Wireless = necessary, or silly indulgence?

[Fuzzbass666]

.... and it's such a freeing experience being able to go wherever you want on stage, in the crowd, on top of stuff. I'll never go back.

This! Especially on top of stuff

 

[KsPiNeSh]

Necessary for me for all of the reasons previously mentioned. Wireless makes it very easy to be active and I love getting into the crowd.

 

[theduke1]

Line 6 G 50 here it is great for going out and doing a sound check a few time during the gig to get the real story og what we sound like!

 

[themacinator]

Wired for practice, G50 with the receiver on my pedal board for shows. Nothing compares to cutting the cord when playing live. And FWIW the G50 is the best $400 I've spent in recent years, except the four bills I spent re-habbing my blueline SVT.

 

[LiamPodmore]

I have one. Sounds great, but it would Still waiting for the first *quality* digital "guitar bug."

May i introduce you to the Invalid Link Removed The guy in Our Helical Mind (Shep) uses the stageclix systems and they get rave reviews, as well as being the main competitor (Especially in the UK) for the Line 6 systems it seems.

Liam

 

[5StringFool]

Been playing wireless live for years now. No reason to switch w/ the kit that's currently available now... My XDS-Plus is quite solid.

Ditto. I love my XDS Plus.

 

[Steve Dallman]

I do everything on the cheap. I found a great Audio Technica dual diversity wireless at a pawn shop for $30, and yes, it's a legal frequency. It has been reliable and predictable over the last 4 years of use.

I love not having the cord coil around my feet. Plus, we mix from stage, so getting out in the audience is necessary. But since I fixed my Line 6 Variax 5, I have gone back to the cord. To use the wireless, I have to use internal batteries...6 double AA's, and they only last a couple gigs, plus the 9v for the wireless (maybe every 4-5 gigs.) So with the Variax, I only use the wireless on large stages, or outdoors.

 

[seanm]

May i introduce you to the Invalid Link Removed The guy in Our Helical Mind (Shep) uses the stageclix systems and they get rave reviews, as well as being the main competitor (Especially in the UK) for the Line 6 systems it seems.

Liam

That looks really cool. Very minimalistic, I like it! And the charger on the front of the RX is a great idea.

Wonder what it will cost in Canada or the US.

 

[Fiset]

Another vote for wireless (and another vote for the Line 6 G50).

Not often I quote my own post but I wanted to follow up on this topic.

Last week I purchased a second transmitter for my Line 6 G50 wireless system. I use a passive 4-string and an active 5-string and I decided I wanted a transmitter for each bass so that I could quickly and seamlessly switch between the two. Got the chance to use both transmitters on stage this past Sunday night as my band was providing direct support for Michael Schenker (who still brings it live, by the way) and it worked flawlessly. I wish I would have bought a second transmitter earlier!

 

[gjbassist]

I just recently started using wireless for gigs and I love it. It's great to have the freedom to move around and not worry about stepping on cords. I got an inexpensive AKG WMS 40 Pro system for under $100. So far it has performed perfectly. Can't imagine ever wanting to go back to using cords in a gig situation.

 

[Thecomedian]

I hope someone with more experience can come in and explain it better than this, but: I had some classes on it, and basically, the signal strength of wireless drops by the square of the radius. Additionally, the higher your noise floor, the more interference you will get (less clarity of signal = more "noise" or garbage on the output). If its so loud you can't hear a difference, then it's okay.. generally speaking, wireless is inferior for signal transmission to shielded cable. With wireless your cable is the air. If prefer absolute clarity and precision, and protection from interference, cables will always be better.

If everyone goes wireless, soon we'll have the amount of energy free floating around in daily life similar to living under high power lines (joking, but it's something I worry about, how these signals are negatively impacting our environment and ourselves.)

 

[DieterVDW]

I hope someone with more experience can come in and explain it better than this, but: I had some classes on it, and basically, the signal strength of wireless drops by the square of the radius. Additionally, the higher your noise floor, the more interference you will get (less clarity of signal = more "noise" or garbage on the output). If its so loud you can't hear a difference, then it's okay.. generally speaking, wireless is inferior for signal transmission to shielded cable. With wireless your cable is the air. If prefer absolute clarity and precision, and protection from interference, cables will always be better.

