Wisycom Streamlines Worldwide Workflow

With OneRepublic's relentless international schedule, Monitor Engineer Chris Marinaccio is tasked with maintaining consistent, high-fidelity monitoring in vastly different RF landscapes.

Following the "Escape to Europe" leg, the band paused briefly in California before continuing to Australia and Asia, with further European dates to come—demanding gear that performs reliably in any venue worldwide.

For wireless in-ears, Marinaccio relies on Wisycom's system centred on the MTK952 dual transmitters, MPR50 IEM receivers and ADB3 omnidirectional antennas. "Our production manager, Dave McMullen, decided to switch to Wisycom before I joined the team, and I was extremely impressed when I came on board," Marinaccio said. "It’s the cleanest and clearest monitoring I’ve ever had in over 13 years of being a monitor engineer."

The scale of the production hasn’t fazed the setup. "I'm using one antenna for the band on both the main and B stages, and I still have plenty of power to reach the B stage 45 meters out, even with the antenna aimed at the main stage," he added. He notes the rig’s stability even in dense RF cities such as London and Las Vegas: "I have no dropouts or issues. When you use Wisycom, it’s clean and you can stack additional wireless gear so close together."

With back-to-back shows across multiple regions, Marinaccio says Wisycom’s ultra-wideband capability removes the need for region-specific systems. "The ability to put frequencies anywhere lets me work around RF chaos, especially in the U.S., where the RF range is very congested," he said. "Being able to choose whatever part of the spectrum available at a given venue, instead of being trapped in frequency blocks, is awesome. This is less critical in Europe, where the spectrum is more open, but in the U.S., it’s often the difference between a smooth show and consistent RF headaches."

The crew also uses spectrum gaps in the U.S. to accommodate comms and intercom, which Wisycom helps manage efficiently. "We can just park the wireless there, knowing it’s going to be mostly a clean area for RF," he explained. "We don’t have to worry about all 18 channels, we can focus only on 10 or 12, which makes coordination more simplistic."

Having moved from studios to live touring, Marinaccio prizes fidelity. The transparency of the Wisycom chain means he doesn’t need to compensate for noise, compression or colouration in his mix. "With Wisycom, you’re not dealing with noise," he said. "You turn it on, and you don’t know it’s on. That clarity is essential for the band, especially for those members who rely on bone conduction due to ear drum damage. It’s great that the noise floor is basically non-existent, otherwise it would be way tougher to hear everything."

He added that competing systems can "flatten" mixes under compression due to companding, forcing engineers to adapt their approach. "With Wisycom, I can compress a lot because it’s so transparent," he continued. "I can mix how I want to mix, without having to rethink gain structure, which is really nice. The result is an in-ear mix that responds more like a wired studio headphone, which provides natural EQ and dynamics without the sound collapsing in on itself."

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