The inaugural Virginia Beach Super Girl Surf Festival brought three days of professional surfing, women’s sports and free live music to the oceanfront over Labor Day weekend, supported by a dBTechnologies VIO system designed to carry full-range concert sound across a wide, deep audience area built directly on the sand. Held from 5 to 7 September, the Virginia Beach event marked the newest addition to the Super Girl Festival Series as it celebrated its 20th anniversary. The free program combined a World Surf League competition with more than 4,000 female athletes participating across 14 sports, 24 fitness and wellness classes,…
Author: TPi
The PLASA Show 2026 has closed for another year, and the Backup team said they are “thrilled” to have been part of it. Every year the show brings new faces and new excitement to Olympia and this year was no exception. Backup Tech was once again part of the #WeMakeEvents hub and hosted two well-attended seminars, Talking Health & Welfare and Building A Sustainable Live Events Workforce, along with a breakfast meeting that brought together many of the industry’s associations, unions, groups and charities to look at how they could work more closely together to support the people working behind the…
Live Technology has appointed Nick Wellens to the position of Regional Sales Manager for the North of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Wellens will represent Live Technology’s extensive portfolio with a focus on supporting and supplying new and existing customers, including maintaining and developing close relationships with live event providers across the region. Wellens joins Live Technology from parent company Midwich, where he spent ten years as an account director working with key customers from IT and AV channels. After managing his own real estate agency in the South of France, he moved into technology in 2011. Seeking a new challenge,…
Red Event Production has moved into a new purpose-built 12,500sq ft headquarters in Bedford, quadrupling its warehouse capacity and creating a stronger base for supporting an increasing roster of projects. The move takes Red from its previous warehouse to a new facility at North Common Farm Business Park, close to Junction 13 of the M1. The site brings the company’s warehouse, offices, meeting spaces and workshops together under one roof, while providing faster access to venues across London and the wider UK. Rather than adapting an existing unit, Red worked with the developer to create a facility designed around the…
Areal has appointed KOIL Corporation as its official distributor in South Korea, covering the SR1 spatial reference headphone and Upmix Engine. The appointment marks Areal’s first distribution partnership outside Europe and represents the next step in the company’s international expansion. The partnership gives customers in South Korea access to local sales, product demonstrations and technical support as Areal continues to build its global distribution network. Developed at Areal’s headquarters in Belgium, SR1 is a portable spatial reference system designed for professional immersive monitoring on headphones, supporting multichannel sessions up to 7.1.4. The Upmix Engine is a real-time hardware processor for…
Swiss band HECHT took to the stage at Zurich’s Hallenstadion with a visual production as energetic and spontaneous as the band itself. Combining live camera feeds, real-time Notch effects and programmed content across a large-scale LED canvas, the production used Hippotizer Media Servers from Green Hippo, an ACT Entertainment brand, to put video at the heart of the live experience. Designed by Roger Staub, Creative Director at Leap of Faith, the visual concept brought lighting, video and the band’s performance together as a single, highly dynamic environment. Rather than treating video as a fixed backdrop, the system was designed to…
Rock-It Cargo has welcomed Michael Llewellyn to Rock-It Cargo, bringing with him decades of experience and a deep understanding of the live events and logistics industry. In his new role, Llewellyn will work across the Rock-It network, specialising in music touring, sporting events and other global projects, with a focus on growth and innovation and finding new ways to bring the breadth of Rock-It’s capabilities to its clients. There’s also a familial connection behind Llewellyn’s arrival. His father, Mike Llewellyn, began his own career with Rock-It Cargo in the 1990s, making Michael’s arrival at the company three decades later all…
Receiving excellent reviews for its outstanding performances and production values, the recent amateur production of Dear Evan Hansen performed by CCADS Theatre in The King’s Theatre, Portsmouth saw some highly original uses of Ayrton Stradale fixtures in an imaginative design by lighting designer Christopher Pratt. Pratt, who has a long-established working relationship with CCADS, incorporated 15 Ayrton Stradale into his design, utilising the shutter sets to carve out precise areas of action and track the actors across the stage. “Our director, John-Paul McCrohon, wanted to set the mood as an overarching sense of isolation,” said Pratt. “The idea was to…
Sphere Entertainment and Disguise have announced a new multi-year partnership to develop advanced technologies custom-made for Sphere’s immersive entertainment venue. Since Sphere opened in 2023, Disguise has served as a key technology partner supporting the delivery of Sphere’s groundbreaking live residency productions and corporate events. For these events, Sphere uses Disguise media servers and software to process, synchronise and play back content in real-time, at a scale unparalleled in live entertainment. Building on that successful collaboration, the companies are expanding their relationship to advance technologies and workflows to accelerate video playback capabilities and help prepare Sphere for the next phase…
