News

(The ones you’ll NEVER get away with!)   You know the story – show setup and rehearsal is SO BORING. After you’ve got cozy, rope lights rigged, ornaments and icons in place, Persian rug and fav chair just so, what now?   CX strongly encourage you not to enact any of the following mayhem on…

By Julius Grafton I had one of my best Australia Days this 2013 mixing monitors at an aboriginal festival near the city of Sydney. You wouldn’t know it was on unless you were part of their network. It wasn’t for white Australians, but it wasn’t closed off either. It was free to attend. The scene:…

10 January 2013 Today’s Sydney Morning Herald reports the planned temporary mega structure to be built on Glebe Island Wharf (above centre, just left of the Anzac Bridge) will have transport issues. The report here says pedestrian and cycle access will be restricted. Pages Hire won a tender to build the enormous structure, which they…

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: 19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 64,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that…

(January 1, 2013) By Julius Grafton At the end of 1976 I sold my lightshow business Zapco to Roger Barratt who was soon to be acclaimed as Australia’s greatest lighting designer. We met in late 1975 after Roger told Rob Nicholls at Strand Electric that he needed someone to look after his lights. Roger was…

21 December 2012 Today’s Smart Company reports that liquidator of Jackson’s Rare Guitars in Sydney will attempt to help the suppliers of the store’s guitars get their property back. This is a remarkable and honorable gesture from a practitioner of the insolvency profession, where seize and sell in haste is the usual mode. “I just…

16 December 2012 In earlier posts CX detailed the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the closure of Jacksons Rare Guitars in Sydney’s inner west. At the time a large collection of rare and valuable guitars were seized by Deloittes, called in as ‘Administrators’. Problem is that many guitars, perhaps as much as a million dollars worth, were…

13th December 2012 Sydney will have a new Convention, Exhibition and Entertainment Centre, after a three year shutdown. Plans announced yesterday by the state government have failed to excite the exhibitions industry. Right now, Sydney offers 25,000 metres of continuous space across five halls – with NO columns. An extra 2,500 meters in hall 6…

(13 Dec, 2012) Here we go – the ACMA held a Wireless Mic workshop last week. The upshot is that YOU have a short period to make comments, and then the following becomes LAW: 1. FROM the end of December 2014 the digital dividend spectrum (694–820 MHz) is NOT available for wireless audio transmitters. This…

12 December 2012 While CX doesn’t have ALL the details, it appears the collapse of an outdoor cinema screen structure at St Kilda last week could have maimed or killed audience members, had the timing been different. This is the picture of the structure as collapsed: Entertainment rigger Michael (Nitrox) Petrani was driving past on…