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Oregon Church Depends on Meyer Sound for Worship Ministry

Oregon Church Depends on Meyer Sound for Worship Ministry

MEDFORD, OR — Joy Christian Fellowship in Medford, Ore., announced that it is one of the first houses of worship to install Meyer Sound’s M’elodie ultracompact high-power curvilinear array loudspeaker. Music minister Jake Schmelzer chose the Meyer system because of his experiences at the Britt Festivals in nearby Jacksonville, for which George Relles Sound of Eugene, Ore., has provided a Meyer Sound rental system every summer since 1985.

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Red Bull Air Race Takes Wing with JBL Vertec

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL — Sound engineer Christopher Winter chose Loudness Sonorizacao of Sao Paulo, Brazil, to provide the sound reinforcement system for the April Red Bull Air Race in Rio de Janeiro’s Botafogo Bay, which drew one million spectators, making it the largest sports event in Brazilian history. The system included four towers of 16 Vertec VT4889 line array elements each (64 in total), powered by Crown I-Tech 8000 amplifiers. Low-frequency fill was provided by 64 JBL SRX728 loudspeaker subwoofers.

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Walter Boho Passes Away at Age 83

Walter Boho, owner and operator for 45 years of Boho Electronics Labs in Hillside, passed away at home on Saturday, May 26. He also taught at United Radio & Television in Newark from 1945 to 1952. A decorated WWII vet, Boho served in the Army as a staff sergeant, where he earned the Purple Heart and Bronze Star for heroic achievement in action, owing to his deeds on April 5, 1945, near Wurzburg, Germany.

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Historic Olympia Theatre Takes Digital Leap with Soundcraft Vi6

MONTREAL — Originally built in the late 1920s, Montreal’s landmark Olympia Theatre recently underwent a renovation project and technical facilities update that simultaneously took the “grand dame” of the city’s theatre scene both back in time and squarely into the 21st century. Mathieu Guilbault, who serves as front-of-house mixer for the theatre and codesigned the new system coordinated with local sound and lighting provider Kloda Focus to supply the venue with a new PA system, which now benefits from a Soundcraft Vi6 digital live sound console feeding Crown-powered JBL Vertec arrays.

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Marc Dufresne

Young FOH Guns

A Quartet of Exceptionally Talented Young Guys “Know What All the Knobs Do” and Are Turning Them for Some Big Names

“I’m not sure what I wanted, but I knew I wanted to take what I learned there and try to have fun,” says young FOH engineer Eddie Map. “There” is a school for sound engineering, and it’s interesting that three of four of the “young guns” highlighted in this article all have that formal training, and the fourth has formal music training. In the past, most got enviable gigs by just figuring it out as they went, driven by passion and persistence. But while today’s gear seems to demand serious education, these four certainly are not lacking any passion and persistence — or exceptional talent for that matter. They all come from different places and got where they are in different ways, but they are already out with big acts doing a remarkable job like a seasoned professional.

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Keep Frozen Until Show

For the 2007 Canadian Winter Games, they only heated the venue enough to keep the FOH gear operational. . .
 
Whitehorse, Yukon, with its population of 23,000, has a cozy, small-town feel, as people have time to chat, and cars stop for people to cross the street even if the traffic light is green. This city is also one of the best places to see the mysterious phenomenon called the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis. During a clear winter night when there is a high level of solar wind, the electrons discharge like florescent lights, and tourists come from all over the world hoping to see the sky light up in green swirls.
 

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How to Benefit from Headroom

Once upon a time I was working for the original large-scale rehearsal/ rental company in Los Angeles. We got a gig for a super-high-profile show at The Century Plaza Hotel Grand Ballroom: a $1000-a-plate benefit concert with Stevie Wonder.

We got in at 3 p.m., miked everything up quickly and got ready for soundcheck. That’s when the promoter — who was also mixing front of house for the show — came up to me freaking out and saying he can’t mix! All the faders are about a third of the “normal” level, the subgroups a little higher, and the masters are at 25 percent.

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Get Naked

It’s a much scarier thought for me than it is for Jenna Fischer

I was reading the most current issue of Wired the other day and was struck by something they called “radical transparency” — the notion of being totally open and honest with your customers as a way of inspiring loyalty. (It is very much an extension of the kind of bottom-up hierarchy that I discovered in the books Out of Control and The Cluetrain Manifesto, both of which I wrote about a good two years ago.)

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Better Heard and Not Seen

How do you get big if it’s your job to be transparent?

“How do I get into the big time?” was a question that was recently asked of me. How indeed? Although I understand the person’s desire for success, and seem to comprehend what is meant by “the big time,” I seriously have no absolute viable solution to the query. The good news is that for any neophyte seeking a job in the audio business there are many available avenues to “The big time.” The bad news, on the other hand, is that once you arrive at your destination it may not seem as glossy as “the big time” you once expected. Therefore, I must say that it’s not as much the destination as it is the journey, because if one keeps seeking the big gig just around the corner, then it becomes increasingly difficult to see that they may have finally arrived.

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We Are on to Something Here

Two industry deals get worked out, but maybe not in the way planned …

The music industry has always had an ambiguous relationship with Clear Channel — you may have disliked their practices, but no one could deny their influence and ubiquity. The live sound community especially has had an intense link with what had once been the 600-pound gorilla of the concert production business. When Clear Channel tired of some of its entertainment holdings and spun off the concert production business in December 2005 in the form of Live Nation, a couple of interesting strings remained connected. One of those strings just got resolved — sort of — and it really underscores just how important the live music industry has become to the entertainment sector overall. 

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Bleeding in a Different Sort of Way

Sometimes you need to stand up for your price, before you get squeezed dry

From time to time we hit on an issue in FOH that’s like a live wire to our readers and our writers — not surprising since they’re all audio professionals. One of those threw some sparks this month for Steve La Cerra. This month Steve amplifies on Larry Hall’s “You Book; You Pay” article from the February 2007 issue of FOH. Don’t worry, next month he’ll be back examining high tech issues for us, but until then: Game on. —ed.]

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