The Singing Christmas Tree, an annual holiday highlight in Portland, OR featuring a live Nativity, a segment dedicated to Santa and his elves, and a choir that’s now in its 61st year, sees sound reinforcement provider Clarity Media Group delivering in-ear monitoring to performers with Lectrosonics M2 Duet digital wireless systems.
“I’m a front-of-house guy when I do shows. I’ve tried just about every manufacturer of wireless on the market,” says Tom Akoury of Plus 4 Marketing, which consults with Clarity Media Group. “And I’ve used Lectrosonics wireless mic and IFB systems on the broadcast side for years. All that good stuff from broadcast came over onto the live performance side: the reliability, the audio quality, the performance in challenging RF situations. Ben and Travis had been getting asked about in-ear monitoring systems, and frankly Lectrosonics is the best wireless I’ve ever seen in this application.”
Clarity, headed by co-owners Ben Strizu and Travis Cibolski, has engineered the show in past years, but 2023 has been their first time using Lectrosonics. “We have six M2Ra packs on singers, plus one for the band director, plus another for me because I’m the monitor engineer,” Strizu says. “You really notice the lack of noise floor!”
“It’s crazy to me that something battery-powered could be that quiet,” adds Cibolski. “We used a different brand of wireless IEMs on this same production last year, and compared to them, the response to Lectrosonics has been incredibly positive. Everyone is a big fan of them. The cast members feel more immersed in their performances even though they might not describe it in audio engineer terms.”
The Clarity team ranks its wireless priorities as audio quality followed by range and the ability to navigate a crowded RF environment are tied for a close second among Clarity’s priorities, with Cibolski noting, “If you get far enough away from the transmitters, a receiver can pick up sources you don’t want. We had run into that with other gear. I’ve had no issues with Lectrosonics, by contrast. I have to try to get them to drop out, which is cool. Before the show opened, I went out into the parking lot. I had to get very far away before they dropped out, and I was only running them at 25 milliwatts [of transmitter output power].”
“We also used the M2 system at a concert over Labor Day weekend in Atlanta and had a similar performance at only 25 milliwatts,” adds Strizu. “We looked at our scanner and there was RF just everywhere, stepping all over everything. The Lectros didn’t miss a beat.”
Cibolski also cites the system’s Flex List: “Flex List can name, store, and recall frequencies. Each frequency carries one stereo pair, so I name them all in [Lectrosonics] Wireless Designer software, then with a mouse click I upload that to a pack. Right on the pack, we can flip through the frequencies and hear the separate mixes for anyone onstage.”
