Sound designer Michael Strange used Lectrosonics LMa Digital Hybrid Wireless beltpack transmitters on The Cotton Patch Gospel, performed by Sacramento, CA’s Best of Broadway.
Sacramento, CA (February 10, 2014)—The non-profit organization, Best of Broadway, performed The Cotton Patch Gospel in 2013 as a charity event to support Sacramento Family Promise. Sound designer and audio engineer Michael Strange tackled audio for the show, deploying Lectrosonics LMa Digital Hybrid Wireless beltpack transmitters used in conjunction with a Lectrosonics Venue mainframe outfitted with four VRS receiver modules.
“We experienced some equipment loss just prior to opening,” Strange reports, “so at the eleventh hour, I acquired the Lectrosonics gear to augment some existing equipment. The range on the Lectrosonics gear is amazing. The lesser brand I was using would drop out as the actor left the stage. By comparison, in one instance with the Lectrosonics system, the lead in the show left the stage wearing an LMa transmitter, went outside and around the building in order to later appear behind the audience. I was monitoring the RF levels via the VRpanel software and I was astounded by its robust performance. The actor and transmitter were well outside the line of sight of the receiving antennas. I was monitoring this transmitter through a brick wall over a distance of hundreds of feet and yet the signal hardly even dipped!”
“The Lectrosonics RF performance was so solid, I didn’t have to be finicky at all with antenna placement,” Strange continued. “This saved me a lot of time to deal with the all the other challenges that one typically encounters during a show.”
The beltpack transmitters were also durable enough to survive the show, it turned out. “I’ve had many transmitters broken by exuberant actors and dancers over the years,” he said. “In this show, one of the actors was to sleep suddenly—falling to the ground. I’m quite certain that if he hadn’t been wearing the Lectrosonics transmitter, I would have been replacing that equipment on a regular basis. I used the Lectrosonics wireless systems with the company’s HM172 earset microphones and, together, the audio quality was exceptional.”
Lectrosonics
www.lectrosonics.com
