Monitor engineer and RF tech Dave White put Sennheiser's wideband Spectera system through its paces across Ed Sheeran's massive stadium run, and it's already changing how he thinks about RF coordination.
Dave White has been handling RF for Ed Sheeran since 2014. Over that time, he’s moved through Sennheiser’s 2000 Series, Digital 9000 and Digital 6000. Upgrading each time meant a big jump in quality. Spectera was the next step, and for ‘The Loop’ tour, the timing couldn’t have been better.
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Launching in Auckland back in January before rolling through Australia, with South America and the United States still to come, the production runs across a main stage and a B stage. Managing a vast area with a conventional narrowband system would have meant complex switching, over-driven amplifiers and a lot of coordination headaches. “With Spectera, everything is off-the-shelf and designed for the job,” White says.
FOH engineer Simon Kemp noticed the sonic difference right away. “Moving from 6000 to Spectera has been a real sonic improvement,” he says. “The sound of Ed’s guitars has become even more transparent, and the dynamic range has really helped him move from very quiet, gentle songs to loud, in-your-face moments.” Sheeran’s show runs with no playback and no auto-tune, with the MM 445 capsule feeding a fully digital signal chain from transmitter to speakers. There’s nothing to mask a weak link, and by Kemp’s account, Spectera hasn’t been one.
Photo credit: Mark Surridge
RF setup time has gone down significantly, too. Coordinating 30 channels on a narrowband system means calculating and tuning each one individually. Spectera selects a centre frequency and handles the rest automatically within a chosen frequency block. White has gone from 30 minutes of coordination down to approximately seven.
On such a large-scale tour, there’s also weather to consider. Auckland’s opening shows brought what White calls “biblical” rain. So much rain that Sheeran performed in a raincoat. Australian dates have ranged from 40-plus degree heat to sudden downpours and not a single handheld or bodypack has failed across any of it.
Spectera also helped reduce White’s equipment footprint significantly. A 32U RF rack from the previous tour has been replaced by three Spectera units sitting within the existing monitoring setup – a substantial reduction in freight and complexity.
The Spectera handheld, new for 2026, is also out on the tour in beta. White has been feeding notes directly back to Sennheiser’s development team, and calls it the missing piece of the puzzle.
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