The case for never owning a guitar wireless system.
I've tried six. They were all worse than a cable. Here's why I think they always will be.
I've tried six different wireless systems over the last fifteen years. Shure GLXD, Line 6 G50, Boss WL-50, Xvive U2, Sennheiser EW-D, and a Lectrosonics rig I borrowed from a session player for a week. They were all worse than a cable. Not all in the same way. But all worse.
I know this is an unfashionable position. Wireless has gotten dramatically better. The latency is functionally zero on the good ones. The dropouts on 2.4GHz systems are rarer than they used to be. The high-end pro systems are bulletproof in a way the consumer-grade ones aren't. I am not arguing that wireless is bad in some absolute sense.
I'm arguing that wireless solves a problem most guitarists don't actually have, introduces problems most guitarists don't anticipate, and costs more — in money and in attention — than the value it delivers. I have not had a single gig in fifteen years where a wireless system would have been the difference between a good performance and a bad one. I have had several where a wireless system was the cause of a bad performance.
The argument for wireless is usually: 'I can move around the stage.' This is real. If you are in an arena rock band where your stage moves matter to the show, you need a wireless. If you are a working guitarist playing rooms with stages between six feet and twenty feet wide, you do not. The distance you can cover with a 20-foot coiled cable is exactly the distance you can usefully cover on a stage that size.
The argument against wireless is several things at once.
One: it adds a battery to your signal chain that you have to remember to charge or replace. This is a small thing until it isn't. The number of times I've watched a guitar player frantically swap a 9V mid-set because their wireless transmitter died is not zero. It's not even close to zero. Cables don't die.
Two: it adds a failure point. The transmitter has a 1/4-inch jack that wiggles. The receiver has antennas that can be bent. The RF link can be interfered with by anything from a venue's DMX lighting controller to a soundman's wireless intercom on the same frequency band. None of these failure modes happen with a cable. The cable is two pieces of metal in a shielded sleeve.
Three: it almost always sounds slightly worse than a cable, in a way that's hard to articulate but real. The companders in even the good systems compress the dynamic range subtly. The frequency response of a properly designed wireless system is essentially flat but the transient response — how the system handles fast attack on a strummed chord — is consistently a hair behind a cable. I have done this in a level-matched A/B with a buffered-bypass tuner as the switch. Every player I've shown the test to has picked the cable. Every one.
Four: it costs $300 to $800 for the systems you'd actually want. That's two pedals. That's a vintage tube. That's a tech fee for getting your amp re-capped. The opportunity cost is real.
The only people who I think genuinely need a wireless are players who are doing real choreography (specific arena rock and pop touring), players whose stage is so cluttered with other people's cables that running another one is a fire hazard (some theater pit gigs), and players who have spent years on cables and just got tired of them, which is a valid quality-of-life argument but not a tone argument.
If you're none of those things and you're shopping for a wireless because the YouTube ad told you it would be 'liberating': I'd buy a really good 20-foot cable, a really good 10-foot patch cable, and use the rest on something that will actually change your playing. A wireless will not change your playing. It will only change what happens between your playing and the amp, and that change is, almost always, a small step backwards.
— Jason
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