International News

KORIYAMA, JAPAN – The Big Pallet Fukushima Convention Center regularly hosts meetings, exhibitions, festivals, and even sporting events, but the 250,000 square-foot facility suffered damage in Japan’s 2011 tsunami. Big Pallet recently reopened after extensive renovations, many of which were planned even before that devastating event unfolded. Revamped sound systems in the 31,000 square-foot exhibition hall and 1,000 square-foot convention hall were among them. Now completed, these systems use Ashly ne800.70 amplifiers to deliver clean, reliable power to One Systems loudspeakers.

HONG KONG — The Harbour City outdoor shopping center celebrated the launch of a free public artwork that floats in the water, a 16.5-meter inflatable “Rubber Duck,” with a public ceremony featuring music and entertainment. To support that event’s audio needs,  Amek Services relied upon Shure PSM1000 Personal Monitor Systems and UHF-R Wireless microphone technology.

TJØME, NORWAY — Verdens Ende, known to Norwegians as “The World’s End,” the southernmost tip of the island of Tjøme, 60 miles south of Oslo, can be a forbidding place — but not for actor Gard Eidsvold wearing Point Source Audio’s CO-5W-KIT waterproof earset microphone. There, at the sea’s edge in a driving rain, he was perched precariously above the rocks on a thin plank, vigorously rowing his symbolic boat while reciting the lines of the iconic Norwegian ballad “Terje Vigen.” Both the actor and the mic performed flawlessly before a rapt audience, which sat under hoods and umbrellas a mere 30 meters from the shoreline.

NIJMEGEN, The Netherlands —Dutch rental company Story Sound, which supported the Emporium Festival here last year with its then-brand-new JBL VTX line arrays, deployed the gear once again to support this year’s event. Greater familiarity with the VTX gear’s high-tech tools, combined with slightly relaxed noise constraints, let Story Sound deliver a whole new level of sound quality for festival revelers for the late May event.

LONDON — While mixing the Pet Shop Boys’ current Electric world tour, the band’s longtime sound engineers, Holger Schwark (FOH) and Seamus Fenton (monitors), needed to transfer signals and keep the sound within the digital domain. In order to do so, the duo have been relying on a multicore system from Optocore, a provider of scalable, high-bandwidth, low-latency fiber-optic networks for the transmission of audio, video and data in a variety of markets, including pro AV, live and fixed installations and broadcast.

MANCHESTER, UK – Gorilla, a 700-capacity venue offering a wide range of live entertainment in Manchester’s city center, recently upgraded with a Midas PRO2 digital console at FOH, provided by Mason’s Games Ltd. The console has 56 mic/line inputs with remote mic preamps, 27 sample-synchronous, phase-coherent mix buses, up to 28 Klark Teknik DN 370 31-band Graphic EQs, 12 multichannel FX engines and 96 kHz 40-bit floating-point processing. Two AES3 inputs, three AES3 outputs and dual-redundant power supplies complete the hardware configuration.

LONDON — The challenge for Capital Sound, which was tasked with optimizing performances by Bon Jovi and the Rolling Stones at London’s British Summer Time (BST) festival in Hyde Park, was to make the audio loud and rich for 65,000 attendees, yet keep noise complaints from nearby residents to a minimum. Martin Audio’s MLA system served as a solution..

CARACAS, Venezuela – PROmontaje, based here, has taken delivery of a Meyer Sound LEO linear large-scale reinforcement system, the first to be available in Latin America. The new system was initially deployed at the Vive Movistar Festival in Caracas this summer.

TOKYO – AS Project Co. Ltd., located in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, has been leveraging Dante functionality for live event sound reinforcement and recording with Yamaha’s CL Series console, Pro Tools HD and Focusrite’s RedNet 5 units – making the soundco the first users of Focusrite’s RedNet in Japan.

CORNWALL, U.K. – The People’s String Foundation, a 12-member band that performed recently with an accompanying 10-piece orchestra at the Minack open-air theatre here, relied on Allen & Heath iLive digital mixing systems at FOH and monitors. FOH engineer Tommy Williams credited the iLive systems for their compact size, and also for the ability to use an iPad to mix much of the performance, which supported the group’s forthcoming album launch.

ANSAN, South Korea — Soundenergy’s Giwook Cha worked with Sunbeom Kim of Soundus, K-array’s Korean distributor, on an audio system upgrade for Do-ha Methodist church here that included a K-array BlueLine KB1 speaker system. Soundenergy also steered the Noryangin church in Bon-dong, South Korea toward K-array gear — in this case, K-array’s Kobra KK102 (pictured here). Both church systems were chosen for sound quality as well as their ability to blend in visually with each church’s interior design.