The events sector in India is no doubt changing in the recent past and Sennheiser would like its hardware or software to evolve according to this change. We caught up with Naveen Sridhara, Sales Director at Sennheiser India, to talk about the new Spectra Transmitter platform from the company, the increasing influence of AI in pro audio sector and how, according to him, convenience and not technology, will rule the next phase of professional audio.
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The key product here is Spectra, which is a transmitter platform and one that Sridhara is clearly excited about. For rental houses, the key point would be the simplicity it provides. As he said, “For a rental company, you have 64 channels of wireless and they need to carry many racks… that has been simplified into just a small device which can do 64 channels, so you can even carry it with you in your car and set up the whole thing.” The product also combines the extensive network of analog antennas into one digital antenna which can be carried over the network cables and body packs for transmission and reception into one bi-directional body pack.
When AI came into the discussion, Sridhara immediately positioned it as being a software and cloud solution story and not hardware-focused. The Sennheiser control software named Sound Base is not exclusive to their devices. “It’s taking care of any wireless equipment, wireless microphone in the environment… we also have our competition, anything can be used, put together,” he noted, positioning this solution as an opportunity for managing fragmented and multi-vendor RF environments.
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As for headphones, the discussion took a turn towards HD 480s that were made for professional studio monitoring applications. According to Sridhara, this is a real gap-filler for Sennheiser products as “This is true, I would say position filler is one in that segment. We did not have anything.” He believes that there is room for growth in terms of usage far beyond audiophiles and into mixing and studio workflow as part of Sennheiser’s range of Neumann monitors for creators.
The topic of the live events boom in India was raised on multiple occasions during the discussion. Sridhara cited the emergence of such artists as Karan Aujla, Diljit, as well as The Wish, which is an all-female troupe, to demonstrate that live events are not the exclusive privilege of a limited number of established artists anymore. In addition, Sridhara highlighted sports broadcasts as an area often overlooked as a source of growth because sports broadcasts have already exceeded the reach of news coverage. From a geographical perspective, the country has already surpassed Delhi and Mumbai.
On where the industry is headed, Sridhara was candid about the shift his own teams have to make. “The challenge is to build competency in the market,” he said, pointing to the move from hardware dependence toward cloud-driven software infrastructure that dealers and engineers will need to learn from scratch.
Asked for the single biggest takeaway shaping professional audio’s next phase, his answer was blunt: convenience. “You may have the best technology, but if it’s not really, it’s quite complex to handle, still you know the customer is still struggling,” he said. Spectra’s plug and play scanning is built around exactly that problem.
One thing that hasn’t shifted is R&D. Despite India’s growing importance as a market, Sridhara confirmed the company’s core R&D remains centred in Germany, at least for now.
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