News

TUSCALOOSA, AL – Located in the heart of downtown, the nearly 200-year-old First Baptist Church Tuscaloosa – which cancelled some functions in the wake of last month's severe weather so members could serve the community, but was otherwise unaffected by the disaster – chose Music Alley, Birmingham, AL, to upgrade its sound system. Music Alley founder and CEO Steve Garrett, in turn, chose gear from Turbosound and Allen & Heath to fulfill the design and build objectives.

MONTREAL – Les Grands Ballets Canadien recently purchased an Allen & Heath iLive digital mixing system following a trial run on a three week production of Leonce et Lena. The Company selected a system that includes an iDR-32 MixRack and iLive-R72 Control Surface, which can be used for touring as well as for installation in the ballet company's home base at Theatre Maisonneuve at the Place des Arts.

JONESBORO, AR – After 79 years of ministry, Central Baptist Church, with a permanent location here that seats about 2,500 church members, is branching out. Journey Campus is the name of a portable church serving Arkansas State University (ASU), and EliteMultimedia included an Aviom Pro64 in the portable church's system design.

HIGHLAND HEIGHTS, OH – Eighth Day Sound recently added 20 of the new DiGiCo SD racks with 192, 96 or 48KHz sampling rates to its touring inventory. The new gear is supporting Lil Wayne's I Am Music II tour.

OXNARD, CA – Rat Sound is providing sound reinforcement for the current leg of Prince's "Welcome 2 America" tour. The system consists of six hangs of 10 L-Acoustics K1 in the round with 42 dV-DOSC and 40 SB28 subs powered by L-Acoustics LA8 amplifiers, and engineers Majid Malki and Fred Lucas are using an analog Midas Heritage 3000 console.

HOUSTON – Lon Brannies, a 39-year audio industry veteran who spent 27 years with Yamaha Commercial Audio Systems, Inc., passed away April 18 after a long illness.

NEW YORK – Lou Mannarino of NY-based L&M Sound & Light recently used K-array's new KR400S for a performance by The New York Philharmonic conducted by Marvin Hamlisch at New York's Avery Fisher Hall, part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts complex. The performance featured guest vocalist Idina Menzel.

TULSA, OK – When The Joint, a 2,700-seat showroom at Tulsa's Hard Rock Hotel and Casino opened in 2010, it was equipped with a house audio system based around Meyer Sound's MICA line array loudspeakers. These arrays were hoisted on chain motors, because management wanted to offer touring acts the option of flying their own systems. In The Joint's first six months of operation, however, the MICAs have never budged.

NEW YORK – In his role as senior audio engineer for the NBA, 40-year audio industry veteran Jonathan Freed's job is to make sure that what the camera sees during basketball games, the viewer can hear – as long as the background audio doesn't distract viewers too much from what the announcers are saying.

BOSTON – To commemorate 150 years since its charter was signed, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) staged its Next Century Convocation at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. The event organizers called upon Northeast Media (Woburn, MA), which used a Harman JBL VerTec line array system for audio support.

MEMPHIS, TN – Dave Woolworth of Oxford, MS-based Oxford Acoustics used the Iconyx IC Live digitally steerable array from Renkus-Heinz to meet the sound design goals the auditorium at White Station High School, which has a low ceiling and parallel walls and serves 2,300 students.

Harman founder and chairman emeritus, Sidney Harman, died April 12 of complications from acute myeloid leukemia. Harman, whose activities spanned the worlds of professional audio, government (he served as the U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce in 1977 and 1978), education and publishing (he became the publisher of Newsweek in Aug. 2010), is also remembered for his philanthropy.