Review: Hollyvox G51 wireless intercom

[pritch]

We've just invested in a four beltpack Hollyvox G51 system, and having spent a little while using it in anger, I thought the Blue Room might be interested to hear my thoughts.

Note: I'm not being paid to write this review - we bought the system ourselves, and sadly nobody's giving us freebies or anything because I'm writing this.

We considered a few other options. GreenGo from Canford and Bolero from Riedel were very impressive, but far more high-end than a small theatre is ever likely to need, quite complicated, and rather expensive. The Altair wireless system looked alright - but we felt that the Hollyvox system had the edge when we came to making a purchase.

It comes in below £4000 for a four beltpack system, and includes everything you need to get started. For that, you'll get:

• Four beltpacks
• Four headsets
• Four batteries installed in the beltpacks, plus four spares
• A charging cradle for up to eight beltpacks plus eight spare batteries
• A wireless base station
• A pair of long-range aerials for the base station
• A four wire to 2x XLR cable
• Adaptors to support the base station on a lighting stand or attach it to a truss
• Base and charger power supplies

Contents of the kit - this is the eight beltpack version which has the same base station and charger, but more beltpacks and headsets - image from the manufacturer

It all arrives in a knock-off Peli case. Hollyland are clearly aiming at the video market with the whole package, and I can see the case being a great option if you wanted to have comms for several crew members on location. As a venue, the case is frankly a bit of a pain because it's one of those things that seems like a shame to throw away, but it really is a massive lump to have lying around.

Hollyvox beltpack and headset with Tecpro for comparison

Getting started

At the most basic end of things, all you have to do is plug the base station in, grab some beltpacks and headsets, and you're talking. It's about as easy to use as standard wired systems.

Many theatre users will want to interface to a two wire system, and the base station has two and four wire inputs already available. When I first connected a Tecpro system to the two wire input it worked immediately but wireless beltpack users found that there was a distracting echo of their own voice with a very slight delay. 30 seconds playing around in the base station menus led me to the auto-nulling option, which played a deafeningly loud tone down the wired system without warning - but after that it seemed that the echo issue disappeared with absolutely no hassle.

The four wire input is a nice touch. It's allowed us to bring the stage relay mics into the comms system without costing us a penny. The system bridges the two and four wire inputs too, so Tecpro users will also hear whatever you've fed in through the four wire input.

The headsets connect with a rather non-standard connector which is perhaps slightly concerning. I know that I can obtain spares now, and I hope that I'll still be able to buy spares in a few years time. I'd like to be able to plug a standard XLR4 headset in, but I can't even get an adaptor to let me do that.

Permanent mounting of the base station required a bit of creativity as the included brackets were more suited to a temporary solution on location. Interestingly, the base station has slots for two NPF batteries - as a theatre these aren't really our area of expertise, but I understand they're fairly normal batteries for video applications, so I can see the ability to use and hot-swap batteries on location being a real boon for some people. We were pleased to find that, although it has a power button on the side, the base station will just power itself up straight away if you turn it off at the mains and power it back on. For a venue where the base station might be mounted somewhere relatively inaccessible, this is quite important as nobody needs to get ladders out every time you need to use comms.

Range and quality

Our theatre is a building that's just outright hostile to radio equipment. We've got walls built of... frankly, we're not sure what. Many of them have metal mesh in. The place just sucks up RF power. Using the base station with the included long-range antennas, we've found that we can adequately cover the whole backstage area, plus an area behind the control room. We found some areas of the theatre where the crew are unlikely to go, but as we were testing it we figured we might as well - being a digital system there's little warning that you're dropping into unusable radio coverage, for the most part it either works or it doesn't, and the first you'll know about it is when a voice in your ear tells you that the connection has been lost, perhaps 15-30 seconds after it dropped out.

When you're in-range, sound quality is crystal clear, including the audio coming in from the analogue wired inputs. The G51 has active noise cancellation on the microphones - in practice what we've found is that nearby voices are almost eliminated which can be quite nice. I wonder how it would work with something like loud live music? The manufacturer sells a very similar system called the Hollyland Solidcom M1, which lacks the environmental noise cancellation.

