MINNEAPOLIS, MN — The musical/stand-up comedy show, Funny Business, running at Minneapolis' Hennepin Stages Theatre, has switched 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 body mic clipped on is gone, as are off-axis attenuation issues and crowd-noise bleed problems."
Funny Business is a 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 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."
Shosted and his team specified the Sennheiser HSP4 head mic. This mic features a permanently polarized condenser hands-free cardioid microphone, with an adjustable neckband that is visually unobtrusive. Individually adjustable to head size, the HSP4 utilizes a neckband designed to keep the microphone clear from shirt collars and other clothing — a real plus in live theatre.
Says Shosted, "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."
For more information, please visit www.sennheiserusa.com.
