Pasquale Quadri, Founder and Chairman of Clay Paky, Receives the 2014 MIPA/PIPA Lifetime Achievement Award

	Pasquale Quadri, founder and chairman of Clay Paky

Pasquale Quadri, founder and chairman of Bergamo, Italy-based Clay Paky SpA, received the prestigious lifetime achievement prize at the MIPA/PIPA awards held in Frankfurt during Musikmesse, the most important international exhibition of musical instruments and professional sound equipment for the entertainment industry. The ceremony took place on March 13, 2014 and the winner was chosen by an overwhelming majority of the jury, which consisted of journalists from all around the world, representing over 100 industry journals.

This is the 15th time the annual MIPA awards have been presented. They have been extended this year, for the first time, from the world of musical instruments to the field of stage lighting and sound (PIPA awards). The fact Quadri is the first person from the lighting industry to receive this prestigious award is therefore particularly significant.

Quadri, better known as Paky, is a well-known entrepreneur in the Bergamo area, although he is not the kind of person who loves to be in the spotlight. Nevertheless, every lighting professional knows that he is the creative power-house behind Clay Paky, an Italian company that today exports 97% of its production and whose lights play a leading role on the stages of many of the world's most important events and shows. Among the most recent, it is worth remembering the Summer Olympic Games in London, the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Bruno Mars's and Madonna's shows during the Super Bowl Halftime, Justin Timberlake's, Luciano Ligabue's, and Gianna Nannini's tours, the magical performances of Cirque du Soleil, and the ballets at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Among those currently being organized, the company mentions Lady Gaga's and the Rolling Stones's world tours.

Now it is the music industry that wants to sing Quadri's praises for his contribution to innovation. His passion for technology has given rise to products that use light to bring out the rhythms and atmospheres of musical notes and create emotions. Quadri's story is therefore closely intertwined with music and full of great international successes, which range from early lighting effects, such as the Astrodisco, which came to symbolize the discotheque in the 1970s and 80s, to the invention of legendary computerized lights for the rock concert world, such as the GoldenScan, the Sharpy (in 2010), right up to the B-EYE today.

Clay Paky, the company Pasquale Quadri founded in 1976, is entirely Italian. The company says he has never succumbed to the temptation to move it to countries with lower taxes and costs, even though it is precisely from those countries that his most challenging rivals come, with total disregard for the over 50 patents he owns.

With this MIPA/PIPA Lifetime Achievement Award, Quadri joins a highly exclusive club whose members consist of the mythical personalities who have received it before him for having made the history of the world music industry, such as the two Meyer brothers, who founded the famous speaker company Meyer Sound, Fritz Sennheiser, inventor of the wireless microphone, and Jim Marshall, whose guitar amps are legendary throughout the world.

The company says this award brings great pride and acknowledges his personal genius, in addition, "it is a recognition of Italian creativity in a high technology industry where the key to success and real qualitative excellence are things that only true experts can judge."

See Clay Paky at PLASA Focus: Baltimore, May 8 - 9.