Boston, MA (August 19, 2026)—Commencement ceremonies can be a pressure cooker—after years of work aiming towards the big day, everything has to come off flawlessly or risk forever coloring people’s memories of the event. For the University of Massachusetts Boston campus commencement ceremonies, that meant Capron Lighting & Sound replaced lengthy cable runs with a reliable wireless solution for part of the P.A. system.
The biggest challenge was to provide audio transmission between front-of-house operations to where graduates were lining up, more than 700 feet away. While the university’s recently installed fiber infrastructure transported audio to a campus technology room the bulk of the distance, there was one small hitch—specifically a 150-foot span across a large glass atrium inside the Campus Center and a connected outdoor pedestrian parkway.
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In previous years, production crews were forced to route cables across audience seating areas, active roadways, multiple pedestrian walkways and through the Campus Center building. These installations often required overhead cable runs using platform lifts or extensive cable protection systems such as cable troughs.
Adding to the challenge, university security protocols required that all campus doors, including staff-only and non-public entrances, remain closed and secured throughout event preparation, eliminating the ability to route cables through the building and significantly reducing available installation and testing time.
Capron’s solution was to use RF Venue‘s RF PA Extension Kit to transmit audio wirelessly across the Campus Center atrium and outdoor pedestrian areas without interfering with pedestrian traffic, building access or university operations. The Kit pairs a two-channel 1RU transmitter with two single-channel IP54-rated diversity receivers featuring built-in compensation delay, allowing production teams to deliver audio to remote loudspeaker systems. The receivers were positioned at the student lineup location, feeding a distributed P.A. system covering approximately 2,000 feet of student processional route.
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David Messcher, senior project manager/LED Video Screens at Capron Lighting & Sound, reported, “Instead of spending valuable time installing hundreds of feet of cable across heavily trafficked areas, we had the system operational within minutes. It allowed us to broadcast cleanly across the atrium and outdoor parkway without blocking doors or disrupting pedestrian traffic, making installation, testing and event operation incredibly straightforward. Audio quality was excellent, delay configuration was simple, and deployment was significantly easier than previous methods we’ve used.”
