d&b solutions deployed Sennheiser Spectera for the installation of Sarah Mullally as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, supporting a live BBC broadcast from Canterbury Cathedral in the UK.
The ceremony, held on 25 March 2026, marked the first time a woman had been installed as Archbishop of Canterbury. Around 2,000 guests attended the service, including Prince William and the Princess of Wales, representatives from the Commonwealth and United Nations, and global church leaders.
The production required wireless audio coverage across the full 160m length of the cathedral, with d&b solutions deploying 42 Spectera beltpacks across two base stations.
What began as a smaller live stream developed into a full BBC broadcast, increasing the requirement for microphones, resilience and a robust feed path to the outside broadcast unit.
d&b solutions selected Spectera for the project because of its RF performance and ability to operate across multiple RF zones. The final system included two Spectera base stations, eight DAD antennas and 42 beltpacks, all running in mic mode.
The Archbishop was fitted with two beltpacks and two lavalier microphones, with one pack assigned to each base station to provide redundancy for the broadcast’s most critical source. All microphone elements used on the production were DPA, including the near-invisible headsets used by the 16-piece African choir.
Canterbury Cathedral’s size created a significant technical challenge, with some antenna cable runs exceeding 100m. Rather than relying on a more complex RF-over-fibre system with combiners, d&b solutions combined the CAT5 cables of Spectera’s DAD antennas with fibre using media converters with PoE injection.
The Spectera base stations’ Dante outputs fed d&b solutions’ wider PA network, while MADI outputs were sent directly to the OB truck, giving the BBC a resilient audio path alongside the digital split provided by d&b solutions.
Remote control of pack parameters, including gain, was also critical because not every microphone could be rehearsed on its intended wearer before the live service. Spectera enabled mobile terminal control through the main RF carrier, avoiding the need for separate antenna infrastructure for control data.
d&b solutions also integrated Spectera with Sonoros, a UK-developed control and monitoring application, allowing mic engineers to monitor system status and listen to individual feeds from anywhere on the Wi-Fi network via laptop or iPad.
The system was installed while the cathedral remained open to the public. The BBC loaded in on Monday, rehearsals took place on Tuesday and the live broadcast went out on Wednesday without incident.
George Veys, project manager at d&b solutions, said: “We chose Spectera for this project because of its market leading RF performance and, due to the size of the Cathedral, the ability for the product to perform in multiple RF zones seamlessly. This is exactly the kind of project we envisioned Spectera would be perfect for, and it performed brilliantly.”
Images courtesy of Lambeth Palace, credit Andrew Baker