New from Sennheiser at NAB is the EM 3732 receiver, a rugged piece of equipment with a 90 MHz switching bandwidth that makes finding available frequencies easier than ever.

“The 3732 allows the customer to tune to pretty much any frequency within a 90 MHz band, which allows you to tune to any one of 18,000 different frequencies,” explains Joe Ciaudelli, consultant for Sennheiser’s professional products industry team.

“In particular with sports applications, when you can be in a Miami arena one week and then a Colorado stadium the next, finding free frequencies can be difficult, especially now that the RF landscape is changing,” Ciaudelli says. “The 3732 compensates by being so tunable that you can find free frequencies.”

High intermodulation compression wards off potential interference from competing signals and easy-to-spot warning lights allow for crisis aversion, even from across the room.

“If your transmitter battery gets too low, it will give you a warning light,” Ciaudelli explains. “If you have a whole rack of these things, even from far away, you can immediately tell which one of the microphones is having trouble.”

An organic LED display allows for intuitive operation of the easy-to-use system and the receiver’s optimum sensitivity requires just one tenth the signal of most wireless microphones.

Also new for NAB is the MKE 400, a small-scale microphone that fits perfectly with miniature handycams. The shotgun microphone has a base roll-off switch, shock-mounted shoe mounts and an available furry wind coat and XLR adapter.

The multi-pattern MKH 800 twin is also new for the show. It can manipulate the polar pattern both remotely during performance and after recording.

Also brand new from Sennheiser’s Neumann division is the TLM 103 D, a microphone with a directly digital output.

“This allows you to do all of your effects within the digital domain, so you avoid the latency delay in switching between analog and digital,” Ciaudelli says. “By staying all digital, you get a very pure signal that’s easy to handle.”