Jam band Umphrey’s McGee is offering a new way to enjoy a concert experience.
By leveraging wireless technology to broadcast music from the sound engineer’s mixing board to band members, fans can rent a wireless receiver and headphones and hear what the musicians hear.
Although this experiment is still developing in its early stages, the small percentage of fans who have tested it out have been very positive about the quality and volume of the sound. The group is now aiming to lower the costs of operation.
Image by Mark Johnson, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC 2.0).
Japanese artist Cornelius was doing this 15 years ago except with low power FM broadcast and everyone brought their own headphones/recievers/
As were the Flaming Lips touring for the Soft Bulletin. In fact they did a couple shows without any amplification to speakers, they just broadcast the sound to an FM transmitter and everyone listened on FM radios with headphones. I guess people didn’t like it because by the time I saw them they were amplifying to speakers and broadcasting via FM. I would have loved to seen an earlier, no speaker show…
The concept’s been around for a while:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_disco