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
Large concerts like this will have dedicated radio system operators who look after all the transmitters and receivers. They can’ be incredibly expensive and sophisticated systems with lots of redundancy and carefully planned channel frequencies and even dynamic channel selection to actively avoid interference or to work around drop outs. The channel allocations are planned around potential conflicts from things like mobile networks, public band radio, TV & radio transmitters etc – which are different in every country. In fact it is often illegal to transmit in certain frequency bands that correspond with other systems.
Each performer will have a transmitter (or more) that sends their voice/instrument to a receiver, plus a receiver which receives the monitor signal from another transmitter. Each performer just plays/sings in time with their in-ear monitors and they will be in sync with everyone else. The wireless signals travel at the speed of light, and the processing in the transceiver systems happens practically instantly.
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