Pasquale Quadri, Founder and Chairman of Clay Paky, Receives the 04 MIPA/PIPA Lifetime Achievement Award

(21/03/2014) Pasquale Quadri, founder and chairman of Bergamo-based Clay Paky SpA, received the prestigious lifetime achievement prize at the MIPA/PIPA awards held in Frankfurt during Musikmesse, the most important international exhibition of musical instruments and professional sound equipment for the entertainment industry. The ceremony took place on 13 March 2014 and the winner was chosen by an overwhelming majority of the jury, which consisted of journalists from all around the world, representing more than a hundred industry journals.

This is the fifteenth time the annual MIPA awards have been presented. They have been extended this year, for the first time, from the world of musical instruments to the field of stage lighting and sound (PIPA awards). The fact Pasquale Quadri is the first person from the lighting industry to receive this prestigious award is therefore particularly significant.

copyrighted by liveProduction.tv Pasquale Quadri, better known as Paky, is a well-known entrepreneur in the Bergamo area, although he is not the kind of person who loves to be in the spotlight. Nevertheless every lighting professional knows that he is the creative power-house behind Clay Paky, an Italian company that today exports 97% of its production and whose sophisticated lights play a leading role on the stages of the worlds most important events and shows. Among the most recent, it is worth remembering the Summer Olympic Games in London, the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, s and Madonnas shows during the Super Bowl finals, Justin Timberlakes, Luciano s and Gianna Nanninis tours, the magical performances of Cirque du Soleil, and the ballets at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Among those currently being organized, we can mention Lady Gagas and the s world tours.

Now it is the music industry that wants to sing Pasquale Quadri's praises for his contribution to innovation. His passion for technology has given rise to products that use light to bring out the rhythms and atmospheres of musical notes and create emotions. Any show or music event would lose much of its charm without Clay Pakys magical visual effects. Pasquale Quadris story is therefore closely intertwined with music and full of great international successes, which range from early lighting effects, such as the Astrodisco, which came to symbolize the discotheque in the 1970s and 80s, to the invention of legendary computerized lights for the rock concert world, such as the GoldenScan, the Sharpy (in 2010), right up to the innovative B-EYE today.

copyrighted by liveProduction.tv Clay Paky, the company Pasquale Quadri founded in 1976, is entirely Italian. He has never succumbed to the temptation to move it to countries with lower taxes and costs, even though it is precisely from those countries that his worst rivals come: several Asian companies have been copying his ideas for years, with total disregard for the over fifty patents he owns.

With this MIPA/PIPA Lifetime Achievement Award, Pasquale Quadri joins a highly exclusive club whose members consist of the mythical personalities who have received it before him for having made the history of the world music industry, such as the two Meyer brothers, who founded the famous speaker company Meyer Sound, Fritz Sennheiser, inventor of the wireless microphone, and Jim Marshall, whose guitar amps are legendary throughout the world.

This award makes us all proud. It acknowledges his personal genius, but is also a recognition of Italian creativity in a high technology industry where the key to success and real qualitative excellence are things that only true experts can judge.

PROFILE OF PASQUALE QUADRI

Pasquale Quadri is a leading player in the birth and development of the world professional lighting industry for shows and entertainment, and one of its pioneers.

copyrighted by liveProduction.tv His involvement began in the early 1970s, when Pasquale Quadri played bass guitar under the stage name Pasquale Quadri in a successful band on the Bergamo music scene. However, even then, he cultivated a strong interest in optics and electromechanics. Working in his garage, he transformed Rollei projectors into special lighting effects, which he then sold to the venues where he performed with his band. The success of this activity quickly led him to turn his hobby into a business project and, in 1976, Clay Paky was founded in Seriate, Italy.

At first Pasquale Quadri decided to focus on the disco market, which was expanding rapidly at that time. Clay Pasquale Quadris business was hectic right from the start. Pasquale Quadri invented a variety of lighting effects, which the market greeted with growing enthusiasm: the Astroraggi, the Astrodisco and the Astrospider quickly caught on worldwide and became true icons of the disco world.

copyrighted by liveProduction.tv The advent of electronic technology marked another milestone in the development of Clay Pakys products. In 1988, Pasquale Quadri came up with the GoldenScan, the first moving mirror light (known as a scanner by those in the business) with stepper motors. All lighting professionals know the GoldenScan, literally everyone. It was an extremely reliable, accurate, fast light with an incomparable optical unit. The GoldenScan was originally designed for discotheques, but it was quickly discovered by small bands who could not afford the only brand of tour light it was possible to rent in those days. They believed however that it was a good investment to buy a reliable motorized light, like the GoldenScan. Pasquale Quadri realized that the concert and tour world was a new market opportunity and designed a special light for it, the SuperScan. However he did not neglect small nightclubs, for which he created the Miniscan, the best compact scanner ever designed.

Nevertheless, in the late 1990s, scanners gradually lost their appeal in favour

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