JK welcomes the BluePack

JK Audio, makers of professional grade and industry standard telephone audio interfaces, recently released a line of Bluetooth enabled audio products. For our industry, the BluePack Wireless Interview Tool seems to fit well.

The BluePack is about the same size as a production intercom style belt pack. The bottom panel has a XLR mic input for a dynamic interview microphone such as the Electro-voice RE-50B. A stereo tape level input allows only the user of the pack to hear audio from an external source. Prerecorded interview questions may be inserted into this path as a prompter. The interviewer plugs their IFB style headset into the headphone output and hears the interview mic on the left, audio from the cell phone on the right, and a stereo mix of the aux input. The top of the unit has gain controls for the microphone, aux input, and headphone output, as well as the Bluetooth connection button.

The Bluetooth system allows pairing to any cell phone with Bluetooth 2.0 capabilities. The bandwidth of a cellular phone is only 3.4 kHz, however, with a professional microphone, preamp, and monitoring system the user instantly improves the audio quality before it goes through the cell phone compression. The BluePack even has a stereo tape level output allowing a recording of full bandwidth interview mic on the left channel and the Bluetooth call on the right channel. The BluePack runs for nearly 10 hours on a single alkaline 9-volt.

Practical Uses

Radio remotes and television news reporters find the most obvious uses for the system. In the world of radio, dialing via an analog phone line for sports, remote promotions, etc. are diminishing if not completely gone. The cost savings of cellular phone plans and internet connections have taken the dial out of the equation. So the BluePack is the new instant remote interface. The broadcaster simply calls the station on their cell phone and uses the BluePack as a simple pre-amp and mixer.

Television reporters often find themselves getting to the scene of a newsworthy event, just as the live news broadcast is on air. Commonly a graphic of a cell phone pops on the television with a text statement like “Live at the scene, action news reporter Jane Doe via cell phone.” Now the station can equip that cell phone with a high quality pre-amp, and a ½-watt headphone amp that will drown out any number of sirens.

In situations where wireless duplex intercoms are not available, the BluePack is a relatively inexpensive solution for production communications. In addition, when used with Bluetooth enabled devices such as a laptop computer, full frequency bandwidth is available, making solid internet connections even better solutions for those same broadcasts.