In use

The beltpacks are really compact, smaller than any of the other packs that I've looked at - perhaps slightly bigger than a radio mic pack. Curiously, by default they go on your belt horizontally; you can change the orientation of the belt clip, but the horizontal orientation appears to work well, especially as the headset connection doesn't get in the way when you sit down. It does mean that the mic switch isn't on top like it is on other systems, but it's easily found as it sits between the two stubby aerials. Because the screen isn't easily visible with the pack clipped to your belt, there's no easy visual telltale to see if your mic is live, but once you're familiar with the kit you can tell the difference between the talk and mute positions on the push button by feel.

I was slightly concerned that I'd find myself catching the aerials as I moved around backstage, but that doesn't seem to be the case so far - that said, because I tend to wear headsets on my left ear and have the beltpack on the left, it means the aerials are pointing backwards as I walk around so that might reduce the chances of me catching them on something. They're fairly flexible so I imagine they'd take a bit of abuse anyway.

We're yet to come close to draining a battery - a fairly normal 3-4 hour show  sees the battery drop by about 25%-50%. Having spare batteries included as standard is a nice touch if we need them, although they are a little fiddly to change.

You don't have a call facility - crew being able to walk around with their beltpack makes that less necessary than it might have been, but if you need the ability to send a call signal, you're not going to get anywhere with this system.

Additional features

There are a few things that we haven't tried, but which could be interesting to some people.

You have the option of having three talkgroups. Each beltpack can be in any number of talkgroups, and there are options from the management interface to choose which beltpacks can do what. The two and four wire interfaces can be added to specific talkgroups as required.

The base station supports up to eight beltpacks. Multiple base stations can be cascaded to give up to 32 wireless users.

In conclusion

I'm very impressed with the Hollyvox G51 system. The range seems great, even working off one base station and indoors. It's intuitive to use, audio quality is good and battery life more than acceptable. Analogue audio inputs being built into the base station is a very nice touch, and it works extremely well with Tecpro kit.

Spares availability is currently good - but this is very much a one-manufacturer solution right now, which concerns me slightly. Will I be able to buy a spare headset this time next year? I hope so, but can't guarantee it.

Pros

• Price
• Ease of use
• Built-in analogue connectivity

Cons

• No call signal function
• Cliff-edge drop in transmission at the edge of the range
• Concerns about getting spares in future

[david.elsbury]

Thanks! How does it fare (fair?) in louder environments, where some radio systems seem to struggle? 
 

also, do the headsets self mute when the mic boom is raised to the top position?

[pritch]

31 minutes ago, david.elsbury said:

Thanks! How does it fare (fair?) in louder environments, where some radio systems seem to struggle? 
 

I have absolutely no idea. Hope that helps!

Seriously, though - the noise cancellation on the microphones seems pretty good at rejecting ambient noise at fairly normal levels, how it would cope with loud live music is something we're fairly unlikely to test though. I'd say that the maximum volume on the beltpack, although fairly good, is probably not quite as loud as a Tecpro beltpack cranked all the way up.

I know they do dual-muff headsets as an option.

 

31 minutes ago, david.elsbury said:

also, do the headsets self mute when the mic boom is raised to the top position?

They do. If the beltpack is muted then pulling the mic boom down won't unmute it though.

[boatman]

I see that it uses the 1.9GHz band. That could be a problem at festivals or other venues where there's a lot of freestanding metalwork around.

Other than that concern, it sounds like a very versatile system. Thanks for the review.

[J Pearce]

2 hours ago, boatman said:

I see that it uses the 1.9GHz band. That could be a problem at festivals or other venues where there's a lot of freestanding metalwork around.

To be fair, most of the available systems use 1.9GHz or 2.4GHz - there's so few other bands that are available across all territories.

[d_korman]

Interesting - but I can't find any UK end-user supplier. Where did you buy it?

[pritch]

Prolight Concepts are the UK distributor - https://www.prolight.co.uk

I imagine they'll want to direct you to a reseller in your local area who they work through.