Wireless Shure Microflex Opinions

[Malabaristo]

I'm curious whether anyone here has experience using Shure's Microflex system for body mics on actors in plays/musicals. It seems like it may be tuned more specifically to speech, so maybe the latter would suffer a little?

The reason I'm asking is that I have an opportunity to repurpose a system of 12 channels that was previously used for a meeting room setup. It currently has all MXW8 tabletop transmitters, but the bodypacks are readily available used. Getting 12 channels of (hopefully decent quality?) wireless for $1-2k in parts is pretty appealing, but I don't want to make that investment if the results are going to be disappointing. For reference, though, this would either be replacing/supplementing a set of twelve SLX in one school or eight BLX in another, so the bar isn't exactly high...

 

[TimMc]

I almost confused Twinplex with Microplex.... plenty of experience with the former, little with the latter except in the installed conference market. I will, as they say, "watch this space."

 

[FMEng]

I'm not familiar with Microflex, so I'm commenting after a look at the Shure website. What receivers does the system come with? I'm only seeing wall mount "access points" (receivers) with Dante I/O, so you'll need a Dante network and compatible console to make the audio connections. Conference rooms are generally smaller spaces, so the system has less range than SLX-D or QLX-D, so that means the access points need to go near the stage. Because the access point has no display or controls, you'll need a computer for that and to run Dante Controller. If you don't already have Dante, the cost of a Cisco switch, possibly a console card and computer might make the cost less than desirable. Don't skimp on the network switch. All in all, It looks possible to use it for theater but with some compromises and hidden costs. Download the manuals and digest them thoroughly before moving forward.

 

[StradivariusBone]

I have a lot of experience with the microflex conference system and using it like that is an interesting proposition. It all routes through an POE access point that is controlled via a web interface and has an 8x8 (or maybe 10x10) dante interface, but also has 1x1 analog I/O and of course the input from the mic stations and the voice lift output supplied back to the same stations.

The thing is not great as a mixer. It does really well at voice lift and handling channels as the speakers mute and unmute themselves, but it also sums all audio into whichever buses you route it to so there's not really any way to apply any granular EQ to a single channel.

I've never used or seen a belt pack module that works with the system, but I think that in and of itself could be really interesting. It is remarkable at conference audio, handling zoom and in person meetings, also used it in panel discussion scenarios, but I don't think it'd be well suited to theatre.

 

[Malabaristo]

I was able to borrow some of the pieces to do a little testing, so I may be able to answer my own question: the sound quality probably isn't going to be acceptable for music. It seems there's a certain amount of processing going on between the mic and the access point that can't be disabled. I'm sure that's tuned reasonably well for speech intelligibility in a conference room setting, but it's not particularly appealing even for speech in my opinion--not when you care about more than just being understood. My hope was that I could bypass all the conference-y features and just have clean, 1:1 Dante or analog output to a real mixer, but I didn't get the results I was hoping for.

We do have both the access points and the Dante to analog interfaces, so we could use them in a non-Dante environment. Both of the spaces where I would have liked to use them are going Dante anyway, so the analog step wouldn't be required. I'm still somewhat tempted to get an MXW1 body transmitter to see if it behaves any differently from the MXW8 desk transmitters we have... but that's mostly because I'm bad at letting formerly expensive things sit unused.

Oh, and for comparison I did try sending Dante audio directly to the Microflex interface and the resulting analog output sounded very clean. Whatever processing remains happens either in the transmitter, in the access point, or some combination of those two.

So... overall it was a pretty disappointing test, but unless there's some hidden configuration step I missed, they're not going to do what I wanted.