Production Mixer Shares Tales of Wireless Feats

Orlando, FL (December 4, 2024)—High Five Sound founder Edson Alvarez has long relied on Lectrosonics Digital Hybrid Wireless gear on documentary, reality, auto racing and news productions, and he has stories to tell.

Once, in Fiji, Alvarez recalls, “We were working on a reality-survival type competition show there. We had, like, a total of 20 SMDB and SMDWB transmitters on cast members, and though we wrapped them up pretty tightly, some would inevitably come back having taken on salt water. At that location, there was no time to send them back and wait for new ones to arrive. My supervisor had read that you could disassemble a pack, remove the batteries, expose the motherboard, clean it with distilled water, then you dry it out in the sun. I’m not saying to try this at home, but we had no choice, and it worked. If we had this kind of accident, we could get packs back up and running in about three hours.”

Closer to home, promotional and documentary shoots inside Disney theme parks have brought different challenges. “Walt Disney World is, as you’d imagine, a very active RF environment because of all the things that are under some kind of radio or remote control,” Alvarez explains. “I usually have to stay in the A1 block, but I can always find six or seven channels I can use, thanks to Lectro receivers’ ability to find and hang onto frequencies. I was just there for four days, in fact, working across three of the different parks. I was able to use mostly the same frequencies all the time, which was surprising given that I had four or five people miked at all times.”

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High Five’s work has also taken the crew behind the scenes to show viewers how Disney works its animatronic and multimedia magic. “Sometimes we need IFB inside a ride,” Alvarez says. “For this, one of my bags is always equipped with a T4 transmitter, as if necessary, it can go up to 250 milliwatts of output power, which is more than enough to cut through all the metal in the structure and the RF in the air. Next to my SRCs, I also still use the UCR411 even, and honestly, I think it has a certain magic about signal acquisition.”

His most recent gig, for the Rafa Racing Club at Florida’s Sebring Raceway, was a frequency coordination challenge: “I have eight channels in my bag for mics. We use two scanners to home in on the conversations going on between drivers and crews. Then there’s the IFB for the producers, which I have on T4 [transmitters]. At one point, we couldn’t find the coaches, but we had their signal. The producer was really impressed, and he was probably 70 yards from our position. That gives me a lot of confidence in Lectrosonics.”