New York, NY (January 30, 2026)—Based in New York City, Masque Sound has been providing installs and sound reinforcement for Broadway since 1936. Working with sound designer Daniel Kluger and associate sound designers Charles Coes and Kaileykielle Hoga, Masque recently took on the task of implementing a sound system for the Broadway production of Marjorie Prime at Second Stage Theater.
So what’s the big deal? Masque is the first company to supply Sennheiser’s Spectera wideband wireless system for a Broadway production—and this is a big deal.
If you’re not familiar, Spectera is part of a new generation of WMAS (Wireless Multichannel Audio System) technology intended for pro applications. It enables a large number of wireless devices (e.g., microphones and IEMs) to operate within a small range of available RF spectrum.
Engineers working in live entertainment are all too familiar with the shrinking availability of bandwidth for the use of wireless devices, which began back in 2010 when the FCC started pushing us out of certain RF bands in favor of auctioning the bandwidth to broadband mobile providers. Initially, we lost the 700 MHz band (698 to 806 MHz), then most of the 600 MHz band. This reduction in bandwidth has presented serious challenges for large-scale productions that require high channel counts of wireless devices.
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WMAS mitigates the issue of bandwidth restrictions. It’s a bi-directional wireless technology capable of combining wireless microphones, IEMs and instruments into a single broadband RF channel, and it was approved for use in the U.S. by the FCC about two years ago.
A WMAS system requires availability of a vacant TV channel, which is a chunk of bandwidth 6 MHz wide in the U.S. and 8 MHz wide in Europe (for a UHF channel). That’s a lot of RF real estate, but fortunately most locales have at least one unused TV channel laying around. In return, WMAS offers up to 64 audio channels and, at the same time, a drastic reduction in the amount of RF “pollution” otherwise created by multiple, separate traditional wireless systems.
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The transmission power of a WMAS system is 50mW regardless of how many audio channels are being transmitted. Traditional wireless systems require a bandwidth of 200 kHz and allow a maximum power output of 50 mW per channel (typically variable from 10 mW to 50 mW).
This reduction in transmission power, combined with use of a vacant TV channel, decreases the possibility that WMAS would interfere with transmissions from nearby broadcasters or other wireless users—obviously a major concern on Broadway, where neighboring theaters might be running dozens of channels of RF devices in close proximity.
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Operationally, WMAS systems such as Spectera and Shure’s Axient Digital PSM IEM system reduce the amount of gear required. The Spectera base station, for example, supports bidirectional transmission of up to 64 channels (32×32), while Shure’s Axient Digital PSM supports up to 28 channels in a 6 MHz band (U.S.), and up to 40 channels in an 8 MHz band (Europe). And, the Spectera SEK beltpack is capable of running an IEM/IFB and a mic/line stream simultaneously.
This is indeed promising technology.
