One of Hand Held Audio's more challenging clients recently has been shock dance act the Prodigy. Hand Held Audio has been supplying Shure SM58 hand held, guitar and PSM 600 in-ear radio systems to the band on a one-off basis since January as they prepare for the release of their next album.

The band has been extremely busy with festivals in Australia, USA, Ireland, Belgium, Mount Fuji in Japan, plus of course the recent Mean Fiddler festivals in Reading, Leeds and Glasgow over the August Bank Holiday weekend where Prodigy headlined. According to Hand Held's Nick Bruce Smith, the challenge has nothing to do with the gear spec which is straightforward enough, although the licensing element has been time consuming given the number of different countries and sites the band has covered. The interesting part is seeing the state of the equipment on its return. "We just never know quite what we'll get back, or in how many pieces!" said Nick Bruce Smith. "It's a bit of a 'Guess the Mystery Object competition. We know it definitely left here in the shape of a microphone, but it could easily come back as something that wouldn't look out of place in the museum of Modern Art!"

By way of explanation, Bruce Smith was heard to describe the band members as "quite exuberant" on stage and the Reading Festival was no exception. "At the end of the set Maxim just flung his microphone [a hapless SM 58] into a sidefill. Luckily for SSE, the sidefill just bounced it right back, but sadly the mic didn't survive the encounter. Following an inquest the jury returned a verdict of Death by Misadventure. The funeral took place last week." He also went on to add that all funeral expenses were undertaken personally by Maxim and that there were no hard feelings.

Hand Held Audio, specialists in wireless and in-ear technology for over a decade, has supplied all of the wireless and in-ear monitoring systems for the series of Radio One Big Sunday events that have taken place up and down the country. Hand Held has also been responsible for the licensing requirements at each venue. Tens of thousands of fans have already attended events in Swansea, Ipswich and Falkirk with another due in Leicester on 8th September. Audio contractor for One Big Sunday is Britannia Row who have been using their recently acquired X-Line line array system from Electro-Voice.

Although the requirements vary from show to show, Hand Held's Nick Bruce-Smith says that typically they have supplied around eight headsets, eight hand helds and eight in-ear systems per event, mainly from Shure. These plus whatever the bands bring of their own gear and the BBC's own radio systems means a total of up to 40 channels of radio that require licensing. Technical Earth's John "Freddo" Fredericks is Brit Row's man on the ground who looks after and polices all of the radio systems on site.

According to Bruce-Smith who is responsible for arranging the licensing, the biggest complication is lack of information from the bands concerning their requirements. "Because each band is only doing such a short set, it comes quite low on their priority list to sort out, so as a rule it all tends to be rather last minute," he explained. "We invariably start with a skeleton system which never actually comes together until the day before! We can't even use the previous event as a template because often the bands have changed and available frequency ranges differ from site to site. The event as a whole isn't too complex, but it can be a bit of a juggling act to pull it all together."

The Falkirk event has proved to be the most challenging so far with lots of equipment being brought in by bands which all required licensing coupled with the fact that there were very few frequencies available at that particular site. "In the end we decided we were just going to have to double up on some frequencies and make Freddo do some work for a change! Needless to say, it was all alright on the night!"

Hand Held have recently developed a new strain of custom ear monitors. They were approached by Craig Donaldson, sound engineer for Super Furry Animals, to see if acrylic ear moulds could succesfully be coupled to Sennheiser IE3 generic monitors. This made a lot of sense for the band who are Sennheiser endorsees.

Acrylic ear moulds were the original custom ear monitors as developed by Garwood back in 1990 and remain ever popular today. They were designed to couple with Sony walkman-style drivers to produce a great-sounding and inexpensive ear monitor.

The challenge in adapting the design for the Sennheiser drivers lay in their radically different shape and the sound exit tube in particular. A certain amount of head scratching is normal in such circumstances, and after due process it magically produced a couple of new engineering techniques. The drivers were in the moulds - now how would they sound?

The position of the drivers in relation to the ear canal is crucial to the sound that ear montiors deliver. It's usually the bass response that's affected if the position of the drivers is wrong. Not so with the IE3's however, which sounded fine in the moulds apart from lacking a little sparkle. Out they came for further modification of the exit tube to avoid the absorbtion of high-end that was occuring. Finally a fine new ear monitor was born!

Super Furry Animals are now on the road with their IE3/Acrylic monitors.

Sir Cliff gets on the road.

Cliff Richard is currently in rehearsals with his band prior to a major tour. Hand Held have been asked to supply radio mics and ear monitors, six of each,for the tour. Radio mics are the Shure Premier Series with the Beta58A being the preferred vocal capsule. For the in-ear systems the Shure PSM700 frequency agile unit was chosen for it's suitability in diffferent territories.

New Micro Monitor 2 ear monitors have been made for the evergreen star whilst other band members, including the backing vocalists, will be using custom acrylic monitors with Sony 848 drivers.

The tour goes through the UK and Europe in comprehensive fashion before going on to Australia and New Zealand, finishing up in February 2003. Definately not a summer holiday.