Shure SLXD vs.......

[NickVon]

I want to start some Rumor Mills? Lol

Is there any other direct competitor to Shure's now "Digital" SLXD line in the 600-700$ per channel world?
Sennheiser still makes a great product in the EW100 G4 series.... but it's still an analogue transmitters/receivers, with all the problems their in of intermod/ and RF tuning around TV after the shuffling in recent years.

Anyone know if any other major wireless companies are looking to attempt to compete with Shure and the SLX line?
I never much cared for the older SLX revisions over the Sennheiser series, but I feel like if you are looking to buy wireless at this price point it's the only option. And even I at a long time EW100 series user is basically swayed to Shure and the SLXD's.

Thoughts/ opinions/ discussion.
Nick

P.S. I supposed if you have hundreds for 1/8" locking elements there maybe value in sticking with Senn..... but may be not....

 

[FMEng]

Shure was very smart when they saw the TV repacks coming, and made what was probably an expensive research and development effort on the digital systems. Now that the repacking is done, I don't foresee competitors making a similar effort because the sales volume won't be that good for a few years. In North America, there's lot of new wireless equipment in use now. For the rest of the world, they've got a glut of used equipment from North America.

I wouldn't put any of the 928, 2.4, 5.8 digital, wireless mics in the same category as ULX-D, QLX-D, SLX-D. The stuff in the wifi bands are more of a building block design that doesn't take much R&D, and they all have major limitations.

 

[MNicolai]

I wouldn't put any of the 928, 2.4, 5.8 digital, wireless mics in the same category as ULX-D, QLX-D, SLX-D. The stuff in the wifi bands are more of a building block design that doesn't take much R&D, and they all have major limitations.

Audio-Technica went this route. Someone tried to sub them for QLX-D on a project of mine and in about 5 minutes of Googling I had several anecdotes from people about how they worked fantastic right up until an audience showed up with all of their smart phones and the entire system collapsed and encountered frequent dropouts.

The better example I've seen of how to deploy wifi-band wireless mic's is in a classroom or corporate application where you might have 1-2 mic's per room and in any 100' radius wouldn't have more than 4-5 mic's with overlapping coverage.

 

[JohnD]

From reading elsewhere, the major issue is it doesn't have full WWB capability although there is a work around.

 

[NickVon]

To be clear, i'm not talking about the wifi band stuff thats out there. That is a snake oil product, and unlikely to ever be able to be used up to it's "12" channel max reliably.
I'm speaking of the the QLX-D / ULX-D, little new brother the SLXD. the SLX always in the past being the direct competition for the Senn. EW100 series. The SLXD appears to use at least the basic technology applied in hte QLXD/ULXD stuff minus some of the fancy features (Dante, high transmit power, Larger RF band with, etc.)

 

[themuzicman]

Is there any other direct competitor to Shure's now "Digital" SLXD line in the 600-700$ per channel world?
Sennheiser still makes a great product in the EW100 G4 series.... but it's still an analogue transmitters/receivers, with all the problems their in of intermod/ and RF tuning around TV after the shuffling in recent years.

The SLXD will still need you to factor tuning around TV stations - you're not getting rid of needing to do that at all. It's transmitting digital information over an analog wave that is still in white space. It'll sound better because it's digital information and from there you get the benefit that it'll take less bandwidth but you'll still have concerns with intermod and proper tuning.

As for @FMEng's comments on Shure being smart -- yeah they were crazy smart. Sennheiser has been behind the ball with every wireless product in their portfolio recently. 5 years ago large-scale musical theater and touring theater were generally 100% Sennheiser. They've been so behind that it's splintered pretty significantly - now I'd say it's a 60% chance you're going to be using a Shure rig and 20% Sennheiser / 20% Lectrosonics.

 

[Rod Reilly]

The advent of the SLXD makes an otherwise difficult decision 10 years back when deciding between being a Sennheiser House (most of my brand specific requests lent this way) or a Shure House seem lioke one of the smartest business moves I made. At the time I got rid of my mish-mash of AT, Sennheiser, Samson units and went Shure SLX and ULX. A couple of uesrs back I added QLXD and ULXD for my clients with deeper pockets and better quality needs. Now I am in the process of swapping out my remaining ULX systems (about 60 units) with SLXD and will start to reduce my SLX collection (some 150 systems) as well.

The biggest advantage of the SLXD over similar systems is the ability to scan a full rack for available frequencies (if you connect them via a network hub). Even without this the one at a time scanning is way more reliable than anything up to the release of the ULXD/QLXD range. It means that my clients can easily find non-interfering clean frequencies in minutes, should my preset channels for their location prove to encounter local issues.

Go Shure!

 

[NickVon]

This is how I'm feeling of late. I'm very small, I own about 18 sennheiser EW100 systems from G2-G3. The TV space in the North Jersey/Metro NYC area has made it very difficult to utilize them all anymore. Most are in the A band, with some of the my newer systems in A1, G bands, but it's still tight The SLXD with there digital transmission and tighter packing as a result seems like the only reasonable direction to go rather then more Senn. units not in the A band.

It's weird but it seems like Sennheiser is just not looking to compete with sure anymore. A little reminiscent of when the X32/M32 came out and it took other manufactures 3-5 years to begin competing at it's feature level/price point.

 

[urban79]

I'm wondering what people now think of the new Sennheiser Evolution Digital...

 

[FMEng]

The EW-D stuff looks like it could be competitive with SLX-D. I'm surprised they don't have a band for the uppermost TV channels in the US. It seems shortsighted to do that in today's crowded spectrum. The specs are a bit thin on details, including latency.

 

[TimMc]

I'm wondering what people now think of the new Sennheiser Evolution Digital...

Nobody in the USA is using them yet.