Your New Best Friend at Festivals

(11/06/2014) Imagine you are an audio engineer at a music festival and typically several acts turn up at the last minute. As you've been smart, you've taken care to set aside spare frequencies just in case, but it's just one of those days: the festival manager turns up with yet another unexpected special guest half an hour before the show starts and there are no frequencies left! Usually, this would mean running the entire frequency planning program again, but you've downloaded the new version of Sennheiser's Wireless Systems Manager so all your hard work is safe. Version 4.1 has a brilliant function that protects any selected frequency settings before the software calculates a new plan.

The Fix Frequency function saves you a lot of work, explains Tobias von Allw rden, product manager for professional wireless microphones. When you need to recalculate a frequency set-up, simply select the devices that need to keep their assigned frequencies and the software will not touch these when it calculates a new frequency plan.

Frequency juggling

As spectrum is always an issue nowadays, Wireless Systems Manager 4.1 also includes some new extras that give you even more reliability or help you to make the impossible possible in tight situations.

The software now indicates the spacing between a microphone frequency and its neighbouring frequencies to the left' and the right', whether this is another carrier or an intermodulation product. This provides a better idea about how reliable a frequency is. If not all of your microphone and monitoring channels can be accommodated within a given spectrum window, the software will go below the recommended spacing but indicate this by marking the frequency red. In this case you could consider making this frequency a spare one or assigning it to a less important wireless link or decide to move to another part of the spectrum altogether if possible.

Additionally, version 4.1 allows you to set your own individual noise threshold. If the power of an interfering source is below the selected threshold, the frequency it is on would still be good to use; if the interfering source is more powerful (i.e. above the threshold), its frequency will automatically be disregarded for the set-up. Tobias von Allw rden adds: For example, if you know that the radio microphones at your event will only be used at very short distances from the receivers, you could put the threshold higher, recalculate the frequency set-up and thus win more usable frequencies.

The Wireless Systems Manager 4.1 is available now for either PC or Mac as a free download at http://en-de.sennheiser.com/service-support-services-wireless-systems-manager

About Sennheiser

The Sennheiser Group, with its headquarters in Wedemark near Hanover, Germany, is one of the worlds leading manufacturers of microphones, headphones and wireless transmission systems. In 2012 the family company, which was founded in 1945, achieved a turnover of around 584 million euros. Sennheiser employs more than 2,300 people worldwide, and has manufacturing plants in Germany, Ireland and the USA. The company is represented worldwide by subsidiaries in France, Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, Germany, Denmark (Nordic), Russia, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, Japan, China, Canada, Mexico and the USA, as well as by long-term trading partners in many other countries. Also part of the Sennheiser Group are Georg Neumann GmbH, Berlin (studio microphones and monitor loudspeakers), and the joint venture Sennheiser Communications A/S (headsets for PCs, offices and call centres).

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