www.psneurope.com
May 2013 l 49
marketfeature
LLB’s show takes place at the Stockholm Exhibition & Congress Centre this month and is bound to concentrate attention on this and many other issues affecting pro audio. Undaunted, the rental scene here follows the trend of consolidation found across Europe. When rental and event specialist Eastavab Group Oy merged with Swedish United Audio Starlight AB, the original Swedish full service providers, United Audio AB and Starlight AB became part of a rental network that stretches across Norway, Sweden and Finland in a bonanza of pooled resources and economies of scale. Starlight’s CEO remains Håkan Alfredsson, who came from United. “We like expensive equipment,” smiles Alfredsson, noting the rush of cost-conscious products at Frankfurt once again. “We operate mainly in rental, and again we’ll be very busy this summer: a big tour with Gyllene Tider using Meyer Sound’s LEO; the Peace & Love festival in Börlange, stage one and two with M2Ds and MILOs; and the new Bråvalla festival in Norrköping with Rammstein headlining. For Rammstein, on stage one, it’ll be V-DOSC, while on stage two it’s LEO again. We do racks and stacks, all the lighting and staging, but nowadays the FOH engineers bring their own consoles, pre-programmed.”
“Licensing has never been enforced and is so complicated anyway. As a result, the
authorities have never
noticed pro audio and production – we had 160,000 users but only 16 licences!”
MARTIN’S AUDIO Martin Andersson is the son of Kenneth, who co-founded amplifier pioneer
Lab.gruppen in 1979. As product manager for touring, he now presides over a portfolio that melds the Lake brand of DSP technology into Lab’s power base, with the live sound markets under Andersson and non-cinema installation targets in a firm grip. The acquisition of most of Lake was a defining moment in the development of the TC Group, establishing a bulwark that turned
Lab.gruppen from a workaday Dolby licensee into the arbiter of Lake processing’s fate: the PLM range alone has taken touring by storm, while the potential of the installation markets has integrators salivating. “Lake is a live sound product,” Andersson says, “but we do see great potential for it beyond that in the future. As systems become
Lars Wern, EM Nordic
integrated and networked, a digital engine like this can address a huge variety of needs. The Swedish market is just the same as everywhere else in this regard.” Lake is once again a highlight
of the TC Group’s catalogue and, effectively, an important ‘Swedish’ brand in its own right. “We think that the advancements we made with the PLM 20000Q in how to efficiently make the most of the available mains voltage and current – especially from an optimised ‘show must go on’ perspective – are still unique and unrivalled,” says product research manager Klas Dalbjorn. “We’ve managed to deliver very high SPL with a low mains peak current draw: this is important for events that are powered by generators.” Dalbjorn recently told PSNEurope that to extend amplifier power-to-weight ratio much beyond the PLM 20000Q in a single phase would be “very
t
Photo: Jan Olav Wedin
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