One of the biggest issues when you’re dealing with a crew of people is maintaining communication. When people are spread all over the place on set, you don’t want to be yelling at everyone. So, typically, some kind of headset or earpiece is used.
Hollyland’s Solidcom system isn’t new, but they have introduced the new Solidcom C1 Pro Roaming Hub to the range. It offers support for up to 20 wireless headsets that allow your crew to both hear what’s going on as well as speak to everyone else.
Hollyland’s SolidCom C1 series headsets ($499+) have proven to be very popular on film sets since they were launched in 2022. It was upgraded to “Pro” ($649+) in 2023, which offered increased interference resistance and range, better battery life and a more comfortable design.
Both of these systems, however, were limited to 9 units. You’d have one acting as a controller for your little communications network, with the other eight acting as remote units. This wasn’t a problem for very small crews, but now, the Hollyland Solidcom C1 Pro Roaming Hub bumps that up to 20 total headsets for larger crews.
The Roaming Hub offers a range of up to 500 metres (up from 350m) and seamless roaming between multiple hubs if you need to extend things further. Bear in mind that this is a line-of-sight range, and doesn’t take things like walls, people and other electronic devices into account. So, in the real world, it will be a bit less.
Each of the 20 headsets has full duplex communication with the hub, meaning it can both send and receive audio. Six channels are available, so you can split up those 20 headsets into smaller groups. This helps people to “stay in their lane” but also allows you to switch channels to talk to different departments.
And you don’t need to mess around with fiddly buttons and a tiny OLED display, either – although it has both of those things. The hub can be fully remote controlled and configured from a smartphone or tablet over Bluetooth using Hollyland’s app.
Price and Availability
The Hollyland Solidcom C1 Pro Roaming Hub is available to pre-order now for $5,999. It’s also available in a couple of bundles. One includes the Roaming Hub along with 10 C1 Pro headsets for $9,189, and the other includes the hub and 20 headsets for $12,179.
