International News

SYDNEY — Owen Ironside, sound designer and production engineer at the 500-seat Theatre at The Concourse here, used DPA Microphones from DPA’s Australian distributor, Amber Technologies for a series of 14 sold-out shows pairing the English National Ballet and Australia’s Willoughby Symphony Orchestra. The series was part of this year’s Diamond Jubilee festivities marking the Queen of England’s 60^th year on the throne.

ISTANBUL, Turkey — Altincizme, an audio rental company based in Istanbul, recently provided a pair of Soundcraft Vi Series consoles as part of the sound reinforcement system for three concerts at Istanbul’s Harbiye Open Air Theater featuring Turkish pop singer Sezen Aksu.

MANILA — To celebrate 400 years, the University of Santo Tomas here constructed a sports complex that includes a 54,000-square-foot, 5,792-capacity gymnasium. Crystal Audio installed Adamson’s SpekTrix line arrays — the gear’s debut in the island nation. After testing, installers found that the compact units were powerful enough to change the speaker-to-subwoofer element count in the six main hangs from 6:1 to 4:1. Four supplementary trapezoidal fill boxes were used for the center of the court.

ZHONGSHAN, China — Pledging a total investment near $50 million, Music Group founder and CEO Uli Behringer outlined a plan for a 50-acre complex housing the company’s R&D and manufacturing operations here. Behringer projected that a total of nearly 5,000 employees would be working on site, with a total 3 million square feet of automated factory space and plans for completion by 2014.

KAZAN, Russia — Innovason distributor Imight supported the audio needs for a concert at the Kazan Agriculturalists Palace here with an Eclipse GT digital mixing console from Innovason handling the FOH mix. The concert featured French tenor Roberto Alagna, Bolshoi Theatre soloist Venera Gimadieva and the Tatarstan state symphony orchestra conducted by Alexander Sladkovsky.

LANCING, U.K. — Flare Audio Ltd announced that it will close its PA rental business, Purple Audio Limited, later this year in a bid to strengthen its focus on the manufacturing side of its business, saying that the new focus could create opportunities for potential rental partners and distributors worldwide.

MUMBAI, INDIA – PALM Expo 2013, to be held from May 30-June 1 2013 at the Bombay Exhibition Centre here, could serve as a gateway to this booming market with an estimated buying power of more than $500 million (USD). Driven by its rapidly-growing, youthful demographics and continuing structural reform and globalization, India is poised to accelerate its economic growth rate to more than 9 percent from 2013 to 2015.

MOSCOW — The Bolshoi Theatre here reopened after a six-year renovation with the largest RTS stage-manager system yet, installed by Amptown, ProVideo and TDM. The system includes two ADAM matrices with 448 ports, over 200 keypanels and around 120 belt-packs, plus a number of headsets and interfaces.