Located at the Tel Aviv Performing Arts Centre and owned by the municipality of Tel-Aviv, Israeli Opera is both the principal opera company and busiest hall in the country. As well as hosting visiting productions, the venue is also home to regular shows performed by local orchestras and ensembles.

With an expanding music programme, the existing in-house PA increasingly had to be augmented with rental equipment, prompting the management to undertake a significant upgrade, choosing the new L-Acoustics K3 line array for its sound quality, coverage, compact form factor and ability to adapt to shows ranging from opera to rock.

A spectacular mixed-media installation inside St Michael’s Cave on the Rock of Gibraltar, The Awakening charts the formation of the rock itself using TiMax SoundHub-controlled spatial audio to accompany intricate projection-mapped visuals. Once believed to be bottomless, the cave also provides the backdrop – and the unique acoustic – for live music.

Viewing the current project before the attraction’s June opening, Christian Wright – Director of WrightTech Media, the local digital marketing solutions company that commissioned the project – underlined the dimension audio adds to the visuals: ‘The lighting is amazing, the projection is incredible, but the audio takes it to another level,’ he says. ‘There has never been anything like this in Gibraltar.’

A new music institute in the West Midlands, Resonance claims ‘a completely new approach to music and pro audio instruction, that’s optimised to take students farther, faster’.

With classes kept small – a ceiling of 200 students per year – the school reckons to offer as much hands-on work as possible in music performance, engineering, broadcast, and live audio work. Key to its working is widespread use of Focusrite equipment interconnected by RedNet Dante networking.

‘In a traditional class, you might have ten  students around the console, each waiting for a few minutes at the board,’ says CEO and Principal Rick Benton. ‘We wanted to have ten students in ten rooms, each with their own board and the same source material to work with.

The largest and most versatile sports venue in China’s Shaanxi Province, the Xi’an Olympic Centre Stadium seats 60,000 in its main stadium; 18,000 in its gymnasium and 4,000 in its natatorium. The venue is set to host the opening ceremony and track and field competitions for China’s National Games in September.

Responsibility for designing a high-quality audio system spanning the US$14m stadium’s three zones fell to distributor EZPro International. advanced, stable, cost effective and flexible,’ says EZPro Technical Manager, Yongjun Jiang. ‘The brief we were given was to create a world-class audio system.’

Among the most renowned opera houses in Europe, the Frankfurt Opera recently added d&b Soundscape technology to its d&b audio system. A d&b DS100 Signal engine was purchased in time for the 2019/2020 season, and the staging of a world premiere at the Bockenheimer Depot – Frankfurt Opera’s second venue.

‘It was a spatially complex work, with moving actors and an orchestra spread across the stage’ explains sound engineer, Margit Baruschka. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic the production was postponed to 2021. The decision was then made to move the entire Soundscape system to the Frankfurt Opera. Here it could be used to adapt some of the regular programme to accommodate social distancing requirements.