RF Venue has been busy of late with a couple of installations in the iconic Times Square in New York City and a Charlotte, NC church. Check out both below.
RF Venue Rocks New York City at Times Square Live Concert Series
Every year, TSQ Live invites hundreds of artists, performers, and cultural producers to share their work in one of the world’s most iconic public spaces. These events—part of an initiative of the nonprofit Times Square Alliance—depend upon technology that ensures flawless performance and the best possible audio quality for both performers and the audience. With all these factors combined, DiCorpo chose product solutions from RF Venue to optimize the high-performance Sennheiser EW-D wireless microphone systems and Sennheiser EW IEM G4 in-ear monitor systems being used for the show.
“Was I a little nervous about using wireless in Times Square? Yes. But I’d been using RF Venue products since being introduced to their wireless solutions several years ago while working with some of the regional production companies here in the northeast,” said DiCorpo. “I’d never seen an RF Venue DFIN before. I’d never seen a CP Beam antenna before. Once I learned what they are and how they work, there was no going back.” When the time came around for his company, CJD Productions, to buy its own wireless microphones and IEM systems for the work he was doing with Couch and a few other clients, “RF Venue was an easy choice to complete the systems,” stated DiCorpo, who sourced his RF Venue products from Berlin, CT-based TMP-Pro Distribution.
For the Times Square Live performance, a selection of RF Venue products was used for the critical role of providing dropout-free microphone performance, including the DISTRO4 Professional Antenna Distribution System, an RF Venue Diversity Fin Antenna, and RF Venue Band-pass Filters, which DiCorpo describes as the “gravy on top.” He explains, “If you really want to make sure it’s going to work well and work well for a long time, the Band-pass Filters help block RF from outside of the frequency range where your wireless mics are operating, giving you a little bit more comfort in your setup. With everything going on in Times Square, there’s a lot of other stuff in surrounding frequency bands, so it’s nice to isolate exactly what you’re using for your microphones. What’s great about RF Venue products is that they help the wireless microphones be seen through all that noise.”
The RF Venue Diversity Fin Antenna’s patented technologies utilize a vertical LPDA “paddle” element for reception of vertically polarized signals and a dipole antenna in an orthogonal (right angle) orientation in an all-in-one, easy-to-deploy, package. Designed to work with any brand or model wireless microphone receiver, the DISTRO4 ensures reliable RF signal for up to five receivers and delivers power for four receivers, eliminating wall warts, and up to five DISTRO4s can be cascaded for large system management.
For in-ear monitoring, DiCorpo chose a complementary configuration utilizing an RF Venue COMBINE8 Transmitter Combiner and compact circularly polarized CP Beam Antenna to provide a constant focused signal regardless of the IEM receiver position. “Couch is a high-energy band. A lot of fun. But if they can’t hear each other, they’re not performing at their best. It’s nice to be in a high-pressure environment like that and not have to worry about the microphones or in-ears dropping out. RF Venue gave me that peace of mind.”
The COMBINE8 IEM combiner brings together up to eight in-ear monitor transmitter signals into a single rear panel-mounted antenna connector, as well as providing DC power to up to eight IEM transmitters. Paired with a directional external antenna, most often the RF Venue CP Beam Antenna, the combination enables multi-channel systems to minimize the intermodulation artifacts arising from multiple adjacent transmitters interfering with one another, particularly when rack-mounted and using the transmitter-mounted whip antennas.
“In a sense, the Times Square show had one of the biggest audiences the band has ever played for, not knowing who was in the onsite crowd or who was watching from beyond," he said. "Once we got everything up and I did the frequency coordination and we had a smooth sound check, I was confident that it was going to work. You can't beat that. I don't want to have to worry about dropouts or interference. I want to concentrate on mixing the sound and making the band sound their best.”
Nikao Church Modernizes Worship with Wireless Solutions
Charlotte, NC’s Nikao Church began in 2015 when a dozen individuals under the leadership of Pastor Brian Duley embarked on a mission to impact their city. Having moved to progressively larger north Charlotte locations as the church grew, in October 2023 it added a 40-acre main campus on Charlotte’s southern outskirts that includes classrooms, offices, and an auditorium capable of seating up to 1250 worshippers.
“The basic structures and buildings for the south campus were there; however, they needed to do a full AVL system for the church in order to hold services,” stated Ryan “Fig” Bonfiglio, project manager for Sioux City, Iowa-based BNY Productions, which designed and installed the system. "This was a ground-up installation."
RF Venue’s CP Architectural Antenna and COMBINE8 Kit plus a second COMBINE8 8-channel IEM transmitter combiner and a passive 2x1Split splitter/combiner allow all of Nikao Church’s IEM transmitter RF outputs to be combined to feed a single antenna for transmission to the IEM receivers. As a bonus, said Bonfiglio, as it folds the performance of the renowned RF Venue circularly polarized CP Beam Antenna into an unobtrusive low-profile housing, the CP Architectural Antenna “provides a clean install look that matches the wall color.”
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BNY had the challenge at Nikao Church of having two zones of mics being used on the stage for the service while also having mics in the lobby and outside the front of the church for pre- and post-service programming. The lobby/entrance area being too far from the microphone receiver racks to run coaxial cabling without unacceptable signal attenuation, RF Venue’s Optix Series 3 two-channel RF over fiber optic system was used to convert the electrical antenna outputs to light waves and then back again at the receiving end (the optical signal can be run for miles without degradation). Two RF Venue Diversity Architectural Antenna & DISTRO9 HDR Packs were deployed to provide wireless mic signal reception and distribution. Each Diversity Architectural Antenna provides the patented cross-polarized, true diversity reception of RF Venue’s Diversity Fin Antenna in a compact housing with the same near-invisible appearance as the CP Architectural Antenna. An RF Venue inline band-pass filter on each antenna output suppresses RF noise outside of the operating band of the wireless microphones to improve the signal-to-noise of the antenna signal delivered to the dual-zone, 9-channel DISTRO9 HDR antenna distribution amplifiers. The two DISTRO9s then deliver both the antenna outputs and DC power to the wireless microphone receivers. “The church loves the ability that they have to freely move around the building and have their team be flexible on where they are placed without restrictions on coverage,” concluded Bonfiglio. “With the band-pass filters in line as well, they get good clean signals from both antennas without adding extraneous noise into the system.”
