A celebration of UK and international music, comedy and the arts, the Henley Festival attracted more than 25,000 attendees to its 2017 programme, with its longest-serving contractor RG Jones Sound Engineering providing the PA system under the direction of Head of Sound/Production Manager, Jim Lambert.

Martin Audio’s MLA Compact system continued to serve the main Floating Stage over the Thames, which has a difficult audience profile being only 30m from front to back but more than 80m wide due. With a change of stage this year, RG Jones’ Simon Honywill – himself a Henley stalwart who was first involved as far back as 1984 – was quickly onsite to design a new PA arrangement to maximise coverage for the principal stage.

The diversity of its programming and the spaces in which those performances take place make Manhattan’s Chelsea Music Festival a one-of-a-kind event. In its first eight seasons, it has presented events at more than 50 locations throughout Chelsea and the rest of Manhattan, featuring musical styles from classical to jazz as well as visual and culinary experiences to complement them.

This year’s event used St Paul’s German Lutheran Church as the marquee location for its opening and closing weekend performances. For the first time, live recording experts Jim Anderson and Ulrike Schwarz of Anderson Audio New York captured the festival for delivery via Sennheiser’s immersive Ambeo 3D audio format.

Playing more than 90 dates in stadia and large-scale venues around the world, the Depech Mode Global Spirit Tour is a mix of material from the recent studio album, Spirit, as well as seventeen UK top ten albums and more than 100m worldwide records sold.

To mix sound for the gigs, FOH engineer Antony King is taking two Solid State Logic L500 Plus digital live consoles on the road with him, supplied by UK rental company, Britannia Row Productions. ‘The SSL is the only serious choice out there,’ he says.

Playing for four nights at Mayfield Depot during the 2017 Manchester International Festival, the world premiere of Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s compelling live performance experiment What if Women Ruled the World? gave tube uk its first opportunity to use its new Sennheiser D6000 radio microphone system.

With a stark set reminiscent of Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove post-apocalyptic war room and sound designed by Tel Aviv-based Daniel Meir, the vast and long-derelict Mayfield Depot was well suited to the piece, in which a professional cast was joined by a group of female experts – scientists, activists, politicians, thinkers – to confront and solve a global nuclear emergency – as the clock ticks.

Completely reconstructed after the World War II, Warsaw’s Grand Theatre – National Opera is one of the largest theatres in Europe. Matching the expectations of itsadiscerning audience, the venue recently engaged M.Ostrowski Company for an audio upgrade.

The project revolved around the theatre’s primary performance space – the 1,800-plus capacity Stanisław Moniuszko Auditorium, which is used for a blend of opera, ballet and theatre performances. The new system needed to be able to offer subtle, highly directive reinforcement for orchestral music and announcements, and after a competitive tender process, M.Ostrowski Company turned to Renkus-Heinz and the Iconyx range of Digitally Steerable Column Arrays to provide the solution.