-B digital mixing consoles, both handle on-air broadcast duties as well as audio post production, and are additionally tied to a music recording studio.

"We've been longstanding with our old cabinets and it was time to update," says Reed Hall, director of audio and technical production at the church, a former sports arena and home of Joel Osteen Ministries. "Everybody felt that there was something a lot better out there. We took a listen to the DS-8s and they sounded great. We never mix off just one reference, but these have become our primary

UK - Dance trio Faithless has called time after 15 years on the music scene, playing their final show at London's O2 Academy Brixton at the beginning of April. Their Front of House engineer Mark Kennedy had worked with the band since 1996 and throughout his tenure has relied on products and support from Sennheiser UK.

"It's been wonderful to work with Faithless," declares Kennedy. "The back -up I received from Mark Saunders at Sennheiser UK has been amazing and the mics have been fabulous - in all the years I've been using them, I've always set up the spare radio mic, but I've never had to use it. The original SKM 3072 we used were customized somewhat because Faithless stage shows are very loud. More recently, we moved to SKM 500-945, which have been wonderful and are a vast improvement."

Kennedy employed a combination of the aforementioned SKM 500-945 G3 h

Ireland - Sound Productions, a Dublin based Intellivox dealer, has recently supplied AXYS Intellivox units as part of the public address system at the new T2 building, Dublin Airport.

Dublin Airport's Terminal 2 is a €600m project which included a new terminal building, a new boarding gate pier, a new combined heat and power facility, 19 new aircraft parking stands, and an upgraded airport road network.

Terminal 2, which has already won a major design award for its use of structural steel, was built by a consortium comprising of Arup, Mace, Pascall+Watson and Davis Langdon PKS. With its steel and glass facade, the new terminal makes use of natural light to create a modern and comfortable space for both departing and arriving passengers. However, for Arup Acoustics, the acoustic and electro-acoustic designers on the project, all these hard surfaces posed several challenges.

USA - Audio-Technica has announced the appointment of Michael Edwards to the position of vice-president professional markets. The announcement was made by Audio-Technica US president and CEO Philip Cajka.

Following the start of his audio career as a successful recording engineer, Edwards joined Audio-Technica in 1994, and has served the company since then in a variety of key roles in sales, marketing, and most recently as director of product management. He is a member of the Audio-Technica Taiwan board of directors.

As leader of the company's professional division, Edwards will have considerable responsibility for the way Audio-Technica develops and positions its professional products. He will oversee A-T sales, marketing and product development efforts in the pro audio, M.I., broadcast and installed sound markets, says the company.

Cajka stated, "As part of Audio-Techn

Qatar - Qatar Vision has recently purchased the Encore system from ClearCom's UAE distributor Nicolas Kyvernitis Electronics Enterprises. Distributors in the Gulf for the live sound market segment, NMK hassupplied the rental firm the new two-wire partyline intercom system in addition to other equipment. The deal includes a master station, belt stations and a number of CC-95 headsets.

"For live performance markets, ClearCom is not just a brand. It is the default term used," commented Richie Hiranandani, marketing manager. "Qatar Vision has recently invested in upgrading their inventory across the board and communications was no exception."

(Jim Evans)

USA - MediaMatrix by Peavey has announced the avaliability of the new Nion nE, a l DSP platform designed for cost-efficiency and mid-market applications. At a lower entry cost, the NION nE brings the power and flexibility of nWare to a broader array or designers and contractors, says the company.

The Nion nE supports up to 32 channels of analogue audio, and up to 64 channels of AES digital audio via four Nio card slots in the NION nE frame. It uses the same Nio cards as a standard NION frame, so users get the same selection and variety of input and output options, including the new Nio-AEC echo cancellation card. The NION nE also accepts CobraNet or Dante digital audio transport network cards, which are optional.

"The Nion nE is built on the same foundation as the venerable NION n6 and n3," commented Charles Anderson, engineering supervisor for MediaMatrix. "Des

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