Astral Wireless Guitar System Sound Devices – Product Mix of the Week

New York, New York (May 23, 2024) – Introduced earlier this year at NAMM, Sound Devices’ Astral wireless guitar system is designed specifically for guitar and bass.

The system consists of the company’s A20-TX Transmitter with A20-TX Guitar Strap Clip, A20-TX Smart Guitar Cable and A20-Nexus True-Diversity Wireless Receiver. The system uses the company’s patented SpectraBand technology, which provides an extremely wide tuning range and bandwidth (169 MHz to 1525 MHz), enabling the use of the same transmitters and receivers in any country and around the world.

The heart of the Astral Wireless Guitar System is the patent-pending A20-TX Smart Guitar Cable, which incorporates the patented circuitry into the instrument’s ¼-inch plug and allows the user to adjust capacitance and impedance, ensuring that the instrument’s pickups are loaded equally with the wireless transmitter in the same manner how they would be connected to the instrument amplifier.

The cable capacitance can be adjusted from 0 pF to 1500 pF in 25 pF steps, corresponding to a cable length from 1 to 60 feet in one foot steps, while the impedance can be set to 100 k, 1 M and 10 M ohms; these parameters can be adjusted on the A20-TX transmitter or remotely from the A20-Nexus receiver.

Using the A20-TX Smart Guitar Cable, the system can handle an 18V peak-to-peak (!) input level and provides a dynamic range of 140dB, making it suitable for use with active “hot” pickups. The output from the instrument’s ¼-inch connector to the transducer input is balanced for quiet operation.

The Astral Wireless transmitter uses Sound Devices’ GainForward technology, which eliminates the need to adjust the audio gain in the transmitter. The system gain is 0 dB from input to output, thus maintaining the same gain structure as cable when used with pedalboards or connected directly to an amplifier.

The A20-TX transmitter operates for up to 12 hours and can be powered by three AA batteries (alkaline, lithium or NiMH) or lithium-ion or LiFePO4 batteries; the device has a built-in charger via the USB-C port.

The transmission is a proprietary, 100% digital RF modulation with long range and an audio bandwidth of 10 Hz to 20 kHz (±1 dB). The transmitter power can be set to low (2 mW), normal (10 mW), high (20 mW) and very high (40 mW). The delay is 1.9 ms.

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The A20-TX transmitter’s Lemo input supports a variety of audio input sources, including analog or line microphone, standard 2- or 3-wire lavalier microphones, and AES42 or AES3 digital sources. The transmitter can be controlled remotely via Bluetooth using the Sound Devices A20-Remote app for Android, iOS or iPad. A reversible guitar strap clip ensures the transmitter is held securely on any guitar strap, and the built-in recorder can store audio (32-bit floating point/48 kHz) on a removable micro-SD card.

A20-Nexus True-Diversity wireless receivers can accommodate 8 channels in a half-rack design, expandable to 12 or 16 channels with A20-Nexus 4-Channel Extensions. The receiver’s AutoAssign feature automatically scans the RF environment for clean frequencies, assigns them to multiple channels, and then automatically forwards those frequencies to transmitters that have been connected to the receiver using NexLink, Sound Devices’ exclusive remote control protocol. Pairing of A20 receivers and transmitters usually happens once during the initial setup, after which pairing is restored.

Colorful OLED displays on the front panel make it easy to control and monitor all functions, and the A20-Nexus can be remotely controlled via a web application running on any computer, smartphone or tablet.

Power can come from PoE+, DC input (with redundancy), AC mains with an optional adapter, or via the 8 Series audio devices via the device-to-device connector when docked.

Audio output is via Dante or dual DB25 connectors with mic, line or AES output, and the A20-Nexus receiver is capable of converting 16 channels of Dante to analog audio at mic or line level and/or AES via DB25. The device supports sampling rates of 44.1, 48 or 96 kHz.

Additional features of the A20-Nexus True-Diversity Wireless Receiver include dual front and rear BNC antenna jacks, front panel headphone output, two RJ45 ports for Dante and/or control; LTC/wordclock input, dual 4-pin Hirose DC outputs for powering IFB transmitters, camera jumps or other low-power peripherals, and a multi-function USB-A port that can be used to pair and sync timecode with A20 transmitters, USB keyboard connection for naming channels etc. or inserting a USB stick to update the firmware and save or load settings.