Guitar Gear

A few weeks ago at band rehearsal, our other guitarist was setting up and I noticed he was using a wireless system. I asked him if it was the BOSS wireless, and he replied that he just couldn’t justify spending $200+ for a wireless system. Instead, he did a lot of research on the various budget systems out there and finally decided on an Xvive system.

He sent me a link to it because I thought he sounded great with it. But being a gear guy myself, I couldn’t resist doing my own research. And in my research, I stumbled upon the Swiff Audio WS-50 system. I read and watched several reviews and decided to give this system a try. And why not? At $56.00 on Amazon, it was less than half the price of the Xvive.

But what also sold me was that it operated in the UHF frequency range which was intriguing to me because all the rest of the systems either operated in the 2.4GHz or 5.8GHz range. Even before I saw a video that confirmed my concern about that, I wondered that with both WiFi and cellular operating in these frequency ranges if there might be a problem with those ranges being too crowded at times. It wasn’t a really big concern, but I still had it.

Then when I came across the WS-50, I noticed that it operated in the UFH range. When I was growing up in the days before cable TV was ubiquitous, there were two TV bands: VHF, which had all the major networks on it, and UHF where all the good cartoons like Speed Racer, Simba, and Spiderman played; not to mention Ultraman! Well… UHF has pretty much been supplanted with cable – and I supposed VHF as well – so with the WS-50 operating in the UHF range, my concern for frequency conflict was much lower.

So I pulled the trigger and it arrived a few days ago. It came almost fully-charged, so I just plugged the receiver into my amp and plugged the transmitter into my guitar and… It just worked. Almost ’nuff said. I practiced with it for almost an hour and had no signal drop-off or any interference whatsoever. Granted, I was in my house, so the chance of interference was pretty low. But yesterday, I brought it to my church gig to really run it through its paces. But instead of plugging the receiver directly into my amp, I plugged it into my pedal board. Again, it just worked.

I have to admit that I was a bit concerned about the quality of the unit, considering I only paid $56.00 for it. But wireless technology is so mature now that even low-cost units will be fairly high-quality. And the WS-50 rocked it! I haven’t compared how it sounds to a cable connection, but it plain sounds good, so I don’t really see the point in making the comparison.

And how it sounds is really all that matters to me. And it worked right out of the box! Now during my gig yesterday, during a break I turned both units off to save the batteries and when I went to play again, they both came up real quick.

One thing I do love about the WS-50 and frankly, the new wireless units that have come out on the market is that they just plug right into jacks. I had a Sennheiser remote for a long time and no doubt the quality was super-high with that unit. But it was a bit inconvenient in that the remote unit clipped onto either my strap or onto my belt. If I brought multiple guitars to a gig, I had to duct tape the unit to my strap.

But with the WS-50 and its ilk, I can turn off the transmitter, remove it from my current guitar, place it into my new guitar, then switch the unit back on. And it does it completely noiselessly! Super-convenient!