If everyone goes wireless, soon we'll have the amount of energy free floating around in daily life similar to living under high power lines (joking, but it's something I worry about, how these signals are negatively impacting our environment and ourselves.)

First of all: modern systems are digital, so either the signal is transferred perfectly (though sampled) or the signal is lost completely. So no worries about noice floor or interference.

Secondly, what most people who worry about cellular towers or wifi stations don't realize: radio signals are EVERYWHERE. Every electrical appliance emits electromagnetic radiation. Just hold your guitar/bass near your tv, computer, laptop, lightbulbs, outlets, ... while it's plugged in and you'll hear the buzz/noise.
In fact, if you've ever had a badly connected power outlet in your house, you'll know how much radiation this causes (very loud hum received by guitar for example).
It's mostly between the ears...

 

[mcnach]

Before I begin, lemme state that this isn't a "what kind of wireless should I get, OMG!!!!111!!!" thread.

I'm toying with the idea of a wireless mainly for romantic, "rock star" reasons - running around stage, jumping into the audience, etc.

But the punk covers band I play in doesn't play big venues. Also, I sing backup on a lot of songs and kick in a fuzzbox here and there, necessitating that I stay close to my mic/pedals.

So, what's your take? Stick with cable or spend $400 on a G50 or other quality wireless? Again, I'm not asking for brand suggestions, but advice as to whether or not I'd just be throwing money away.

It's not necessary, But it's nice to have.
Having no cables anchoring you is very comfortable even if you stay on one spot. That is enough for me.
Then, of course, you can move more, and it can be very useful at soundcheck too.
Oh, and it's also nice to be physically isolated from mains power... some venues' wiring is not very trust-inspiring.

 

[mcnach]

You mean when you never had a dropped or intermittent signal, and you didn't have to worry about batteries dying mid call? Sorry, just had to go there.
There are plenty of great, reliable wireless out there without a doubt.
Just playing devils advocate.

Well, coverage is not an issue with guitar wireless ;-)
As for batteries... that's really up to the user. I keep an eye on the battery status light of my G30 and it warns you well in advance. No issues unless you choose to ignore it.

 

[mcnach]

Planning ahead for me is having a second unit or hard wire on stand by. Nothing is fool proof.

And That too, of course.
I personally check my wireless batteries and change ahead of a gig if getting low, carry spare batteries, and cables.

 

[Thecomedian]

First of all: modern systems are digital, so either the signal is transferred perfectly (though sampled) or the signal is lost completely. So no worries about noice floor or interference.

Secondly, what most people who worry about cellular towers or wifi stations don't realize: radio signals are EVERYWHERE. Every electrical appliance emits electromagnetic radiation. Just hold your guitar/bass near your tv, computer, laptop, lightbulbs, outlets, ... while it's plugged in and you'll hear the buzz/noise.
In fact, if you've ever had a badly connected power outlet in your house, you'll know how much radiation this causes (very loud hum received by guitar for example).
It's mostly between the ears...

You've never had digital broadcast antenna TV It sucks really bad. I prefer the tiny spotty snow or sometimes slightly doubled image compared to a station that has harsh audio cut-outs or artifacting (what people typically call "pixelated", when big blocks of patchy color appear that try to approximate what the signal is supposed to look like, you can see this a lot on highly compressed video, it has blocky texture).

Digital audio over a cell phone also gets garbled and affected. The signal you're sending may be digital, but its still RF (radio frequencies).


[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]

heres a great link, sorry that its not indexed with chapters or sections, but scroll down to the digital part, especially how the digital signal interacts with noise.

If you prefer to test it, go to any youtube music and listen to the high quality version of a song (preferably one that has an album picture and isn't an mvid), at 360 or more quality, then switch it to 240 and listen to it again, clarity is lost, it sounds noticeably more dead.

http://youtu.be/DJ40tPJzx54 Go through the first ten seconds, then repeat on lower quality. Its the same digital signal, but some of the signal is getting thrown out to achieve faster playback, similar to compression of MP3s of lower quality. The same occurs in wireless transmissions, and for TCP (that is, must have zero errors in transmitting the data), the packets of digital information that get dropped are resent, and this is where you experience, in video games, Lag spikes, if you happen to be a video game player.

