UAE: 

Dubai-based Flair Event Services has added several new pieces of equipment to its inventory, in preparation for what it hopes will be a very busy upcoming season. Highlights include new consoles from British manufacturer Allen & Heath, a doubling of its wireless audio capabilities with new equipment from Shure, and further investments into networking, lighting and power. Looking to dive deeper into the world of corporate events in 2024, the purchases are designed to better cater to conferences and product launches than the company’s existing rider-focused concert portfolio.

“Purchased from NMK Electronics, a lot of our latest audio investments not only support and build on our current equipment, but are also more focused towards our newly developed corporate sector,” explained Flair’s technical director, Marno Snyman. “We’ve been focusing on private social events, large format weddings and live international concerts for the last couple of years, but from this year onwards we're stepping fully into the corporate world.”

The new additions to Flair’s portfolio include compact 48-channel SQ5 audio consoles from Allen & Heath, Shure Axient AD-1 body packs, Shure Axient AD-2 wireless microphones with Beta52 capsules, Shure Axient AD-4Qs four-channel wireless receivers, AD-600 Spectrum Managers, ULX-4D dual wireless receivers, ULXD-1 and ULXD-D2 mics with Beta52 capsules. These are joined by GigaCore 16XT and GigaCore 10 networking switches from Luminex.

“With 48 channels, the SQ range consoles are compact and can do everything we need for a corporate function,” furthered Snyman. “Even if we have a small band, we can still accommodate a three-piece setup with decent EQ and pickups. On the wireless side, we’ve doubled our channel count of both our Axient and Shure ULX ranges, all with beltpacks, handhelds, spectrum analysers and antennas combined. On the networking side we were previously using Luminex 14Rs. We've upped that by getting a couple of Luminex 16XTs and GigaCore 10s for truss mounting for our Robe FollowSpots.”

Other new equipment purchases in recent months have included a significant expansion of the team’s lighting capabilities with new fixtures from PWR. “We partnered with PWR, a company that launched at Prolight + Sound at the beginning of this year, to help them develop and refine the fixture,” noted Snyman. “We’ve got 200 Pixel blinders from them, which is essentially an RGB warm white miniature blinder – it’s super tiny but very powerful, and we've used them already for multiple concerts. We also have 400m of PWR’s Pixel bar system. We use them quite a lot as truss lighters or for set elements both for corporate and concert halls, and they give us the ability to extend a video stream with lighting fixtures into a broader format. Generally, we stack these pixel bars onto the lighting truss and run them through Resolume as a video screen. They work to kind of extend the overall visual experience and make it feel like you've got a lot more room to play with.”

Finally, the team is awaiting to take delivery of a large quantity of power supplies from SES: “We're getting a couple more 400 amp DBs, 125 amp DBs, 63 amp DBs, so our power department has also seen quite a big investment.”