Amongst the company's corporate clients, regular use of wireless microphones is rapidly becoming widespread, and with channel counts that would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago. By way of recent example, Peter Russell has recently returned from Barcelona, where Blitz|GES supplied the audio infrastructure during a large corporate event for a major computing software company.
"We were asked to supply microphone systems for over 25 separate seminar rooms for workshops in small groups at the event - breakout rooms, as they're known. A total of 144 channels of wireless were required in the end, for which we used a mixture of Shure ULX-D, QLX-D and UHF-R wireless systems exclusively. We're increasingly being asked to provide channel counts of this size; for example, we're the in-house AV supplier for ExCel in Docklands, who are quite often delivering events that require over a hundred channels.
"We need technology that allows us to cope with those client demands, often without pre-production or the opportunity to visit a venue or assess its suitability for heavy-duty use of wireless technology, or to perform frequency scans in the area beforehand. So our wireless hardware has to allow us to reliably operate the maximum number of channels, no matter how RF-heavy the surroundings might be or how helpful the local RF regulatory framework is.
"In Barcelona, for example, there isn't really anyone you can call, like Ofcom in the UK, if someone is interfering with the frequency that you're licensed to work on. You just have to find an alternative frequency somewhere in the band you're using and work with that. That's why Shure's ULX-D is so helpful, because you can move into High Density mode, and squeeze more channels into the gaps you can find. In these kind of environments, having the Shure kit, which offers high channel density and just works with minimal interference, gives us the confidence to proceed."
(Jim Evans)
