Road to Drive: The Bleeding Edge

It’s only Monday, and this week is already looking and feeling so much better than last. The highlight of the day was a visit from our friend Casey Lloyd from Sennheiser. Sennheiser has already been loaning us some 421’s to try out on toms, but today Casey came with RF goodness in the form of Sennheiser’s latest RF receiver, the 3752. This thing is brand spanking new and just debuted at NAB last week. We are going on the bleeding edge of RF technology for Drive this year.

While this is Sennheiser’s top of the line wireless units, there is also a pretty cool new feature on it that I didn’t really get until I saw it in action. It’s called the Command Channel. Each channel on the dual-channel receiver has two separate outputs: the main output and the command channel output. There is a small button on the top of the handheld mic transmitter’s battery pack that flips a relay in the receiver while depressed. This switches the output on the receiver to the COMmand channel. We will be patching the Command Channel into our last remaining open channel for the conference and routing it exclusively to the band’s IEMs giving our worship leader an easy way to talk exclusively to the band. I hear there are some other creative ways to route the command channel to get into intercom systems, but we’ll have to wait to try that another day.

We’ll have the unit plugged in and fired up a little later this week, and I’m very curious to compare it sonically to our existing 3000 series receiver.

This afternoon I was also able to start checking the system tuning. I’m doing this quarterly now, and we were due. As always, the goal is to ensure as consistent an experience as possible throughout the room. I was actually pretty surprised at how well the main clusters held up through the first quarter of the year. There were a couple of little tweaks here and there, but by and large things were in good shape. Towards the end of the day I was able to start in on adding in the sidefills, and I should have those finished tomorrow morning along with the rest of the main floor. I also wiped the balcony delay settings today since we replaced the diaphragms late last week; I roughed them in by ear on Sunday morning, but I wasn’t quite satisfied for long term use so I’ll probably spend a bit more time on those tomorrow since the main floor is looking good and moving relatively fast.

I’ll probably be back later this week as we move closer to Drive.