Sennheiser’s Spectera, a bidirectional wideband solution, recently powered the shows of Infernal, a Danish electronic dance music group, at Copenhagen’s number one nightclub venue VEGA.
The pair’s monitor engineer Christian Almer works for Sennheiser as a technical application engineer and he brought along a Spectera system to try out for their wireless monitoring. The Spectera technology is currently only available to selected customers under Sennheiser’s ‘Pioneer Programme’, which launched in December.
Almer employed Spectera as an in-ear monitoring system and, in addition to the shows at VEGA, he also tested it at eight private events. For all concerts, he connected one or two antennas to the base station, with the antennas placed near the stage in order to compare all range tests directly against Infernal’s current set-up.
Almer said: “As part of the Pioneer Programme, I wanted to test everything. During my frequency coordination I often deliberately found two TV channels with very strong signals and placed my wideband channel right between them.”
Infernal used four channels of Sennheiser Digital 6000 for vocals, two main and two backup. They also used six channels of Sennheiser’s EW-DX for acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bagpipes, a hockey helmet with a built-in mic for a vocoder, a marching drum, and a harmonica.
Eight channels of Sennheiser ew G4 IEMs were used for the band, monitor cue, and communication with the tour manager. The crew used a separate system with four channels of ew 300 G3 microphones with PTT switch for intercom, as well as an ew 300 G3 IEM transmitter with multiple in-ear packs for the music mix and crew communication.
Due to the visual concept Infernal wanted to achieve at the VEGA, all equipment was hidden behind the large LED screen that served as the show’s backdrop.
Almer concluded: “Setting up multi-zone coverage with traditional in-ear systems is usually complex and expensive and is not at all comparable to a multi-zone antenna solution for wireless microphones as, with the sum of a multichannel in-ear system, power levels must be considered throughout all the components. But with Spectera it has become as easy as plugging in an Ethernet cable. In fact, this is such a big shift and so easy that I fear that those who make a living from complex antenna solutions and RF distribution networks might speak negatively about the system, because Spectera has the potential to disrupt their entire business model.”
