AV Magazine: The RF PA Extension Kit system provided by TMP Pro proved quick to deploy and highly adaptable to the event’s dynamic requirements. “It was very straightforward,” said Connell. “If you’ve installed a wireless microphone receiver, you can install the PA Extension Kit.”
The team used the RF PA Extension Kit to wirelessly feed powered satellite speakers from front-of-house and remote I/O locations. In the field, the set-up delivered long-range, stable signals, with audio quality indistinguishable from a wired connection.
2 comments:
This was a fascinating article to read about. I know the use of wireless mics and how they work somewhat. But I had never thought of using wireless speakers and on such a large scale before. I think that is mainly because of the problems that RF can bring along with it. It’s unpredictable, hard to control, and hard to set up and work with if you don’t know all of the system and how it is working together. Additionally, there are many more RF signals in the air than just your audio. This can cause a lot of problems for the signal and the consistency of sound. I am super interested by the extension system that they used to deliver consistent sound across the entire event. I would love to learn more about how it deals with all of the RF issues that pop up and how it can be configured to work with different scenarios. I don’t think this would be useful in theatre settings, however large events such as this have a perfect application for the system.
I’ve just been learning about RF and wireless connection in my Electrical Engineering class! Frequency, a word we closely associate to sound in theatre, is applied to any AC source in engineering. This current can be easily transmitted over a conductor like a wire, but when we need to transmit over the air, there become issues. Low frequencies don’t have a lot of energy, and over short distances, dissipate quickly. (When i say a “low frequencies” this is relative! Humans hear from 20Hz to 20kHz, and speak at the low end of that spectrum, at 85-300Hz. Up to 3kHz is “low” in this discussion.) So, to transmit long distances over air, the low frequency audio signal is multiplied by a carrier frequency (this is a much higher frequency above 3kHz) which gives the audio waveform much more energy. When the signal is received, it must be demodulated.
Like Octavio said, RF is unpredictable and hard to control. Because there is no insulation from other sounds (like there would be a jacket on a wire), interference is a big issue. I’m impressed they were able to do it on such a big system (speakers often have issues just because of how much power they require.)
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