Sennheiser has released further details of its Spectera deployment at the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 in Vienna, including full equipment figures and operational detail, following Installation’s report from the event earlier this month.
Sennheiser deployed its Spectera system throughout the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 at the Wiener Stadthalle in Vienna – across both semi-finals and the grand final on May 16 – marking the first time the technology has been used at the world’s biggest live music broadcast. Installation reported directly from the first semi-final on Tuesday May 12. The contest, broadcast to more than 100m homes, is the largest deployment of Spectera base stations, bidirectional bodypacks and handheld microphones to date.
Sennheiser has now revealed that the full system comprised 46 Spectera SKM handheld microphones with Neumann KK 105 A super-cardioid capsules – chosen for reduced pickup from adjacent sources and the room – and 101 SEK bidirectional bodypacks. Six base stations were deployed in total: four active, each working on one RF channel, one dedicated to continuous spectrum scanning but linked to all antennas and available as a spare, and one held as a true spare unit.
The German manufacturer also revealed that, with each song running to three minutes, the audio team had just 42 seconds to change over to the next act. With a maximum of six people on stage per act, the team managed rotations of six Spectera handhelds, six SEK bodypacks for IEM-only use, and six bodypacks configured with headset mics and in-ear monitors. For hands-free acts, the bidirectional Spectera bodypack was paired with a cardioid Headmic 4.
Spectera, which came to market in April last year, is designed to address a persistent problem in live wireless audio: signal dropouts caused by radio frequency reflections inside large venues. Where conventional wireless systems transmit on a narrow band of spectrum – typically around 200kHz – Spectera uses an 8MHz-wide carrier, borrowing techniques from 4G mobile networks and digital broadcast television and optimising them for the low-latency demands of professional audio.
On cabling, Jonas Næsby, who headed Sennheiser’s technical application engineering team on site, noted that a fibre run from the sound room to FOH used standard IT media converters – avoiding the performance compromise he says is typically associated with RF-over-fibre systems used with conventional wireless.
Jan Watermann, RF systems engineer at Sennheiser, said the wider transmission scheme is key to eliminating the fading that narrow-band systems cannot avoid.
He added: “With previous narrow-band techniques, you typically have dropouts due to reflections in the venues. With the new technique, the transmission scheme is so wide that even where you have signal fading in parts of the band, you have gains elsewhere – so in summing everything up, we always have reception.”
The Eurovision deployment also marked the live debut of Spectera’s handheld transmitter, a device not yet commercially available. The handhelds used in Vienna are described by Sennheiser as pre-production samples that have been fully certified.
Sebastian Georgi, product manager for Spectera at Sennheiser, added that certification of the new form factor proved straightforward.
He said: “The electronics inside the handheld are almost identical to the beltpack. So with the first iteration we anticipated some more issues, but it was absolutely flawless.”
A core feature of Spectera is that every device communicates bidirectionally with the base station in real time, giving engineers continuous visibility over battery states, IEM volume positions and whether a performer’s headphone cable has been disconnected. Watermann added that the latter has real consequences on a show of this scale.
He said: “Sometimes just the cable is plugged out and nobody knows. The artist says ‘louder, louder’ and nothing happens. Now we have plug detection, and you can immediately see the problem on screen.”
Because all Spectera devices share a synchronised clock, the platform also eliminates phase coherence problems that can arise when multiple digital microphones pick up the same source simultaneously. Watermann said this capability was largely a by-product of how the system is built.
He added: “We have to synchronise anyway, so we could also synchronise the word clock in each mobile device. For the sound engineer, putting multiple microphones together is now much easier.”
RF frequency management at an event the size of Eurovision normally demands dozens of broadcast trucks and visiting teams from across Europe. Spectera’s approach, the company says, simplifies the task considerably – engineers deal with just two or three wide carriers rather than dozens of narrow ones, making it easier to detect and resolve interference. Sennheiser opened Spectera’s control API to third-party developers three months ago, and says customers built their own AI-generated monitoring tools within 36 hours of access being granted.
Italian rental and production company Agorà handled technical production for host broadcaster ORF. Prior to the event, all Spectera devices were shipped to Sennheiser’s headquarters in Wedemark for endurance testing before being sent to Agorà in Italy for rack configuration and two days of dedicated Spectera training.
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