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Cobra Sinks Teeth Into Wyclef Jean

Cobra Sinks Teeth Into Wyclef Jean

MIAMI–At a recent special appearance at a large Miami Verizon wireless store, Wyclef Jean was so impressed with sound of a Dynacord Cobra system that he extended his set, turning a brief public appearance into a free concert. Bayshore Sound of Tampa, FL, handles sound for Verizon in-store events across Florida. For Wyclef Jean's outdoor appearance at the busy Miami location, Bayshore wanted to take the sound reinforcement spec to the next level. Having recently demo'd and ordered a Dynacord Cobra system, they felt Cobra would be perfect for the job. That said, their EV & Dynacord dealer pointed them in the direction of Miami-based Drummer Boy Sound, who supplied Bayshore with an interim Cobra rig, complete with EV QRx monitors and RE-1 wireless mics, a Midas Venice console and Klark Teknik EQs.

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Speakers Create Jamaican Vibe

BERKELEY, CA–A record 37,000 people attended the 11th annual edition of the Air Jamaica Jazz and Blues Festival at the Rose Hall Resort & Country Club of Montego Bay to see and hear a star-studded bill featuring artists such as Patti Labelle, Al Green, John Legend, Nestor Torres, Shaggy, Morgan Heritage, Air Supply, and Bo Diddley. The technical team of Jamaica's John Swaby Entertainment, the festival's audio provider, faced the dual challenges of an event featuring groups of widely varied instrumentation and musical genres being presented in an outdoor environment. In order to deliver even coverage and consistent quality across all of the styles slated to be heard on the resort's golf-course-cum-festival-grounds, the Swaby Entertainment team relied on a system of self-powered Meyer Sound loudspeakers.

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Feeling the Beat at Bay Beats

SINGAPORE–After several years hosting the annual Bay Beats festival, a concentrated exposition of local south-east Asian talent featuring five "Indie" bands a day for three days, this year a decision was taken by Singapore's Esplanade Theatres on the Bay to purchase a large format line array to cater for the festival's audio needs.

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Pittsburgh's Benedum Reaps Audio Benefits

PITTSBURGH–The Benedum Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Pittsburgh is a historic theatre that hosts over half a million visitors a year. Named the "Number One Auditorium in the US" by Billboard and ranked third in Pollstar's 2004 Top 50 list of theatre venues worldwide, the 2,800-seat Benedum Center provides turnkey production services to everyone from first-run national Broadway tours to regional groups like the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre and the Pittsburgh Opera.

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Republic Parties With New Speakers

TORONTO, ONTARIO–Republic, a busy Vancouver Club on Granville has revamped their entire sound system with Adamson Speakers. Republic is open seven days a week; during the day Republic is a busy pub and sports bar, and at night it features live DJs and entertainment transforming itself into a dance club.

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Sub Finishes P

OXNARD, CA–L-ACOUSTICS' has completed its P-Series line of self-powered amplifiers with the release of a self-powered subwoofer. The addition of a self-powered subwoofer SB15P for extended LF response in bi- and tri-amp configurations widens the performance range of the P series for small to medium format applications.

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Doctoring Up Your Rentals

Dear Fellow Anklebiters,

I rent out my digital console to regional sound companies once in a while. I rent out EFX processors as well. What is the proper protocol for a console that is to be rented out? Should it be cleaned of all saved scenes? Will the engineer who ultimately uses this console just need to load his/her own libraries? Should the EFX processor have any custom programs on it or should it be factory clean?

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What's New(s)?

I have now rewritten this column three times. Every time I try I end up covering too much ground and just rambling. This is the last shot. In the past few months I have been involved in a number of conversations and situations that all forced the same basic question: What is news?

The easy answer is to quote Reuven Frank, the one-time head of NBC news who said, "NEWS is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising." That statement is at once overly broad, confrontational, outmoded and completely true. And smart marketers both know and take advantage of it.

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On The Bleeding Edge

Along with all of the other computerrelated technology we love to play with, synthesizers have planted a strong foot in the world of software. Only a few years ago, software synths were a novelty. Once they caught on, they quickly moved from the studio environment onto the stage. Now many acts are using software synths to augment or replace their hardware keyboards and rack modules for touring purposes. Let's take a look at why, and whether or not this is a good idea.

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Parnelli Innovator Honoree, Father of Festival Sound

All you need to know about Bill Hanley is this: as a kid he fondly recalls a local roller rink. But it's not the fun he had skating with his friends, or perhaps the scene of his first crush he most wants to talk about.

No, it's the speakers he speaks of with precision.

"I was skating every day and I fell in love with the music," he recalls. "There was this organ, and it was played loud with 12 Hammond B-40 tone cabinets and two 20-watt amplifiers with four 12-inch electro-dynamic loud speakers in a rink with excellent acoustics. I would go hear other, bad, sound systems and wonder why something couldn't sound as good as that roller rink."

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Regional Sound Companies Hailed as Hometown Heroes

Let’s have a tip of the glass for the hometown hero, the relatively little guy who shuns the mega-tours and life on the road, and focuses instead on serving the local community for fairs, festivals, theatre in the parks and one-off concerts.

Despite the differences in their respective regions, the number of full-time employees (ranging from one to 100) and length in business (10 years to 60 years), they have much in common. Most started out as musicians and offer a variation on Clearwing’s Gregg Brunclik’s “I started out as a musician but decided I wanted to eat” quip. And they all share a never-ceasing passion for quality sound, razor-sharp survival instincts and most indispensably, a sense of humor.

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