What's best for many-channel wireless?

[Stephanie]

Our vocal group has been looking to go wireless, with individual mics for each singer. The snag is there are 10 voices, which means we need something that supports 10 channels. Most mutlichannel systems I've seen top out at about 4.

Any input would be welcome!

[peteracox]

Hi, With 10 vocals you would think you are ltd to very expensive systems but thanks to the fact there is so much competition these days prices for Mic's to suite you now start at around
£135.00.

This Would get you the Behringer ULTRALINK UL2000M, witch is capable if set up correctly of letting you use up to 20 systems.

Then we move up a notch to the £350-£500 Range.
Here you are looking at the middle of the road sennheiser and shure systems.
Examples would be,

Sennheiser EW135/145/165 G2 £300-£400
Shure PGX24 £300-£400
Shure SLX24 £400-£500

Hope this gives you a rough picture.

[Stephanie]

It's been a while, but we've finally got our wireless system! It's the Hisonic HSU8400, which is four receivers in a single 1U rackmount case, with four headset/transmitter sets. You can stack these things up to (theoretically) 64 mics but a practical limit seems to be about 20. That's 20 individual voices! We're actually running with 12, into three receiver units. Check it out at www.hisonic.net/HSU8400L.htm .

Within the quad receiver box, each receiver (A through D) responds to a dedicated group of 16 channels (1-16). Each of the four transmitters is permanently keyed to A, B, C or D but can be set to transmit on any of its 16 channels. This give you enough flexibility to work around extraneous UHF noise in any setting. Everything is solidly built and well thought-out. For example, receivers have a large LED channel indicator as well as RF and audio idiot lights, as well as their own level knob. Transmitters have a little backlit LCD showing channel and battery level, as well as a tiny on/mute/off switch. There are individual XLR outputs for those fortunate enough to have 12 mic inputs on their mixer, but there are also mixed outputs which combine the four mics into two line-level outputs for the rest of us. Receivers and transmitters remember their channel settings between uses, which saves a great deal of setup time.

The sound seems pretty clean, although you get a nasty buzz when the transmitter batteries are low. The manual is awful but you only need to read it once.

The nice thing for us is the simplified microphone technique. Because we sing unaccompanied a lot of the time, we're used to balancing our voices acoustically. With the headsets we just sing as usual and don't have to worry about how far we are from the mics or anything. We can move so much more freely that we can start adding movement and choreography to our numbers without fear for the sound balance.

The other nice thing is the price: I found them on Craigslist for $325 per quad set, so for just under $1000 we're wireless.

Just think: with all the money we saved we can all take dance lessons!