I can only speak to my experience and knowledge
base which is with
Sennheiser. We're a similar sized
house (592) but have pretty good
acoustics. Especially if you're working with
amateur and school performers (middle or high school), a big benefit is the metal housing on both handhelds and bodypacks.
Shure and other brands utilize plastic which, while light-weight, seems more prone to normal wear and tear often found in these settings.
Pricing, you'll find systems with similar features have close price points between
Sennheiser and
Shure. The G3 100 series runs approximately $600 whereas the 300 series is around $850 (receiver, transmitter, cheap lav). Repair wise, we've only had to
send in one receiver to be fixed in the 10 years I've been working at our
PAC. It was one of the G2s that were purchased 7-8 years ago. It was fixed by Sennnheiser for $60 or so, not bad.
Personally, we have 17
Sennheiser systems..11 G3 (10 - 100 Series, 1 - 300 Series), 5 G2, and 1 of the first generation that is still working fine. The only thing I wish I would have done was get all 300 series with the new G3 units we just got. The big plus is the networking feature. Especially if you have a large
system like we do, anytime you need to re-program, it makes it more cumbersome with the 100s that you have to do manually.
As far as lavs, we got away from those a long time ago..just too many problems (both inherent and part of the setting). We have Countryman E6s and, while they are about $330 a piece, the quality is second-to-none. The only issue we've had is the
strain relief where it connects to the
bodypack is extremely susceptible to breakage. As a result, we end up buying the 2mm Duramax replacement cables and replacing the native 1 mm cables as needed.
