Derek H

And what about battery life? My concern is at hour 11-13 they start dying and become a pain.. or always require a battery change after lunch. Neither of those scenarios are great.

What’s your battery workflow with that many units? Are you charging them in the stand up charging units or do you manually put AAs in each morning? Do you change batteries at some point?

So I have an IFB system in block 941 consisting of a T4, 1x R1a and 1x IFBlue. Kind of testing the waters on the IFBlue. It all works well and the sound quality is similar between the two receivers. I would say the R1a sounds a little darker and the quality of the edge-of-range fizz and breakup is softer. I know these are very subjective sound descriptions but there you go. An advantage of the IFBlue is that the impedance mismatch hiss from the R1a is gone. This is also true with the R1b. A problem I notice with my one IFBlue is that it seems to produce random little hits that are louder and more painful on the ears than would be normal on the R1a. I’m not sure if my unit is faulty or if the sound of the IFBlue circuit is such that it over-emphasizes these hits. This is while listening with HD25s. Before I send it in for a look at Lectro I’m wondering if this is kind of normal for these or unusual. While we’re at it anyone with a bunch of IFBlues care to comment on how they’re physically holding up? I’m a little skeptical of the beltclip.. both for it potentially breaking and also it’s holding power. Do you find they pop off if you brush or bump into something? I’d like to replace my Comteks with them but I’m also thinking the battery life won’t work for long days on one set of rechargeables. Thanks! D

Regarding cable length. Comtek recommends headphones with a 36” cable for better radio reception since the headphone cable is used as an antenna. Maybe that was specific to the 72-76 units though. Doc is there a particular reason you chose the length you did for the scene monitors? Just curious.

Hey Doc are there different revisions of the scene monitor? Or is it the same since you first released them?

Yeah I figured that was probably the case. Or maybe Hamiltonbuhl designed them and had them made to their spec and other production lines copied it. We just don’t really know.

Pretty sure those LSC models are just HamiltonBuhl relabeled HA2s. Which you can get a little cheaper directly from them. https://hamiltonbuhl.com/store/products/912/HamiltonBuhl-Personal-On-Ear-Stereo-Headphone they’re nice enough with a thick quality one-sided cord and they fold flat. Cord is a little long, 5 feet.

Thank you!

Thanks Matt!

I don’t think anything has changed with these since G1… Could be wrong. I have a mix of G2/3/4 and the cables are all interchangeable. I just checked for you and the stock 3.5mm to XLRM cable that came with my old G3 is wired with the ring floating and pins 1&3 to sleeve and pin 2 to tip. The stock 3.5mm locking to non-locking 3.5mm has the Ring on the locking end floating and the tip connected to tip and ring on the non-locking end. Sleeves connected. My custom cables are all wired the same as well and have always worked for feeding cameras and mixers. You might be thinking of the transmitter input which is different and does require you to ground the unused ring or tip to sleeve in order to select your input level mic or line. Think of the receiver output as being mono unbalanced. If you plug in headphones to it you’ll only hear one side.

Canare is the best

Because supposedly it holds up better to repeated bending and handling whereas a spiral wrap shield can spread apart more when it’s bent.

I’m guessing it would not work with 1.5” rail and maybe not with 30mm either?

Is this for a jumper from mixer to boom pole? If so, I always prefer stretchy coiled jumpers for that though they are a pain in the ass and you definitely want to buy two because they seem to go bad sooner or later. Not sure how beneficial Starquad is for a short jumper like that but couldn’t hurt. I would go with the mini-starquad or the other Canare you mentioned. My main criteria would be a french braided shield.

Yeah I was going to mention TX advance as well but figured its a non starter if you really wanted apple. Great thing about TX advance is with a $40 SDR dongle and a USB adapter cable you can scan your entire operating range right in the app and’s let it do a full coordination for you choosing clean frequencies. It gives you similar functionality to wireless designer/ wireless workbench but is brand neutral. It does have a bit of a learning curve but can do a lot and the developer wrote a good user manual for it.

Only ones I know of are FreqFinder and Lectro Controller. Not sure they have the features you’re looking for.

Hey Wyatt, just curious on a couple things. What size extrusion are you using? Also do you use anything to keep the gear recessed?

I agree that it sounds like some battery protection circuit kicked in. Either in the BDS (poly fuse) or something maybe more sophisticated in the battery itself. Maybe the level of charge had nothing to do with it and there was a small arc or something that kicked a fuse. I’ve had this happen when hot-plugging a device with a barrel connector (bad idea) and there’s a tiny arc and the whole bag shuts down. Give it a ten second rest and it powers back up. Poly fuse. Still thinking about this… maybe what happened when you hot swapped was the NP fresh off the charger at 16V and put it in parallel with the 13.5V NP too much current rushed from the charged NP to the low NP (batteries in parallel will balance each other’s voltage this way) and it tripped the low battery’s charge current protection. The basic remote audio BDS doesn’t have anything fancy built in for managing two batteries as far as I know. A better way to run two batteries together might be to have a circuit that doesn’t allow the two batteries to interact. Like a Schotkey diode. The PSC triple bds for example has some circuit on it that does this. It has two separate input connectors too. This also lets you have an AC adapter in one input and battery backup in the other. Sorry not trying to sales pitch PSC stuff but just an example of other options to handle this scenario.

Anyone have a recommendation for a caster specialist vendor who will sell small quantities? I feel like McMaster is a little overpriced in this area. Also every time I Google this it seems like there are new caster dealers since the last time.

Doug, what do you mean by “not SMS”?

Sounds like a pain. Have any pictures you can share?

Same here

Yeah, I will say Facebook can be more visually interesting to browse with more pictures of gear and setups (seems most people feel an image or video is a minimum requirement for a Facebook post) but the discussion often goes off the rails. I deleted my Facebook account last year and have been pretty happy with that choice. I also hated how stuff would just sort of disappear or become really difficult and convoluted to find again. At least things are logically sorted and presented chronologically here and searchable. Also there’s a lot of nasty rate-shaming on Facebook that seems very misguided. Kind of scary how often, for months after I deleted my account, I would without thinking open safari on my phone and type “F” into the search bar. This stuff is definitely addictive. I still scroll through JWsound probably too much but at least that is usually a quick check and I read one or two posts and then I’m back to real life and it doesn’t go off the rails into some algorithmic hell spiral where suddenly I’m purchasing shit I don’t need or getting criticized by someone I’ll never meet. TikTok… I can’t even start. For me it’s totally disorienting, impossible to use and it really just seems to want me watching girls in yoga outfits and guys doing stupid pranks. Usually to girls in yoga outfits .

Thanks for posting! Keep it coming! Yeah it’s too bad you can’t switch sides more easily, sometimes you need to boom from one side or the other depending on the situation. Also having rollers that allowed you to not only pivot the mic but push/pull it would be good. I’m curious, How has the reaction on set been?

The problem with AirTags specifically is that they have a feature (that is always on) where they start to jingle randomly when near someone’s phone too long. It’s an anti-stalking feature actually to alert people that someone else’s air tag has been near them for awhile.