The Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, which has produced more than 100 original productions since its founding in 1968, recently added a Sennheiser Digital 6000 wireless system that it’s already employed with the world premiere of Darlin’ Cory and an adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol that’s running through Christmas Eve.
Clay Benning, the resident sound designer of the Alliance Theatre who’s responsible for audio at the facility’s two performance venues as well as sound design for many of the theater’s productions, explains that in a typical year, the organization presents somewhere between 10 and 14 productions, including plays, musicals or other new works. Very often, the theatre serves as a tryout venue for Broadway and about 60 to 80 percent of the shows the group produces are original.
The last several months afforded Benning and his production staff time to evaluate the technical needs of the Alliance’s latest production, A Christmas Carol. “It’s a huge production,” he says. “The last production of A Christmas Carol had run for 20 years, so this is the first time since 1999 that we’ve built everything new from scratch.” In doing so, Benning and the team fortified its wireless capacity to include 34 channels of Sennheiser’s Digital 6000 wireless system.
“As far as the audio was concerned, the major thing we had to do was move to wireless microphones for the entire cast, which was not part of our last production of A Christmas Carol,” says Benning. “We had been running older Sennheiser wireless for years and years and it has been great, but considering the shift in the spectrum landscape and the agility of the newer Digital 6000, the time was right to replace.”
Since the prior production of A Christmas Carol had so much success at the theatre, the production team made a recent decision to purchase several channels of its own Digital 6000 rather than renting them. “We ran the last production of A Christmas Carol for 20 years, and we knew this production would be running for at least 10 years, so we decided to invest and amortize the cost over multiple years,” Benning notes.
The “tipping point” to purchase the new system coincided with the introduction of the new SK 6212 bodypack transmitter. “That’s really what we need in a theatrical environment — to be able to hide the transmitter packs in wigs, costumes, and things like that,” he observes. In addition to the diminutive size of the bodypack, Benning also points to its battery life: “We can typically run a whole day of rehearsals on a single battery charge with no swaps. That has made life easier for my staff because they’re not changing batteries as much and can see exactly how much time is left in the battery. We monitor this through Sennheiser’s WSM, which automatically talks to all the receivers.”
Atlanta is a major metropolitan sports and media hub that’s full of RF congestion. “We’re located in midtown Atlanta, so we’re right in the middle of everything,” Benning says. “As a result of the recent frequency repacking, we only have three TV channels available.” Since Sennheiser’s Digital 6000 features intermodulation-free operation using an equidistant frequency grid, this allows the production staff much more latitude in finding and locking in frequencies. “Because you can pack things in so tight on the Digital 6000, bandwidth hasn’t been a problem and I think we still have room to spare.”
Having more than 30 channels on stage has become a regular occurrence and Benning adds there was a bit of a learning curve involved: “Once we had our antenna placement figured out, everything fell into place,” he says.“The thing that I like most about the Digital 6000 is that you don’t hear any of the electronics. There is no companding — the audio is just very clean sounding all the way through.”
Since September of 2021, the Alliance has also been running several channels of Digital 6000 wireless to support its production of Darlin’ Cory, which has a significant amount of acoustic music emanating from the stage. “There are 12 people in the cast that are wearing SK 6212 bodypacks with microphones, and then we have a fair number of acoustic instruments with pickups given the nature of the show,” Benning concludes. “We have three or four acoustic guitars, some mandolin, and some dulcimer. The majority of these instruments are wireless and on the Digital 6000 and they sound great.”
