About that Shure PGX14 …

People have asked me to write on how my Shure PGX14 is holding up. I’ve had my first gig with it, and I’ve had it for a while now, so I thought I’d write a review.

First, the bad stuff.

I’ve had some trouble turning the wireless on and off. There’s a trick to it: depress the button for 1 second and let go. It’ll take another second for the thing to come on. Impatient as I am, I kept pressing the button again and again, effectively turning it on and off and on and off again … Also, if you press the button for more than 5 seconds, the device will come on but it’s going to be very hard to turn it off again since pushing the buttong for 5 seconds will put it in “locked” mode which means it won’t respond to the buttons anymore.

I also noticed that you have to check the channel you’re using every time you want to play. On one occasion, I only got a faint signal. After a little research, I found out that the channel I had been using for a couple of rehearsals was somehow getting jammed. Looking for a new channel and synching the beltpack did the trick.

These are the only drawbacks I’ve had. I’ve been able to overcome the “loss of body” problem by simply adjusting the bass and treble setting on my equalizer. I’ve overcome the “less sustain” problem by simply adding a little bit more feedback on the delay I use for my solo-sound. These are problems you’ll have to deal with on any wireless system, even on those twice or thrice as expensive as the PGX14.

Second, the good stuff.

Playing wireless is incredible. No more fuzzing around with cables. No more looking around after a jump. No more getting your foot caught in a cable, or your cable caught underneath a wah or volume pedal.

I’ve played the set for one month now + 1 gig which comes to a total of approximately 19 hours. So far, I’ve had only two sets of batteries in the pack. I switched the second pack way before the indicator on the beltpack told me, “just to be on the safe side”. The advertised “8 hours on a battery” is certainly not a marketing stunt. The batteries I use are “el cheapo” sets. I bought a pack of 10 for 4 euro at a gaz station and I expected them to only last a few hours.

Conclusion: this is a hassle-free (dont’forget to RTFM) and very good wireless set. It’s not the cheapest set but as a UFH diversity set, it’s not expensive. If it broke, I’d cry a lot, save a lot then buy the same set again.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 14:13:00 and is filed under Gearhead. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.