Re: Wireless Audio

That sounds like a pretty tough deal. I think you were on the right track with the back-up plan of putting a recorder by the sound board; you just neglected to hook it up and set it up to deal with the case of the wandering max levels. It could be that you were still set for mic level recording, when most PA board outputs are line level, and you set your peaks when they were not jamming at full blast. Another problem with board feeds is that they are mixed to give the best sound to the people in the sapce, but that balance is often not the same mix you would sue for recording to video. The live mixing guy is counting on the drums for instance to be heard a certain amount with or without amplification and mics on them. So a classic issue with taping bands playing by getting your mix from the board op is your drums are surprisingly weak and the reverb of the room is missing.

When I can't be sure of what's going to happen and can't always have my hands ready on a mixer, I set one track of the 2-track audio to a somewhat low level, and the second track to a higher than average one. The theory being, one track is likely to be "right" at any particular time, no matter what happens to the incoming level.

Another thing that could help is to add a mixer or at least an automatic gain control to that audio recording setup.

The wiring issue comes down to how much advance work you can do: ideally, your antenna is close as possible to the transmitting source, perhaps on an overhead beam, and you run the wire along the beam back to a spot on the wall where you shoot from.

As far as wireless, this is a place where more money definitely means better peformance. Rent some high quality diversity-antenna broadcast wireless sets. One reason for that is that the high-end gear works better, but the other is, the rented wireless sets have been set to channels that have been "cleared" and locally coordinated thru the vendor so as not to be on the same channels as others locally, and are known to work with the least interference.

I have heard of wireless stage audio done using infrared, but I don't think it is very common.

The last desperate backup, which works more often than you would imagine, is to mic a speaker cabinet with a dynamic cardioid mic and run that to one of your recorders. While you still get ambient audio, most of it is still off the speaker. Your risk there is to get one that buzzes or hums a lot.