NYTimes.com: An hour before curtain at “Mamma Mia!” at the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway, Craig Cassidy, the head sound man, starts his nightly ritual of testing the wireless microphones that the performers wear hidden in their white spandex bell bottoms.
The run-throughs by Mr. Cassidy ensure that the microphones are transmitting on their assigned frequencies, a narrow sliver of the nation’s airwaves. The same process takes place every night at nearly four dozen other Broadway theaters, where an inadvertent twist of a dial can put a cordless microphone on the wrong frequency — wreaking havoc if it should send the harmonies of Abba in “Mamma Mia!” into the speakers of a performance of “Wicked” across the street.
“It’s quite a juggling act we have to perform in this area to coordinate the use of all of those microphones,” Mr. Cassidy said.
3 comments:
I think on the earlier article about this desire to sell into the wireless mic spectrums, we discussed how this will affect the Broadway community, who have to work together and make sure none of their vocals overlap each other. That's a serious issue, but also consider that an issue like this may also well affect smaller venues like churches, community theatres, and regionals with wireless microphones. Since the wireless mics are tuned to only a certain spectrum, if that entire spectrum goes away, then these venues who probably pulled together their resources just to buy one or a few wireless mics will have to trash them and buy new ones - something many companies won't be able to afford. Also, consider the many high schools who rent the mics from an outside supplier for their musicals (like my high school) - those suppliers may not have enough mics available, or may have to change them out and charge their customers more to cover the cost of changing their stock.
So how to get the wireless capabilities we need when we have a smaller RF spectrum to work with? WiFi and Bluetooth seem like two likely candidates for new transmission methods. Both present challenges - neither has a really strong industrial model on the market yet, and when they do, they'll likely present the same cost issues as above. Also, they are more likely than RF to be infringed upon by cell phones and earpieces - cause no one wants to hear your phone call coming through the speakers. But these two transmission methods present very real possibilities for the future of wireless mics, and will be interesting to watch the market to see what comes down the pike as a result of the FCC.
Where to start with this. Since 1934, the FCC has been commissioned to regulate the publicly owned frequencies over which wave data is transmitted. They don't "own" anything. The fact that they "sell" spectrum to commercial interests is only a tool of that regulation. Since we distill nearly all our public activity in this country into either money or prison time, the FCC works with what it knows. The FCC has a three-pronged mission: to "make available (not provide!) adequate radio communication services at reasonable charges," secondly to aid in National defense, and thirdly to promote safety of life and property (presumably through the reservation of some bandwidth for services like the "public safety communications network" they propose to build(?) with proceeds from this auction). From this mission the FCC has managed to dip it's fingers into all sorts of other areas of control concerning how we communicate, including who gets to speak, what they get to say, and who gets to listen to us. A serious inquiry and re-evaluation of what authority the FCC should really be empowered to wield has been a long time coming, and it would be hilarious to me if the interest group that finally beats back this bureaucratic Hercules turns out to be the twin-headed Hydra of Broadway and the NFL. Whatever it takes. We give away so many rights these days for a vague, government-defined sense of "public safety," let us not, at least, give up the right to hear "Memories" as clearly as we deserve.
P.S. I encourage you all to listen to 99.1, Bloomfield Pirate Radio, Thursdays to Sundays (various hours) and do your small part to take back your right to listen to whatever the fuck you want.
Though the article relies on ‘Mamma Mia’, it’s important to recognize that every Broadway show as well as all live performance would be affected strongly by this, including just the public when it comes to the effects selling airwaves would have on mobile phones as well. The F.C.C. has spent a long time deciding if they ought to sell off spectrum and degrade the experience for Broadway viewers. There are so many aspects of a show that are affected by loss of sound and the ability to communicate with anyone in the theater. I think it would be heinous for the F.C.C. to put this into action or even begin to develop it any further. In the business of Broadway alone it could be catastrophic to not only the actors on stage but also the audience. There are other options if it goes through, but more expensive and with more room for contingencies.
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