I honestly haven't seen anyone using
Sennheiser 9000 series since they sent demo units around to the major rental shops a few years ago.
At the top end, most of the major players these days are entirely
Shure Axient AD4Q and maybe they'll
throw a receiver or two of
Sennheiser 6000 Series into their kits just to appease whatever random
rider asks for it when a major artist just has to use their own handheld they've had custom finished. Once you spec Axient vs 9000 series the price is roughly in the same ballpark.
You get a few nifty features using Axient instead of ULX-D here is the generic run-down:
- ShowLink - It's like magic when it works
- Expanded spectrum efficiency when you're running in high-bandwidth mode
- Tiny packs!
Sennheiser has fallen way behind the curve when it comes to the cutting
edge of what a
system can do. They have pretty much lost this round to
Shure.
Take a look at Lectrosonics or Zaxcom if you really want to blow the budget. They're more typical in Film/TV, but they average $6k /
channel
There's also a justified reason for their price-points! First, tiny tiny. Second, almost all of those receivers are first a high quality single-channel diversity receiver and secondarily a mono-receive dual-channel receiver. Third, they blast a huge amount of RF that
Sennheiser and
Shure just don't do - think 100 - 150mW and can just blast away a high noise floor. I think there are times this is useful (Reality TV, where you're in a
chase car trying to capture audio of the talent in front of you or a few blocks away) but I also think more often than not the mopic folks really abuse this because they just don't understand RF very well. I routinely run large RF rigs on
arena gigs at 1mW transmit, it just takes some planning and diligence to avoid the noise (and usually, Axient...)
If you REALLY want to blow budgets up, go look at Wisycom - their stuff splits the
line between Film and Live and is on the bleeding
edge of what a wireless
system can do. There's really no good analogy -
Shure's stuff is also powerful, but their interfaces are clean and polished. Wisycom's stuff isn't as nice to interface with, but the flexibility is even more insane - and it extends beyond their Receivers, their antenna distribution and filtering products are pretty wild.