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
“Sync” is an issue for video (or motion picture) *recording*. If you’re using multiple cameras and recording audio on different devices, they all have to be running at the same clock speed. Since digital video gear may be recording in “frames per second”, each piece of gear can be a bit off regarding what a “second” actually is. A tiny error will compound over time, a millisecond off becomes ten milliseconds off before long (when compared to recording gear with differing errors). So often there’s a master source of time code that’s sent to each piece of recording gear – a “master clock”.
That’s not a thing with wireless systems – their latency is low enough that a band can stay “in sync”. You may be thinking of transmission channels – each wireless unit needs to be on its own frequency, so the transmitter will only be picked up by a single receiver.
Even without wireless, latency is a thing for performers in shows, and the bigger the venue the more apparent it is. When, say, your guitar sound runs through a cable (or a wireless system) to an amp, and a microphone is on the amp, and that mic cable goes through a stage-monitor mixer and then all the way to the sound board at the back of the venue, and it’s zapped around through mixers and effects, then sent back to the stage area on *another* cable carrying the entire mix, through power amplifiers and then to the main PA system – on stage, you can “feel” it, a sense of delay – your amp’s right behind you, but you’re also hearing the monitor signal, the house PA, and the echo of the room. Even though all that audio is electrons traveling near the speed of light, the whole thing adds up to a slight sense of “disconnection”. The first time you start playing larger venues, it’s weird, but you adjust really quickly to it. It’s not significant enough to mess up the performance., and eventually you come to associate it with “big room/big crowd” and it feels kinda cool. (Have played hundreds/thousands of shows, from tiny bars to about 8,000 seats, over 40-50 years. No arenas though!)
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