I’ve seen a lot of the Taylor Swift tour on social media recently and noticed that all the singers and musicians are playing wirelessly. Particularly the guitarists who walk around the stage. Couldn’t the signal drop out? And how does it manage to remain in sync the entire time? Especially in a large venue with a lot of interference (e.g., phones, cellular networks etc).
Is the technology just simply good enough? Because surely they wouldn’t take the risk otherwise. Unless it’s all pre recorded – but surely not right?
In: Technology
It’s not at like video or audio streaming. Pretty much what you say into the mic is just converted to a signal (non digitally) and transmitted. On the other side that signal is just converted (again, non digitally) and fed into the the equipment. The circuitry itself is pretty simple and the basics are over century old. Because it’s not digital it happens just about instantaneously and the only factor would be how fast that radio wave can transmit, which is the speed of light so is pretty much negligible.
(SOooo, you could potentially run into a situation where you’re filming cannons or pyro going off and the sound take a second or so to catch up with the visual. If you happen to be recording with remote mics and you want ultimate realism you may need to artificially introduce a delay in the sound. This is an artificial case more suited for a science demonstration than anything you’ll actually on a set.)
There are mics with SMPTE (an additional timestamp) but AFAIK this is only for recording devices.
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