AKG wireless mic

A clear plastic cover protects the LCD display, which is small, but readable, and in normal use displays remaining battery time. At first sight, I thought it was reading '45', which I took to be minutes, but when held in your right hand the display faces you upside down and it was actually telling me '5h' (ie. five hours of battery life). There's a cautionary note included with the user guide, pointing out that the battery life reading may not be accurate unless you are using a Duracell or Energizer type, but the battery supplied with the mic was called Power Plus, so perhaps they're OK as well!

The On/Off/Mute/Programming switch is a decent size, big enough to operate with your thumb, but it's necessarily recessed to prevent accidental operation, and I found that sliding it to On with my thumb caused the battery compartment on the other side to slide open under opposing pressure from my fingers — no big problem for me, but not something I'd want someone on stage to be doing, especially as the battery cover is not held captive once unfastened. The piece of clear plastic that covers the display extends quite a way along the middle section of the body, which is right where the mic is held. It is slightly raised and looks as if over time it might be vulnerable to scratching (for example, from rings), but it doesn't actually make contact with whatever surface the mic is laid on so won't suffer any damage there.

There are no other controls on the hand-held unit, as the setting of any adjustable parameters is done by sending an infrared signal from the receiver. This is a good thing, in that there are no frustrating miniscule setup buttons to press, but it does mean that this mic can only be re-programmed by using a compatible AKG receiver — so mixing and matching with other makes of kit in an emergency wouldn't really be an option.

One interesting feature of the hand-held mic is that it only requires a single AA battery, which, provided you use a decent one as recommended, gives several hours use, and therefore enhances this system's green credentials and reduces operating costs. A rechargeable battery can be used instead of an alkaline one, and there are external charger contacts built into the tail of the mic for use with an optional charger unit — a neat idea. Also at the tail end is a narrow plastic moulding, which detaches to reveal a flat surface. A label can be put on here to identify the mic or its channel/frequency and a clear plastic cover used instead. Both the see-through cover and a set of specially shaped labels are supplied in the box.

The casing seems pretty sturdy and well put together, and the external power supply unit is an in-line type, which is much better than a clunky wall-wart. The power cables (either side of the PSU) are nice and long, and the connection into the receiver is an excellent design that makes good positive contact and uses a knurled locking ring to hold it securely in place. The two compact antennae connect at the rear of the unit using standard BNC plugs, which hold them firmly in position, and also included in the kit is a set of rackmount hardware.

There are balanced XLR and unbalanced jack outputs to suit a variety of connected equipment, and the XLR line output level can be padded by 30dB to feed microphone inputs by means of a small slider switch.

The front panel provides an on/off switch, which is recessed to avoid accidental operation, and a rotary AF output level control — a nice touch, as it's not always convenient to have to cycle through menus and so on if you need to perform a quick level tweak in the middle of a gig. Over to the right-hand side there are three push buttons for programming, which are easy to use. The outer ones take you left and right through various pages and parameter values, and the middle one is used as an 'enter' key for confirming choices and also for selecting different operating modes. The centre of the front panel is occupied by a backlit LCD display where all the vital information appears. Given that this screen is effectively the 'nerve centre' of the system, it's quite small and I found it difficult to read some of the information displayed. At the top of the panel are LEDs, which indicate RF signal present, RF mute, AF signal 'OK' (ie. between -40 and +3dB) and AF overload. Two green LEDs also show which receiver diversity path — A or B — is active at any time, and if there's no RF signal being received, they tend to flash quickly in turn, which alerts you to the possibility that nothing is coming in on that channel. The receiver runs in either 'setup' or 'lock' mode. Setup is used when making any adjustments to channel, gain and so on, and when everything is to your liking, then switching to lock mode prevents any further adjustments and the WMS 450 just gets on with being a radio mic system.

One feature I really liked was the 'retry' step, which forms part of the IR programming process. When setting up channels and sending the information to the transmitter, there's a chance that it may not be properly received (for example, you might not have lined the two IR windows up properly or the mic may not be close enough), and rather than having to start over, the system says 'retry' and lets you have another go until a successful transfer has been made.

The audio level output from the microphone is also directly programmed from the receiver unit, and there appears to be a choice of 'HI' and 'LO', but nothing in between. The manual advises that you would use 'HI' for the dynamic capsule and 'LO' for the condenser, but I found that it was quite easy to light the clip LED on the receiver when using this setting. Changing to the lower setting stopped this happening, and there's plenty of output level available on the receiver to compensate for the reduction in signal level.

I gave the mic to two singers and an experienced presenter/compere, and all three liked using it (I could have sold it twice!) The physical balance is pretty good, with a slight nose-heavy feel, which some vocalists prefer. And another advantage is that although a good quality stand clip is supplied, it fits well into any bog standard type. Some radio mics in my collection are a bit of a weird shape and losing the original clip is a right royal pain, but there are no such issues with the AKG. Although the mic is light and has a moulded body, it seems tough enough for the road — it did get dropped accidentally during the review, and the battery cover and ident label cover both stayed in place.

I found the RF performance to be very stable and reliable over a respectable distance; so long as the line of sight between transmitter and receiver isn't compromised, and without too much interference around, you should be looking at distances over 50m (depending on the exact conditions) with no trouble.

There's a menu subset called 'X-TRA', which gives access to squelch settings, channel naming, system information and settings for the status screen display. The 'STATUS' screen is the main LCD display on the receiver, and within this setup area you can choose one of three parameters, which will flag up a warning and even change the backlight colour from green to red. The options are battery warning (60 minutes remaining), AF clipping (at the receiver input, although there is a permanent red LED that monitors this as well) and low RF signal (automatically mutes the audio output to prevent undesirable noise).