Sennheiser ships Digital 6000 mic system

Sennheiser is shipping its latest wireless microphone range, the Digital 6000.

Incorporating the Long Range transmission mode and proprietary audio codec from Sennheiser’s flagship Digital 9000 series, the system is desinged for rental companies, theatres, broadcasters and houses of worship for a flexible two-channel wireless solution that allows the use of existing accessory infrastructures. Designed for demanding live productions, Digital 6000 also addresses the challenges of the shrinking UHF spectrum: The system eliminates intermodulation, enabling more channels to operate in less spectrum space. 

Tom Vollmers, product manager at Sennheiser, said: “Digital 6000 is a wireless system that is all about performance. It brings the benefits of the Long Range mode of our benchmark Digital 9000 system to a two-channel receiver, while allowing the use of standard UHF antennas and existing Sennheiser capsules or microphones. Integration into analogue and digital workflows is seamless, and the fact that frequencies can simply be placed in an equidistant grid will help users in congested RF environments a lot.” 

The system comprises a two-channel receiver that is available in two different versions, a bodypack and a handheld transmitter, and a rack-mount 19” charging unit. The receiver’s switching bandwidth of 244 MHz (470 to 714 MHz) is covered by three transmitter versions (470 – 558 MHz, 550 – 638 MHz, and 630 – 718 MHz). Up to eight receiver units can be daisy-chained without the need for an additional antenna splitter; the multi-channel system will work with a single pair of antennas. System latency is three milliseconds.

If, as in difficult RF environments, the signal should get temporarily corrupted to such an extent that the transmission error correction can no longer repair it, the intelligent error concealment of Digital 6000 sets in. It employs intelligent learning algorithms to replace the corrupted part, enabling Digital 6000 to still transmit flawlessly where other digital systems fail.

For data security, it features switchable AES 256 encryption, with the transmitters also supporting the proprietary encryption of the Digital 9000 system. 

Existing antenna infrastructures can continue to be used as the system works with standard active and passive wideband UHF antennas, with the highly frequency-selective input filters being contained in the EM 6000 receiver.

The Digital 6000 transmitters use the same high-performance rechargeable accupacks as their Digital 9000 counterparts. The SKM 6000 handheld transmitter features Sennheiser’s standard capsule interface – it can therefore be used with any microphone head from the evolution wireless Series, the 2000 Series, and also with the special 9000 Series heads.

The SK 6000 bodypack excels as a high-end solution for wireless instruments such as guitar and bass – or is ready to use with a variety of Sennheiser clip-on microphones and headmics. These include the MKE 1 and the digital-transmission versions of the MKE 2 and MKE 40 clip-on microphones, plus the SL Headmic 1 and the HSP 4 headmic as well as the upcoming digital-transmission version of the HSP 2.