Comm System

[DwayneJ]

I am looking for a good wireless comm system to communicate with my camera men/women. I am not trying to spend over 1000. Looking to get the most bang for the buck. I looked at the eartek system.http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc..._904_PRO_.html.

Please let me know if this system is good. If not any suggestions for a system.

[Gracetech]

Go with a wired intercom system. First i have purchased the Eartec system you are looking at and i can safely say they are glorified two way radios with a slight varation. In all bluntness i hate the Eartec system. The way it works is it has one master and the others are slaves so whoever has the master can talk to everyone but the slaves can only talk to the master one at a time. I prefer wires anyway since they sound a whole heck of a lot better and you don't have to worry with reception. Most of the times cameras are wired back to the booth so it's not like your gaining anything by having wireless intercom. If i was forced to get a wireless intercom system then i would get a clearcom system which is like 4 grand. Head to Northernsound.net and check out production intercom's econo packages. You'll be a lot happier without all the headaches of wireless.

Oh and one more thing that i like is that you can feed sound directly into the intercom system through a adapter. This helps when your using double muffs since it's hard to know what's going on when you can't hear what's happening on stage that well. We actually use the same adapter as a talk back from our intercom system to the monitors in order to communicate with musicians or the worship leader(during practice of course)

crt

[DwayneJ]

Question, how hard is it to connect a wired system? That is my only concern

[Gracetech]

You can either star connect everything or daisy chain everything. Star connecting means it all goes back to one source(the power supply). Daisy chaining means you loop through each belt pack. You can of course do a mixture of these methods also. The connection between everything is made with standard balanced xlr cables(mic cables). Very simple.

crt

BTW: Welcome to CMN!

[waynehoskins]

It's a piece of cake. And in fact you can do a combination of daisychains and homeruns up to a theoretical limit in the thousands of packs (and that's only due to the loading of the buses; there are fixes for that). It only matters that they're connected in parallel.

The Clearcom bus, even though it uses the balanced XLR cable, is actually an unbalanced line-level audio bus (pin 3), and power is on pin 2; so it matters the 'phase' of the cable, but chances are that'll be a nonissue. And, bus audio being on pin 3 and being line-level-ish, you can pick it right off from there into another system like a recorder, probably without having to have an iso transformer.

Technical Projects / Production Intercom is directly compatible with Clearcom; that's the way I'd go if I didn't have Clearcom money.

[mci44]

i echo the suggestion for production intercom- i used them for several years and they work great. I also interfaced them with clear com systems multiple times and never had a problem. They are about the best bang for your buck you can get without going way high end! and their customer service is fantastic if you ever need help or repairs!