International News

PARIS, France — Every year on the Summer Solstice, hundreds of thousands of revelers enjoy music at stages set around picturesque Paris locations at the free “Fete de la Musique” event. Amadeus — French manufacturer of high-end live sound systems — outfitted the EDM stage with live sound. The system featured the company’s DIVA XL arrays, with its PMX 15 coaxial speakers used as stage monitors/front-fills, as well as the new prototype Amadeus Maestro subwoofer.

SYDNEY – Coda Audio Services recently traded up from their Shure PSM 600 to Shure PSM 1000 personal monitor systems, including 10 transmitting devices and 14 receivers. Managing director Michael Wilkie welcomed the expanded flexibility that the new gear provides, along with an even stronger safeguard against dropouts.

MUMBAI, India – Harman India recently announced that it has signed vocalist and performer Sunitha Sarathy as an AKG endorsee. Based in southern India, Sarathy is noted for her prowess performing Indian contemporary music, western classical music and other western styles and in church choirs as a gospel singer.

LONDON – Singer songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Ellie Goulding has switched to a DPA d:facto Vocal Microphone after trying it for the first time at the Chime for Change concert, which took place in London in June. Currently touring in the U.S. to promote her second album, Halcyon, Goulding is now using a wireless version of the microphone for all of her concerts.

SAN DIEGO – As die-hard comic fans flooded the San Diego Convention Center, Comic-Con 2013 hosted more than 100,000 visitors as well as hundreds of celebrity guests discussing their latest movie roles and ideas surrounding the comic universe. During numerous panels, stars such as Peter Dinklage, Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Jada Pinkett Smith, Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford addressed questions from the audience through Harman’s AKG D5 microphones.

WEST LONDON, U.K. — Entec, based here, continued its 20 year working relationship with British band Blur, supplying sound equipment for the band’s 30-plus performances in 2013. The shows have included dates across Asia, Europe, South America, as well as a headline slot at Coachella; the photo is of the band performing in Hyde Park after the London 2012 Olympics.

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.