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Rants and ramblings Bits and pieces from the editorial cutting-room floor


The Olympics are over – make way for the AVlimpics! Yes, as part of AV Week in the US (14-20 October), InfoComm is encouraging companies to host their own competitions, where teams show off their expertise in various technology-related discliplines. Events include: Cable Wrap and Toss (coil 100ft of XLR cable, toss cable out to 100ft, ensuring


no knots); dB Challenge (guess the decibel rating); Sandbag Toss (toss 20lb sandbag as far as possible); and even Tripod Challenge (carry two 8ft tripod screens 100ft, set up both screens, strike both screens, carry both back to the starting line). We think this could take off – let’s just hope the Olympic brand police don’t find out about the name.


You never know when you’re going to learn something new about technology. Recently we were watching Who Do You Think You Are?, the BBC TV programme which each week investigates the family history of a different celebrity. A recent episode featured Doctor Whoand ER actress Alex Kingston, who was looking at her great- grandfather William’s life in the early part of the last century. Census reports showed that he began his working life as a magic lantern slide maker, and so the programme gave an explanation of how this precursor to photography and projection worked. However, William later became a photographer, and on joining the army in World War I became involved in the


PLASA 2012 as viewed by the Twitterati


From technology of the past, to a past view of future technology. Yahoo! News recently featured a set of French picture postcards, produced between 1899 and 1910, predicting what life would be like in the year 2000. A couple of them are rather prescient. The picture of a kitchen that looks more like a chemical laboratory seems eminently reasonable in these days of Heston Blumenthal and molecular gastronomy. And there’s also a fair depiction of video chat: a man sits in a chair, talking into a horn, while next to him another man operates a machine which looks like a cross between a wax-cylinder phonograph and a telegraph operator’s station. This gizmo is also projecting a full-length image of a woman onto a screen in front of the first man. You can see the full set of postcards at http://tinyurl.com/cs9eo77


practice of sound ranging – which is something we were previously unaware of. This is a military technique for determining the position of enemy guns by analysing the time differences between the arrival of sound at an array of microphones a few kilometres apart. What was particularly interesting was that, in William’s case at least, a photographic technique was used to display the sound peaks over time and enable the measurements to be made. We would have liked to have heard a little more about this, but instead the programme moved on to another ancestor, who kept a bawdy house just off Oxford Street in the 19th century. From one bang to another, I suppose.


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“Do you have a picture you can send us?” This is a request made almost daily to PR people or others with information that they are looking for us to cover in these pages. It’s not often that we get a picture like this, though. You might think that the company in question was being facetious, but in fact it was a pretty accurate representation of the information in question: Swedish company W-DMX was having a party on its PLASA stand, serving Swedish meatballs. More visually interesting than peanuts, in any case.


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Editor: Paddy Baker paddy.baker@intentmedia.co.uk Managing editor: Joanne Ruddock jo.ruddock@intentmedia.co.uk Staff writer: James McGrath james.mcgrath@intentmedia.co.uk Head of design & production: Adam Butler adam.butler@intentmedia.co.uk Assistant graphic designer: Nikki Hargreaves nikki.thompson@intentmedia.co.uk


58 October 2012


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Publisher: Steve Connolly Managing director: Stuart Dinsey


Contributors: Geny Caloisi, David Davies, Ian McMurray, Steve Montgomery Special thanks this issue: Roland Hemming, Sarah James, Mark Millar, Gregg Wallace


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Amina.......................................38 AMX..........................................10 Analog Way.............................22 Arthur Holm............................38 ASL Intercom..........................19 Ateis .........................................04 Audio-Technica ......................06 Audipack .................................09 Barco........................................27 Blackmagic Design................07 Bosch .......................................46 Cadac .......................................54 Clear-Com ...............................32 Community Professional .....16 CommTec ................................25 Crestron...................................17 Datapath...Outside back cover DIS.............................................22 Dynacord.................................14 eyevis .......................................32 Faital.........................................32 Gefen........................................48 Habitech..................................05 Humantechnik .......................24 Imago........................................09 JBL ............................................40 Kling & Freitag........................48 Kracken Acoustics................51 Kramer.....................................55 Lab.gruppen...........Front cover Lightware....Inside front cover Mipro.........................................36 Mode-AL ..................................20 NewHank.................................21 NuVo.........................................56 Peavey .....................................28 Peerless-AV ............................44 Powersoft................................11 projectiondesign....................43 QSC...........................................31 Revolabs..................................38 RGB Spectrum........................37 Sennheiser..............................13 Sommer Cable........................47 Taiden ..........Inside back cover Tannoy .....................................42 TV One.....................................35 Vivitek......................................03 Vogel’s......................................51


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