Production sound mixer Phillip Palmer used Lectrosonics Digital Hybrid Wireless to record almost all of the dialogue and many incidental and ambient sounds for El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, which recently premiered globally on Netflix.
   

Palmer made use of three Venue 2 wideband modular receiver systems, eight SMV transmitters for body mics, four HMA plug-on transmitters for boom and plant mics, a couple of older UHs which were used for the ‘voice of God,’ on set, and a couple of LT transmitters for sound department communication.

“Wideband tuning is important given the increasingly crowded spectrum we have to work with these days,” says Palmer, “so the Lectrosonics Venue 2 was an obvious choice. It’s a rackmount chassis that can hold up to six receiver modules, so you can mix and match tuning ranges based on what transmitters and frequency blocks you’re using.”

Lectrosonics’ wideband capability, receiver-transmitter pairing and quick switching of frequencies reportedly proved invaluable. “There’s a lot of military, industry and push-to-transmit sources like walkie-talkies” in and around Albuquerque, Palmer says. “What might be wide open in the morning can have interference in the afternoon. The frequency agility that Lectrosonics provides has saved my bacon on many occasions.”