How to choose one that will “just work, every single time”
Are you a performer who wants to buy yourself your very own wireless microphone? Do you want to make sure you choose one that will “just work, every single time”? It’s actually pretty simple:
Don’t buy a wireless microphone.
There’s a joke in my industry that goes something along the lines of “at the top end of the market you can spend over $10k on a single wireless microphone, and for your money you will have purchased something that will work almost—but not quite—as well as a $25 mic cable. Wireless microphones are inherently failure prone for a few different reasons, such as:
- The way that a radio transmission will interact with its environment is both unpredictable and variable, and this is only made worse when one end of the transmission link is moving around (and if the person using the microphone isn’t moving around, then why do they need a wireless microphone?)
- Two of the most common techniques that other wireless devices (like Wi-Fi) can use to improve their reliability is by taking up more radio bandwidth and increasing latency, but professional wireless microphones are legally prohibited from doing the former and practically prevented from doing the latter (especially if in-ear monitoring is also involved)
- Devices that rely on batteries are inherently less reliable than ones that don’t
Anecdotally, I once came into a situation where well over a thousand dollars-worth of ostensibly-functional professional wireless equipment had been rendered totally inoperable. The cause? Some unanticipated (and, as near as I can tell, previously-undocumented) interactions between devices and a couple of antenna positions that were slightly-less-than-ideal. That’s all it took.
My professional advice (which—if I’m being honest—never seems to be the advice that people are looking for when asking this question) is to avoid making yourself responsible for wireless anything in a production environment, because—regardless of its quality—there will come a point where it will fail you. Put another way, my abilities in dealing with the complexities of wireless audio devices are one of things that keep me employed and respected by my peers, and at some level I just don’t understand why anyone else would want to take that on for themselves (especially if they also have some other job to be doing at the same time, like singing or playing an instrument).
TL;DR: If you’re a performer who wants to buy yourself a microphone that will “just work, every single time”, do what Michael Bublé does and use a wired one.