Broadcast on Fox to an international televised audience of more than 100 million, this year’s Super Bowl Halftime Show was held at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida.
Sennheiser’s Digital 6000 wireless system was the microphone of choice for headline performer Shakira and her special guest Bad Bunny as the two Latin GRAMMY Award winning artists sang against a Miami cultural backdrop. ATK Audiotek handled the audio design for the pre-game festivities, referee microphones and the Halftime Show for the 23rd Super Bowl in a row.
“It is not a traditional concert environment where you can put antennas out on the side of the stage where they are relatively close to the performer,” observes Gary Trenda, Lead RF Technician for Orlando-based Professional Wireless Systems (PWS). “We deployed antennas on the sidelines and aimed them at where the stage was going to be; then we used an RF-over-fiber system to connect back to the receivers, which were in a rack room under the stands.”
For the Halftime Show performance, wireless receivers are usually placed at a further distance than at a typical rock concert, since the Halftime Show stage is temporary and must be disassembled after just 14 minutes. As such, the wireless must perform flawlessly – despite not having the advantage of close proximity to the stage. “In a show like this, reliability is critical,” says Trenda. “We’ve got to pick up the signal at a longer distance, and it really needs to be rock solid.”
For Shakira and Bad Bunny, the RF team deployed four channels of Sennheiser Digital 6000 wireless – three separate mic channels for Shakira, and one for Bad Bunny. Shakira sang several songs through a gold sparkled SKM 6000 handheld transmitter and MD 9235 dynamic cardioid capsule, before being joined onstage by Bad Bunny, who also sang through an SKM 6000 – colored in neon yellow, coupled with a distinctive red MD 9235 capsule.
“This is my second Super Bowl using Sennheiser digital systems, and our experience has been that even in a crowded RF environment, it is a very reliable microphone system,” says Trenda. As one would expect, the RF environment at the Super Bowl can be challenging: “In the stadium area alone, there are probably 500 frequencies of mics and IEM-type systems – so we are really looking to zero in on the mics we care about and filter out anything else. This is why we applied 6 MHz cavity tuned filters in front of the Sennheiser receivers. The filters are tuned specifically to the frequencies we were using for that pair of microphones.”