Digital isn't perfect and unalterable signal.

 

[DieterVDW]

You've never had digital broadcast antenna TV It sucks really bad. I prefer the tiny spotty snow or sometimes slightly doubled image compared to a station that has harsh audio cut-outs or artifacting (what people typically call "pixelated", when big blocks of patchy color appear that try to approximate what the signal is supposed to look like, you can see this a lot on highly compressed video, it has blocky texture).

Digital audio over a cell phone also gets garbled and affected. The signal you're sending may be digital, but its still RF (radio frequencies).

http://youtu.be/DJ40tPJzx54 Go through the first ten seconds, then repeat on lower quality. Its the same digital signal, but some of the signal is getting thrown out to achieve faster playback, similar to compression of MP3s of lower quality. The same occurs in wireless transmissions, and for TCP (that is, must have zero errors in transmitting the data), the packets of digital information that get dropped are resent, and this is where you experience, in video games, Lag spikes, if you happen to be a video game player.
Digital isn't perfect and unalterable signal.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to nuance your post a bit.

First of all, TCP has nothing to do with this. Digital audio over RF has no relation to an IP network.
Cell phones garble and break up because encoded audio data is sent over an IP network in packets, and packets get lost.
Images pixelate because to reconstruct one image, a big block of data is needed and there are a lot of inter-dependencies between the data. This does not apply to streaming digital unencoded audio.

Indeed in youtube you can choose the quality/bandwidth tradeoff.
But this is an implementation choice to adapt to the various bandwidths of people's internet connections. Again, not much relation to digital audio over a dedicated RF transmitter and receiver.

In a scenario with a decicated RF transmitter/receiver, it is the easiest and the best to just use a fixed sampling rate and no coding blocks (as is confirmed by Line6 specs) . So in practice, you get either perfect reception, or no reception.

Not meaning to be a smartass about this, but I'm a IT guy who worked for 2 years on audio and compression, so I know a few things about this stuff .

 

[Addni]

Please clarify how you manage this...

I was playing a song that was pretty much straight A trough the verse, and only D and A in the chorus. So I was able to single-hand most of the song, using my other hands to open the doors and steering

Only problem was zipping and buttoning my pants when I was done, but I was able to zip and leave the button unbuttoned until the song was over.

Same song is also useful to go get a drink from the bar, or giving the singer the bass and say "just play A" if I have to run.

 

[Thecomedian]

I thought that TCP might be an important parallel due to the fact that it illustrates invoked special rules to prevent the loss of your packets, meaning that in any system, you either design to prevent loss, or accept that you're going to have some loss at some point.

Packets get lost for cell phones and Digital air TV because packets do get lost.. either because there was a temporary burst of RF from the noise floor, or because the signal strength temporarily dropped.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_jammer
Invalid Link Removed

It seems like you are meaning to imply that ambient noise and such doesn't cause packet loss, and therefore cell phone garbling, by stating that it's actually caused by packet loss within the wired network (despite the fact that routers have redundancies and packets have TTL to keep those packets "alive"), but Clearly, the ambient RF noise in the area can cause interruptions, as cell phone jammers would be useless otherwise.

It's just like a three stooges scenario. erroneous "garbage" RF get received, and a packet meant for the recepient gets lost because the bandwidth has been crammed for a millisecond with garbage. Live talk wouldn't work with packet resending protocols, so the other option is to allow packets to be dropped occasionally when interference does occur. On reflecting, it seems certain that wireless x-mit and receive for instruments would behave the same way, because it wouldn't make much sense to garble future sound by trying to repeat packets that are lost.

an RF signal is an RF signal, digital or analog. we shield cables to prevent noise, but in a wireless setup the cable is empty space. the youtube example is mainly to illustrate how the loss of throughput can affect what you hear, however in contrast to youtube, which cuts specific data in a reliable manner, RF interference will mess with your data in an unreliable manner. It's just something to consider.

 

[DWBass]

I guess this thread has officially been derailed!