Sennheiser D1-ME2

BCAP

Well-Known Member
Anyone out there using these 2.4GHz wireless microphones for theater? If so, what has your experience been with them?
 
I have avoided the 2.4GHz range as a lot of wireless network equipment works in that area. Now, that is not to say that filtering is tight enough for the system to work great. It is more of a "wait and see before spending $$$."
 
I don't have any personal experience, but some of the reviews on Amazon make it sound very hit or miss. It works fine for some, and others have nothing but problems. It's going to come down to what the RF situation is in your space.
 
I have posted elsewhere this bit of advice after using 8 of the hand helds for audience Q&A at a corporate event:

Run! Do not walk. RUN away from 2.4gHz. It will probably work at sound check, it will work until you get an audience and then it will leave nightsoil in the bed. I can write out the long story but I think the "Reader's Digest" version should suffice... corporate gig, paddle antennas, direct line of sight to every transmitter. At setup we couldn't get 8 transmitters to work but 6 would. Okay, client has extensive 2.4gHz WiFi mesh network in the venue for their guests so 6 will have to do. Come event time, 900 aviation engineers, aircraft owners & pilots and maintenance people enter the room with their smarty-pants phones and we're down to 3 working mics. I'm glad I was only the venue A1 and not the A/V contractor who brought in this... uh... excrement.
 
After using them for a cheap production, DO NOT USE THEM!! They are completly junk

Theyll work with no one in the audience, but as soon as people flood in connecting to the school Wi-Fi it drops out or sound like junk!
 
Sounds like my concerns play out like I thought they would. So, here's the thing, as you go down in frequency, antennas get long and the amount of data you can push decreases. Analog in the low 500mhz is where I am. Wireless data equipment (smart phones. etc.) wants to be real small, and that means small antennas. On body packs, the longer antennas don't present much of a problem. On handhelds, a performer is going to expect something the length of a microphone, so integrating the antenna is not a big problem, although many including Sennheiser coil them anyways. Hard to tell where things are going so I don't want to spend a fortune on the wrong thing.
 
Thank you for the replies.

I don't own any 2.4GHz wireless microphone equipment (including the Sennheiser D1) and I don't plan on owning any, nor would I recommend it to anyone else.

That said, I've found myself in the fortunate position of working in a relatively new venue that happened to purchase a dozen Sennheiser D1 units operating in the 2.4GHz band. Sennheiser did a good job on this equipment from most perspectives, they are well constructed and easy to use.

Unfortunately, I wasn't present to witness the prior problems but since starting work in the venue I've encountered a few issues myself - a dropout or two, excessive battery power drain on the transmitters compared to similar UHF packs, and instance of the audio from one transmitter transitioning to a low-res, garbled, phase-y type sound (the audio is digitally encoded before transmission, and to me that sounds like a case where there wasn't enough bandwidth to transmit a full resolution signal).
 
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Sennheiser equipment is really great stuff and I like it a lot. It is the band that D1 operates in that is the problem. In the case of the garbled sound, that's pretty much the audio equivalent of a picture pixelizing when the video signal is too slow, and both are an artifact of the receiving end not being able to read enough of the data. In the case of the D1, I would suspect that something else is spitting out data and the result is the signal is being degraded.
 
Having used a Sennheiser D1 lav weekly for about 6 months, I can say that the audio quality of it is phenomenal. Although the space it is currently in has 3 WAPs and there might be a word here or there that has a crunchy syllable, it's been solid.
In our future setup, I plan on running 6 units with distribution and RFVenue antennas, but will have control of the WiFi, which will only run 5 Ghz in the performance venue, so there won't be any interference.

Does anyone know about interference possibilities in the 2.4 range from devices like iPhones, even if the WAPs have 2.4 completely turned off?
 
About the antenna distribution - I thought DISTRO4's operable frequency range is from 470 to 952 MHz so it wouldn't be usable with 2.4 GHz, correct? That was one of the things I was hoping for was for an antenna distribution unit for the D1. I haven't found one yet, but maybe someone else has.

Even video cameras today have wifi transfer features and who knows, maybe that camera is constantly pinging around for a wifi server to connect to while it's filming. Who knows what other devices will walk in with audience members. It seems really challenging to eliminate all 2.4 GHz interference in this scenario.
 
I don't think you are going to find antenna distribution for 2.4 GHz. These systems communicate in both directions. In other words, the "receiver" also transmits data to the mic "transmitter" for the purposes of frequency hopping. As a transmitter, FCC Part 15 rules say the manufacturer has to make them incompatible with aftermarket antennas. You'll find that the antenna connector used by Sennheiser is altered so that a common SMA connector won't fit. The bi-directional nature of the system also makes antenna splitting impossible.
 

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