Sam Ryder's Road to Wembley Tour Ran on Sennheiser Spectera

British singer-songwriter Sam Ryder spent October and early November 2025 on his Road to Wembley tour, and the whole run used Sennheiser's Spectera wideband wireless system for microphones and in-ear monitoring. The tour was timed with his second album, Heartland, which came out on 17 October 2025, and it finished with a show at OVO Arena Wembley on 6 November.

The early dates took place in rooms with a personal history for Ryder: The Cavern Club in Liverpool, Cavern in Exeter, Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff and King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow. Each of these venues hosted two shows on the same day, a matinee and an evening set. Many of them hold around 300 people, yet the crew carried the same equipment it later used at the arena.

The people and the rig

Monitors were handled by Jamie Hickey, co-founder of Production & Touring Ltd, who has about 20 years of experience in the job; this was his first tour with Ryder. His business partner Mike Taylor, the production manager, pushed for Spectera on this run. Hickey joined Sennheiser's Spectera Pioneer Program through Peter Craig of the company's relations team, and technical application engineer Marcus Blight answered his questions on RF coverage.

The wireless setup was compact:

• one Spectera Base Station;
• four DAD antennas working on two 8 MHz TV channels;
• 18 SEK bodypacks.

Microphones on stage included SKM 6000 handheld transmitters, MD 421 Kompakt, e 904, e 935 and MKH 416 models. Ryder sang into an evolution e 935.

What the arena show demanded

At Wembley, Hickey ran 13 stereo in-ear mixes for nine musicians, a production manager, a playback technician, a management mix and a guest mix. Six of the bodypacks also worked as transmitters. According to Hickey, the single unit was full but still had spare capacity. He also said he could line-check the string section while the players were in their dressing room, roughly 80 metres from the stage.

One moment used the two-way design of the SEK bodypack. Kelvin Pratt, who taught Ryder guitar as a child, joined him for a solo on Go Steady. Pratt's pack was set to transmit and receive at once: his guitar went to the line system over Dante, through his Kemper Profiling Amp, and back again, all in the low-latency mode. Hickey noted that latency can be set anywhere from 0.7 to 2.7 ms. Over the tour the system was run on one and two RF channels, with both Dante and MADI.

“It's one unit,” Hickey said of having microphones and in-ears in a single system.