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[Johannes Halvorsen]

I am on a long term scouting mission for a 10+ simultanous channels wireless system for mixed song/theater/spoken word use.

These mics will see regular use by techs who doesn't necessarily understand how to combat rf problems, so ease of use and reliable operation over time is important. This has drawn my attention to digital systems.

In some other threads here the Line6 offerings gets praise for sound quality and ease of operation, but a solid thumbs down when it comes to durability over time.

How is the story whith Sennheiser's D1 system? Does it keep it together over time? How many channels is it realistic to get in a real world scenario? How do you go about running e.g. 12 recievers together; do you need a combiner? Which one is preferable?

And not the least: What other digital systems in roughly the same ballpark costwise should I take a closer look at? Or is digital rf mics (in the 2.4Ghz band at least) a Realy Bad Idea alltogether?

Disclaimer: This is not a "I'm seeking help with install in location A with budget B and needs C and D"-type question. I'm not buying anything tomorrow; I ask to gain knowledge.

[Mike Caldwell]

I would stay away from anything in the 2.4ghz operating frequency range, it's crowded there and I'm sure it will get worse in the future.

I have no idea how it was set up or the operating frequency group but I had a band carrying a four channel QLXD system, nicely package with an antenna distro and the rack was set up to have direct line of site to all mics.

All night long I was getting random digital artifact sounding hits on the mics. The range seemed limited, the singer went into the audience maybe 60 feet from the receivers and started getting digital drop out sounding like a stuck CD.

Other than maybe 800 cell phones and my 5ghz router for the mixer there was no other wireless in operation on the stage, not sure what the local RF spectrum is like but I don't have problems finding open channels when I take a wireless system there either in 500mhz or 600mhz (for what time is left for that here in mid West Ohio)

That's my limited digital wireless mic feedback.

[Keith Broughton]

I would stay away from anything in the 2.4ghz operating frequency range, it's crowded there and I'm sure it will get worse in the future.

I have no idea how it was set up or the operating frequency group but I had a band carrying a four channel QLXD system, nicely package with an antenna distro and the rack was set up to have direct line of site to all mics.

All night long I was getting random digital artifact sounding hits on the mics. The range seemed limited, the singer went into the audience maybe 60 feet from the receivers and started getting digital drop out sounding like a stuck CD.

Other than maybe 800 cell phones and my 5ghz router for the mixer there was no other wireless in operation on the stage, not sure what the local RF spectrum is like but I don't have problems finding open channels when I take a wireless system there either in 500mhz or 600mhz (for what time is left for that here in mid West Ohio)

That's my limited digital wireless mic feedback.

Having used QLXD and ULXD systems, I would say there was something wrong with the setup of that system.
The QLXD I have used has been rock solid, when set up correctly.

[Erik Jerde]

Having used QLXD and ULXD systems, I would say there was something wrong with the setup of that system.
The QLXD I have used has been rock solid, when set up correctly.

Yep, my first thought was if a proper coordination was done on-site.  You can spend all the money in the world on good gear but if you don’t use it properly you’ll still get garbage results.

[Caleb Dueck]

Yep, my first thought was if a proper coordination was done on-site.  You can spend all the money in the world on good gear but if you don’t use it properly you’ll still get garbage results.

QLX-D is the lowest cost digital that works reliably, when properly coordinated.  Getting 12+ channels of any brand 2.4GHz to work by non-techs reliably is not reality.  There may be exceptions but it's not the rule. 



Sent from my VS980 4G using Tapatalk

[Tim McCulloch]

Run, do not walk, away from 2.4gHz systems.  My experience with the Senny is particularly negative.

[Jordan Wolf]

Run, do not walk, away from 2.4gHz systems.  My experience with the Senny is particularly negative.

I totally agree...we have a couple at my church and I am less-than-impressed with basically everything about them.

I’m hoping to phase them out soon and get some QLXDs (ULXDs are beyond budget, I fear).

[Russell Ault]

Run, do not walk, away from 2.4gHz systems.

This is especially true for multi-channel systems. If you're luck you can get a single channel of, say, Line 6 to work somewhat reliably over a short distance; setting up 12 units is a great way to build a system that will work reasonably well right up until the audience shows up...

I’m hoping to phase them out soon and get some QLXDs (ULXDs are beyond budget, I fear).

For a small-channel-count install I'm not sure the ULXD would buy you anything more than rack space and a small saving on antenna distro (unless you're already running Dante). QLXD and ULXD are mutually compatible (in non-high-density mode) and should have pretty similar performance because of it. They certainly both have the weird heuristic-based diversity circuit that discourages coverage-based (vs. diversity-based) antenna placement.

-Russ

[Johannes Halvorsen]

Hm. Pretty conclusive so far... I honestly thougt Sennheiser et. al. should have gotten their act together by now.

The IT guy in me has a really hard time understanding why wireless mics in the wifi spectrum isn't a no-brainer. With modern sound codecs it should be a walk in the park to build a relatively low cost 20-channels-pluss-over-tcp/ip system. Make the reciever a solid router/ap with integrated audio circuitery. Make the bodypacks as wifi clients. Should coexist nicely with other wifi - at leats given a free channel interval, and the bandwith should be more than enough. What is keeping this from happening? Latency? I'm genuinly puzzled.

[Kevin McDonough]

Hm. Pretty conclusive so far... I honestly thougt Sennheiser et. al. should have gotten their act together by now.

The IT guy in me has a really hard time understanding why wireless mics in the wifi spectrum isn't a no-brainer. With modern sound codecs it should be a walk in the park to build a relatively low cost 20-channels-pluss-over-tcp/ip system. Make the reciever a solid router/ap with integrated audio circuitery. Make the bodypacks as wifi clients. Should coexist nicely with other wifi - at leats given a free channel interval, and the bandwith should be more than enough. What is keeping this from happening? Latency? I'm genuinly puzzled.

Yeah agree with everything above. Everything tends to work great and sound fine at soundcheck, and as soon as the audience turns up with a couple of hundred mobile phones filling up the 2.4ghz it all begins to fall apart. Small acoustic gigs, churches, etc where the audience is smaller an less "dense" then you can get away with it, but with your typical gig/show for the kinds of small bands these are aimed at, a few hundred people crammed together and close to the stage, then even a small problem leads to digital pops and clicks and drop outs, and is pretty obvious on the mic.

Could the problem be something to do with the fact that the data delivery of audio is such a time dependent operation?  When you're delivering a web page or normal computer based data, if the packets arrive out of order or some arrive missing it's fairly trivial and they can be resent etc. If it takes half a second longer for the web page to load or data to be sent no one outside of massive IT operations would notice.

But rather than being a bandwidth problem as such, with the audio having to be delivered, converted, and replayed in a fairly specific and time critical way, I'd think there would be much less tolerance to dropped packets or interference? You want to keep the latency down as low as possible, so if a packet doesn't arrive or the data is corrupted with interference there is much less time for the devices to talk to each other and resent it, if re-sending is even possible, before he resulting audio has to be spat back out the Rx again (or if the buffer is so small/quick that it doesn't really even keep the packets in memory long enough to do this?)

K

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