Playing more than 90 dates in stadia and large-scale venues around the world, the Depeche 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.

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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.

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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.

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Sometimes he is the God of Song, sometimes one of the Four Heavenly Kings, and sometimes Jacky Cheung – occasionally he is Hock Yao. In whatever guise, he is currently parading his A Classic Tour through 21 venues across Mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.

Performing in-the-round at both indoor and outdoor venues, his shows are an ambitious production combining elements of music concert, theatre and circus. The requirements of the supporting sound system are considerable, presenting a serious challenge to rental companies Haona, who supplied the system for the China dates, UnUsUal Limited in Singapore, and Taiwan’s Winly Production Services, who worked alongside L-Acoustics Chinese distributor, Rightway Audio Consultants to deliver the system.

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Incorporating a science museum, planetarium, conference room, exhibition hall and main city library, the Les Champs Libres in Rennes recently hosted an experimental sound system designed to allow six sound designers to ‘sculpt’ artworks that could be moved in space.

The set-up uses eight Amadeus PMX-5 loudspeakers and two ML-12 subs distributed around the exhibition hall, with a Q-Sys 110F core and a pair of Powersoft Ottocanali 4K4 DSP + Dante 8-channel amplifiers. Using a Luminex GigaCore 12 Gigabit Ethernet switch, this AoIP platform supported playout of FLAC audio files to allow the sound creations made by these sound designers, and mixed to eight channels.

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