At Forbidden Forest 2026, the Upmix Engine helped Arcadia improve how standard stereo DJ content translated across the Spider’s nine-point L-Acoustics system, without asking artists to change how they delivered their sets. The tenth edition of Forbidden Forest took place this year at Belvoir Castle near Grantham, UK. The three-day electronic music festival, which featured six stages, multiple genres and more than fifty artists, marked a decade in existence by hosting the Arcadia Spider as its centrepiece. Arcadia is not a conventional festival experience. It’s an arts company known for transforming recycled military hardware into sculpted, large-scale performance stages, forging…
Humanitix has become the first ticket agency in the UK to offer a climate donation as a standard part of the checkout process. Working in partnership with the charity onboard:earth, the Climate Levy Donation gives event attendees a simple way to directly address the environmental impacts associated with travel to events. Event organisers can join a free live webinar to explore how they can get involved on 15 October between 12:00-13:00 (BST). Register here. Audiences are increasingly becoming more concerned about their impact on the planet, especially as travel to live events typically causes 60-80% of the total carbon footprint.…
dBTechnologies USA has appointed Richard Dean Associates as its manufacturers’ representative for the six New England states and Upstate New York. The partnership expands the company’s sales and technical presence across the region while providing dealers, integrators, rental companies, consultants and end users with direct access to an experienced local team. Founded in 1975 by Richard Bazirgan and Dean Goodwin, Richard Dean Associates has represented professional audio and video manufacturers throughout the Northeast for more than five decades. Principal Partners John “JD” Davidson and Bill King purchased the company in 2022 and have continued to build upon its established position…
In support of his fourth studio album Don’t Be Dumb, his first album (and subsequent tour) in seven years, A$AP Rocky travelled across the United States and Canada this summer performing to packed arenas. The latter ten North American shows, from Phoenix to Western Canada to the finale in New Jersey, just outside the A$AP Rocky’s Harlem hometown, were supported by an in-the-round Cohesion rig designed to provide the full venue coverage and visceral output required by the Grammy-nominated rapper. “A$AP Rocky is really creative — you have to be on your A-game working with him since he has a…
twoloox has released the highly anticipated Pandoras Box Version 10. The new version 10 heralds the beginning of an important new chapter for the young management team, who took the strategic decision to combine their award winning Pandoras Box media server and their Widget Designer media control tools into a seamlessly integrated solution called the Infinity Suite. Version 10 is the first company milestone since twoloox acquired the Pandoras Box product line in October 2025. Managing Director Daniel Kaminski, responsible for software development and product management, underlines the unique importance of the new release: “When Barbara, Daniel, Andre and I…
Set against the breathtaking backdrop of Montana’s Rocky Mountains, Music in the Mountains brings live music and community together every summer in Big Sky. For the 2026 season, local production company Jereco deployed an almost exclusively ADJ lighting rig to provide a versatile, high-impact house system capable of supporting a diverse lineup of regional and touring artists throughout the summer. Held every Thursday at Len Hill Park in the heart of Big Sky Town Center, Music in the Mountains is a free, family-friendly concert series that has become a popular fixture in the local community. With a different artist lineup…
Waves Audio has announced Waves Tracks Live 2.0 , the next generation of its acclaimed multitrack recording software created specifically for live sound engineers. Tracks Live 2.0 is compatible with diverse live systems but offers particularly seamless integration with Waves LV1 consoles. Reimagined from the ground up, Tracks Live 2.0 is designed to make capturing live performances fast, reliable and straightforward, whether recording a club performance, house-of-worship service, corporate event, broadcast production or large-scale concert. Supporting up to 128 channels of recording, the application combines multitrack capture, virtual soundcheck, essential editing and flexible session export within a single live-focused workflow.…
d&b audiotechnik has announced System Auralization, a new software feature that enables sound professionals to listen to their loudspeaker system design before it is deployed. For decades, sound system prediction software such as d&b ArrayCalc has helped engineers visualise system performance through plots, maps and acoustic data. With System Auralization, d&b adds a new dimension to the workflow, allowing users to hear the direct sound of a system design and assess aspects of system performance that are often easier to evaluate by listening than by studying graphs alone. System Auralization generates a real-time binaural rendering of the current system configuration.…
Most touring lighting designs are built from a palette of fixture types, each doing the job it is best at. The Spiritbox production that toured North America in 2026 was built from just one. Lighting designer and programmer PJ Carruth carried 20 GLP JDC2 IP fixtures and nothing else, running the new firmware 2.0 in what is believed to be the first touring deployment of the 2.0 release. Carruth is a Los Angeles-based designer and programmer who came to lighting through mathematics and science, first learning moving lighting programming from his high school math teacher and continuing the trade through…
