PLASA London: Day Two

	Yesterday, ETC donated a cheque for over £17,500 to the Light Relief charity from sales of their mobile app. Anders Ekvall, Stuart Porter, John Simpson, and Andrew Bridge.

Here is more of our highly selected look at yesterday's trade show action at PLASA London, in its new home at ExCeL.

A stop at Lycian Stage Lighting yielded the news that the company is negotiating with a potential new distributor in the UK. An announcement may be made as early as this week, so stay tuned. The company also has a new product in the works that will probably be ready in time for LDI in Las Vegas in November.

Next stop was the press conference for the Michael Northern Bursary. Northern, the first theatre lighting designer in the UK to be credited as such, was also a chairman and president of the ALD. The bursary is awarded annually to a student or recent graduate who has demonstrated strong, imaginative and creative lighting designs. It is organized by the Association of Lighting Designers, a professional body representing lighting designers in the live performance industry. Each year an award of £500 is presented to a young lighting designer who has shown excellence in the field of lighting design. The project must be a performance-based lighting design in or out of the college environment. Two runner-up prizes of £250 each are also presented: an ETC sponsored award, and the ALD-sponsored Francis Reid Award. The top prize to Alex Fernandes, a student at the University of Edinburgh, who also picked up a year's premium membership to Stage Jobs Pro, the UK's leading theatre jobs website, and a copy of Northern's autobiography. The ETC Award went to Jamie Platt, who recently graduated from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama. The Francis Reid Award went to Nic Farman, a recent graduate from Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance. Peter Mumford, the current chairman of the ALD, noted that the awards provided a kind of stamp of approval for young designers beginning their careers.

The giving continued at the ETC booth, where Anders Ekvall, a software developer for the company presented a check worth £17,500 to Light Relief, the industry charity that takes care of designers, technicians, and other industry people in time of need. The check was accepted by John Simpson, founder of White Light, and lighting designer Andrew Bridge (Phantom of the Opera), along with Stuart Porter, who is a recent recipient of assistance from Light Relief.

The next event of the day produced a big piece of news: Eaton, the international power management company (with 102,000 employees in 175 countries), formally came together with Cooper Controls. In fact, Eaton purchased Cooper last November, but the press event, complete with cupcakes and champagne, was a way of publicizing the new arrangement. According to David Catterall, general manager of Zero 88, a Cooper company, the name Cooper Controls will go away, but that of Zero 88 will remain and Eaton will continue to handle in the UK the lighting systems specialist Cogent and the Italian lighting companies DTS and LDR.

For the show, however, the Cooper name remains, in terms of the new products the SCD Server and SCD Server File, a pair of stand-alone event replay/ show controllers that can be used for sophisticated permanent lighting installations and to run show on many applications, including buildings, facades, landscaped environments, and theme parks. Zero 88 is showing the latest Chili dimmers, designed for venues using both dimming and switched power. Cogent has a new range of flexible LED strips with improved output and a new range of full-color mixing downlighters and replacement lamps. DTS has the new Max multipurpose moving head luminaire, the Nick 501 LED wash light, and a new high-output Delta 12 RGBW wash light, which is IP rated for outdoor use. LDR has the Alba LED profile luminaire, which is said to be especially bright.

All eyes have been on the Clay Paky booth, which is looking to deliver an equally smashing follow-up to its phenomenally successful Sharpy products. The buzz (quite literally, in terms of its marketing campaign which featured enough images of bees to fill an apiary) is all about the A.LEDA B-EYE, a remarkably versatile unit that functions as a wash light and a beam light, with individually controllable LEDS for various effects. Another feature allows it to function as an effect light: the front lens can be rotated in either direction at variable speeds, creating a proliferation of small beam that, the company says, can be unfolded or closed like petals. Keep your eye on this one. The product demonstration, quite naturally is unfolding to "The Flight of the Bumblebee."

It wouldn't be the PLASA Show without a little vodka party from Wireless System, the Swedish specialist in wireless lighting control. The vodka flowed, along with wine and other drinks, and a large crowd assembled to socialize and learn about the company's products.

Polar Audio had an event to celebration the expansion of the product lines it represents. For example, this was the company's first opportunity to exhibit products from Mackie and the Danish manufacturer Cornered Audio. Mackie products on display include the DM8, DM12, and DM12S loudspeakers, which, the company says, features professional-grade all-wood designs with enhanced Mackie digital processing providing new levels of SRM ruggedness, output, clarity, and simplicity, and MRmk3 powered studio monitors.

Also shown at Polar was Aviom's new A360 personal mixer, which is said to deliver a new level of control, performance, and fidelity to personal mixing on stage and in the studio. TG 1000 is beyerdynamic's first 24-bit digital wireless system, which covers 319MHz of the UHF bandwidth (470-789MHz. Audio. Renkus-Heinz showed the IC7-II and ICX7-steerable loudspeaker array elements. Employing the same triple-tweeter technology and fully natural sound reproduction as their digitally steered brethren, the IC7's fixed acoustical beam is designed for side-fill, front-fill, and short-throw applications that don't demand programmable control, the company says. Australian company Wyrestorm announced it is shipping the world's first HDBaseT (HDBT) Class D digital audio amplifier, the AMP-001-010; the MX-PP-POH Pro Plus matrix, a totally modular, built-to-order addition to Wyrestorm's Pro-Plus line of HDBaseT matrices, which is compatible with all leading control systems. XTA showed the new multi-channel analog (and now digital) DS8000D audio distribution system.

The day climaxed with the PLASA Awards for Innovation. The winners were Clay Paky's A.LEDA B-EYE (see above), SGM's G-Spot LED, QSC's PLD/CXD amplifier, Flare Audio's SB18C, Joe Bleasdale's Interactive User Manual, Line 6's StageScape M20d,Robe's MiniMe, and in the final slot, a tie between LumenRadio's Supernova 3, and Artistic Licence's eSense. The Sustainability Award went to TMB for the Solaris LED Flare. Commendations were given to Brompton Technology's Tessera M-System LED processor, Artistic Licence's Art-Osc, Flare Audio's X5A, Chromlech's Tap Technology Elidy Strip, Clay Paky Sharpy Wash 330, and Robe's The Pointe.

The winner of the Tony Gottelier Award, given to Jim Bornhorst, who, among other accomplishments, led the team that built the VL0, the first viable moving light, thus ushering in the modern era of entertainment lighting. Bornhorst has gone on to develop many other products, first for Vari-Lite, and later for PRG -- including, for the latter, the Bad Boy luminaire.-David Barbour