TSURUGA, FUKUI PREFECTURE, JAPAN: Ryokaku-ji Temple is located in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, three-hundred miles west of Tokyo in central Japan. Although it was founded nearly five hundred years ago – literally centuries before the advent of sound reinforcement! – Ryokaku-ji Temple has never hesitated to embrace new technologies. When the temple moved to a new building fourteen years ago, it installed a sound system for the 100-seat hall of worship that promised clear speech and moving music reproduction. But, much to the disappointment of the family that owns Ryokaku-ji Temple that promise was never delivered. Speech sounded boxy and music dribbled out, drained of its vitality. EMU and ENU, a nearby Tokyo-based pro audio sales and sound reinforcement integrator, came to the rescue when the family had finally had enough. Company president Masaki Morimoto designed a new cost-effective system centered on the powerful processing and robust performance of an Ashly more

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON: Martin Feveyear formed Jupiter Studios in Seattle, Washington with Christian Fulghum after emigrating to that rainy and musically prolific city from his native England during the height of the grunge movement. A renaissance man for the music industry, Feveyear is a uniquely competent songwriter, musician, studio/mixing engineer, producer, mastering engineer, tour manager and live engineer. He has relied on his very discerning ear to appoint Jupiter Studios with an amazing collection of tools, which now includes a 56-channel SSL 6056 E Series console surrounded by a long who’s who list of classic and contemporary outboard hits. Despite having a range of compressors that any engineer would kill for, Feveyear’s go-to dynamics solutions are the relatively inexpensive Chameleon Labs 7720 stereo compressor and 7802 stereo opto tube compressor. He has used them for both stereo bus compression (mainly in the studio but also live) and killer guitar tone with more

MISHAWAKA, INDIANA: It was a direct lightening strike that brought the original building for Albright United Methodist Church in Mishawaka, Indiana to the ground, and it was three years after the fire before the congregation had a new permanent sanctuary. Like any complete re-visioning, Albright seized the opportunity to build a church that would meet its unique needs perfectly. The lovely new 450-seat sanctuary provides a well-functioning home to a range of ministries, activities, and classes nearly every day and night of the week, including both traditional and contemporary services on the weekend. To minimize the logistically complicated need for technical staff at all of the various functions, Albright turned to northern Indiana/southern Michigan A/V designers and installers Last Pew Sound Engineering to design an A/V system that would largely take care of itself via intuitive user-interfaces that even technology-challenged church members could easily command. Last Pew more

HOPEWELL JUNCTION, NEW YORK: DeeTown Entertainment is the brainchild of prolific contemporary composer and musician Ali Dee Theodore. In less than a decade, DeeTown has risen to prominence in the American film industry, turning out a seemingly limitless number of chart-topping scores and songs for a huge number of films and musicians, including Hannah Montana: The Movie, The Jonas Brothers, Hot Tub Time Machine, Transformers, Mary J Blige, Daredevil, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Ghost Rider, and Iron Man, among many, many others. The rise of Ali Dee and his crack team of writers, producers, musicians, and engineers has been compared to the heyday of Tin Pan Alley, when Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and their contemporaries ruled New York City. Indeed, DeeTown’s recent move to an upgraded facility in Manhattan makes the analogy all the more apt. From more

HOPEWELL JUNCTION, NEW YORK: After reading this story, every FOH mixer will be begging for his or her own personal Doug Lemke/SpectraFoo combo for the Holidays. In a nutshell, Lemke’s recent outing with enduring 80s pop-rock legend Tears For Fears epitomized the challenge that FOH engineers are forced to confront over and over again – as if in a bad dream! – different more

Written on the International Telecommunications Union website, “Among technological developments, national and international policies, and the many diverse interests of commercial businesses, there needs to be an organization that safeguards everyone’s fundamental right to communicate. The ITU is that organization.�

Meetings continue with attendance in Mexico Hall reaching close to 2,000 participants

Every four years the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) holds a plenipotentiary meeting to discuss, plan and draw up legislation that will affect the way every person on the planet shares data with one another. No small feat as the Union is represented by 192 Member States and 700 Sector Members (larger than the whole of the United Nations). Held for almost three weeks, the 2010 ITU Plenipotentiary ran multiple meetings in multiple languages, simultaneously, and boasted attendance by the thousands. more

MANISTEE, MICHIGAN – OCTOBER 2010: The Little River Casino in Manistee, Michigan opened its doors in 1999 and has been growing steadily ever since, both in popularity and size. Owned by the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, the casino and resort now boasts a 300-room luxury hotel, a 1,700-seat event center, a ballroom and conference center, three restaurants, and literally thousands of ways to win big, housed within 23,000 square-feet of gaming grandeur. Michigan-based Intaglio designed the Little River Casino’s original sound system. Five years later, Intaglio upgraded it with SymNet open-architecture processing to deliver greater flexibility and the capacity to auto-level. Recently, the casino called on Intaglio again to help keep pace with its ever-expanding grounds and a felt need for a better “vibe.” Intaglio’s CEO Kirk Grimshaw tripled the system’s SymNet complement, adding CobraNet interconnects to existing SymLink interconnects, and upgraded loudspeakers and amps throughout to deliver more

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON – OCTOBER 2010: PSAV Presentation Services provides the hospitality industry with the tools and technology that inspire great meetings. This includes incorporating fully-integrated, forward-looking technology solutions for its installations at hotel partners across the United States. As Symetrix fixed-architecture and SymNet open-architecture DSP solutions have advanced, PSAV has kept up, offering clients ever-greater functionality and performance for ever-less money.

Project Manager Matt Keene of PSAV has begun to include Symetrix’ latest offerings – the Axiomtek touch-panel PC and the latest version of SymVue user-control software for new design and installation projects. In addition, Keene is retrofitting older Symetrix and SymNet installations with the Axiomtek, which provides an even greater degree of sophisticated, yet intuitive, control to the end user.

Recently Keene utilized the Symetrix technology to deliver upon an upgrade project. “Even though our latest proposal was for much less money than an earlier one, we more

PHOENIX, ARIZONA – NOVEMBER 2010: Music lovers in the bustling Phoenix-Scottsdale metro area are celebrating The Compound, a combination music venue and local-organic eatery that recently opened at the northern edge of town. The organizers of the charitable McDowell Mountain Music Festival built The Compound to provide a year-round residence for great music and great community. The stage hosts both regional and national acts, and the venue can accommodate some 250 souls. Not the sort of folks to go halfway, the owners insisted on a top-tier sound reinforcement system to deliver not just volume, but fidelity. Lyle Vilhauer of local Arizona A/V sales and installer Broadway Music, Inc. and Jim Hall of Jim Hall Acoustics Research (Nashville, Tennessee) exceeded their expectations with an elegant and minimal system centered on Danley Sound Labs loudspeakers and subwoofers driven by an Ashly processor.

The more

JESSUP, MARYLAND – NOVEMBER 2010: Chris Cundy of Bozeman, Montana, was recently identified as the 1,000th customer of API’s highly regarded A2D. In the four short years since its introduction, the A2D has become one of the most popular and decorated products of the company’s offerings.

“It’s the ideal mix of the old and the new. The solid-state heritage of API with two reference quality 312 mic preamps in combination with the cutting-edge application of today’s technology in a superb A/D section is what makes the A2D such a hit,” said Larry Droppa, president of API. “It is our one and only product with a digital output and it’s great to have it become one of our best-selling products.”

Cundy is part of the team at The Shed, a production, tracking, mixing, educational and rehearsal facility in Bozeman. The Shed consists of more