August saw a production of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman brought to 1,000 socially distanced Lithuanian opera fans for the first time on the slipway of the Paul Willy Lindenau shipyard complex in Klaipėda. Performed by the Klaipėda State Musical Theatre and featuring soloists including Sandra Janušaitė, the event called on dual DiGiCo SD12 96-channel mixing consoles with two SD-Racks and D2-Racks.

Changing weather presented leading Baltic audio rental company NGR Service with major challenges from the outset. ‘The setting in the historic cruise ship terminal made for a unique and spectacular location, but it also meant dealing with rain and winds of up to 20m/s while thinking of how to make the orchestra and soloists sound as natural as possible,’ says NGR FOH Engineer, Tomas Ždanovičius.

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After two decades, four albums and headline slots at major festivals including Rock Werchter, Pukkelpop and Tomorrowland, Belgium electronic rock band Goose are marking the tenth anniversary of their second album, Synrise, with a binaural recording of the title track.

The project is a collaboration between the band, Sennheiser and the Music Research Expertise Unit of Belgium’s PXL University of Applied Sciences and Arts. ‘We had been introduced to immersive sound for multiple applications such live mixing and experiencing live music in a room, or using the technology in our IEMs,’ the band say. ‘But none of these applications seemed useful to us – we love the simplicity of a good old rock ’n roll show – speakers left and right and a crowd jumping up and down...

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Owner of the House of Glass in Tuscany and one of the prime movers behind the Ocean Trax record label, Italian producer/remixer Gianni Bini has a single ambition… ‘My mission is to achieve the state of the art in every step of production,’ he says. ‘From the microphones to the cables, the preamps, and to the editing mixing and mastering, I want to be the point of reference in terms of quality of sound. It’s my personal mission and I invest big money in achieving it.’

Although the original studio was destroyed in the Viareggio railway disaster in 2009, SSL has long been an integral part of this mission. And as part of the rebuilding process, Bini had placed an SSL Duality console at heart of the new studio – but a decade on and time to replace it, he found himself on the verge of signing a deal for another manufacturer’s console.

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The Songcheng Group’s Romance theatres offer large-scale Vegas-style productions designed for maximum visual impact. Recently, six of these theatres – many located in dedicated Romance theme parks across China – have installed KV2 Audio sound systems.

The company owns 74 theatres with a total capacity of 175,000, which exceeds the combined number of seats available in London’s West End and New York’s Broadway. The Romance series of large-scale, hi-tech productions has broken box office records with more than 8,000 performances per year to an annual audience upwards of 35m.

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Joining an already striking skyline, the National Museum of Qatar is visually stunning. Designed by architect Jean Nouvel, the museum contains more than 86,000sq-ft of exhibition space, with interconnected galleries offering walls of video and immersive, multi-dimensional audio created using Flux::Immersive’s Spat Revolution.

The museum’s immersive audio design was created by Switzerland-based Idee und Klang, a pioneering multimedia agency noted for its approach for integrating sound scenography with immersive audio design. The company has been working in immersive audio for more than 15 years, and as company founder Ramon De Marco explains, the Qatar project was unique on many levels.

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