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Funny Business Gets Serious with Sennheiser's HSP4 Wireless Headmics

Live performers can only give their all onstage when they have 100% confidence in their microphones. The versatile cast and dedicated crew of the demanding musical/stand-up comedy show, "Funny Business," running at Minneapolis' historic Hennepin Stages Theatre, learned that fact first-hand when they switched their sound reinforcement over to Sennheiser's HSP4 hands-free headmics.

"Discovering the Sennheiser HSP4 headmic definitely solved a lot of problems for us," notes Eric Shosted, operations manager and technical director of the Hennepin Stages Theatre. "The hassle of wrestling with actors' clothing to get the bodymic clipped on is gone, as are off-axis attenuation issues

and crowd-noise bleed problems. Now the entertainers can immerse themselves deeper into the moment, instead of worrying about whether the mics are picking them up properly."

"Funny Business" is a highly entertaining, but demanding, two-act show about the backstage lives of stand-up comedians, requiring eight performers to sing, dance and do stand-up comedy. Shosted began investigating the benefits of a head-worn wireless microphone system when the clip-on mics that were

used originally were causing complications for the cast and the 250-seat Hennepin Stages Theatre.

"I have monitors that are hanging from the ceiling, and there's a three-piece live jazz/rock band in front of the stage," Shosted says. "With the clip-on body mics, the actors could never get too close to the band or the monitors because the mic capsules would pick up sound from those sources, as well as the crowd's laughter, none of which could be gated out completely."

Seeing that the performers' confidence was suffering due to an uncertain soundfield, Shosted and his team specified the Sennheiser HSP4 headmic. This mic features a high-quality, permanently polarized condenser hands-free cardioid microphone, with an adjustable neckband that is visually unobtrusive and very comfortable. Individually adjustable to all head sizes, the HSP4 utilizes a neckband design that keeps the microphone clear from shirt-collars and other clothing - a real plus in live theater.

The show's audio and performance quality took an upward turn after being newly outfitted with the HSP4s. "The positioning capabilities of the headmics made an immediate impact," says Shosted. "Because of so much singing, dancing and kinetic energy onstage, we have to keep the capsule on-axis with the way the person is speaking, and the Sennheiser headmics facilitated this. In my mix, I had been previously chopping a lot of frequencies to keep the other mics from taking off on me, but these allowed me to almost zero out my EQ. That immediately gave me at least 10-15dB of gain structure, and I no longer have to worry about my monitors or crowd noise becoming sources of interference. The sound of the Sennheiser microphones is clear, accurate, and other than a small bump in attenuation around 10k, you can run them very flat for an uncolored representation of what the people sound like."

Paired with the extremely small Sennheiser EW322 SK300G2 bodypack transmitters, feeding dual Sennheiser ASP2 passive antenna splitters and a Sennheiser EM300G2 rack-mount receiver, the system has delivered flawless wireless performance throughout the show's run. "I have had zero dropouts, crosstalk or interference problems," Shosted reports. "Other systems in the past have had problems even from cell phones, but there are no issues with the Sennheiser gear."

Now that the cast is using the Sennheiser HSP4, "Funny Business" is a gig that Shosted and the multi-talented cast can stop stressing about. "In live theater, when something goes wrong, everybody notices immediately!" Shosted says. "The dependability of the Sennheiser headworn mics is absolutely

essential to delivering an excellent show every time. We power them up, throw the doors open, and the sound is perfect, just like it was the night before."

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Funny Business Gets Serious with Sennheiser's HSP4 Wireless Headmics

29th January 2007

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