Sennheiser Spectera for “Salut Salon”

Picture: Salut Salon, Konzerthaus Dortmund

For more than two decades, chamber music quartet Salut Salon has been challenging the sometimes rigid conventions of classical concert formats with their unique blend of creativity, charm and wit. Their soundscapes are a fusion of classical music, folk, jazz, pop, tango nuevo, film soundtracks and their own compositions, creating an unmistakable cosmos full of sophistication, vitality and humour while making it all seem incredibly effortless. On Salut Salon’s current tour, excellent sound is ensured by Sennheiser’s Spectera wideband wireless ecosystem.

The Sennheiser Spectera wideband ecosystem has been used by Salut Salon since early summer 2025. The components are owned by Florian Hinz from Hinz Audio, who alternates with Thorsten Seeliger as the sound engineer for Salut Salon and was able to take delivery of the components via Sennheiser’s sales partner NORDLITE very soon after the system’s launch.

During the performance at the Konzerthaus Dortmund concert hall on the 8th of November 2025, Seeliger set up the Spectera Base Station in the concealed side area of the stage together with an L 6000 charging station. Two PoE-powered Spectera DAD antennas were installed close by on stands and were directed towards the performance area. Angelika Bachmann, Salut Salon’s founder and first violinist, Alvina Lahyani (violin), Maria Well (cello) and Kristiina Rokashevich (piano) used bidirectional Spectera SEK bodypacks for their personal in-ear monitoring and vocals. Four other SEK bodypacks were used for the cello, accordion and grand piano.

“I always used to set up wired microphones at the grand piano, but the transmission quality of the Sennheiser Spectera is excellent and I’m really pleased that I don’t have to lay – and see – any cables on the stage anymore,” says Seeliger, who has been Salut Salon’s sound engineer for almost two decades and is a Spectera expert at NORDLITE Event Solutions GmbH. In Dortmund, Seeliger used an 8MHz wide UHF frequency band with a centre frequency of 554MHz for the wireless audio transmission of Salut Salon. He selected the “Live” audio link mode for both microphone and IEM channels. The “Live” mode makes use of Sennheiser’s proprietary SeDAC audio codec with a latency of a mere 1.6 milliseconds.

“Other digital IEM systems have a latency of at least 2.7 milliseconds and they don’t offer any bidirectional functionality either,” Seeliger points out. “In my opinion, the audio quality in ‘Live’ mode is already so fantastically good that I don’t even need to use the PCM mode, which is completely lossless in operation but quite resource-intensive. In addition, if I used PCM, I would have to employ the second available 8MHz band of the Spectera system, and I prefer to keep this free as part of my backup plan if something goes wrong.” Depending on the configuration, the Sennheiser Spectera Base Station controls up to 64 audio links (32 inputs and 32 outputs) and uses up to two independent RF wideband channels instead of a large number of narrowband RF carriers.

The Spectera Base Station was connected to the digital audio console via MADI to keep the latency as low as possible. “Excessive latency in their in-ear monitors would definitely be a problem for the classically trained musicians of Salut Salon, particularly because Angelika Bachmann, for example, uses a single monitoring earpiece in her right ear and hears her violin directly in her left ear without an earpiece,” Seeliger explains. “In this case, an audible time delay would be unacceptable.”

Seeliger is highly impressed by the sound quality of the Sennheiser Spectera ecosystem: “In-ear monitoring no longer has any noise whatsoever and I haven’t noticed an artifact or experienced a dropout on tour. As far as the sound is concerned, there really is nothing that you could criticise when using Spectera. Particularly with a sampling rate of 96kHz, the sound is absolutely fantastic! Salut Salon will definitely be using Sennheiser’s wideband system for their concerts in the future – there’s no going back!”

www.salutsalon.de
www.nordlite.de
www.wp.hinz-audio.de
www.sennheiser.com