British Columbia, Canada (September 2, 2025)—Fox’s hit show Murder in a Small Town returns September 23 for its eagerly anticipated second season, but while fans are ready to see the excitement on-screen, veteran location sound mixer Ben McDonald has already had plenty of thrills behind the scenes, capturing action and audio against the odds.
Specifically, Murder in a Small Town frequently demands capturing dialogue across long, continuous takes involving vehicle interiors, wide establishing shots and Steadicam operators in dense woods.
“On a typical day, I might be running eight wireless channels across three cameras: one in a vehicle, one as a wide establishing shot, and a Steadicam deep in the woods, covering 500 meters or more,” says McDonald. “I have to position my RF Venue antenna so that it’s hidden from the shot yet perfectly placed between all three camera locations to avoid dropouts, and I’m able to pull it off consistently. My mics are a typically a combination of DPA, Schoeps and of course, the Sanken CS-3 short shotgun. The Diversity Fin gives me the confidence to know I’ll get everything without dropouts, even in the most unforgiving RF environments.”
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Operating under the banner of his company Soundscape 3, McDonald has spent nearly 20 years mixing sound for feature films and streaming series, much of it in the breathtaking but logistically challenging wilderness of British Columbia. McDonald typically runs 50–100 feet of BNC cable to mount the Diversity Fin in a position hidden from camera but equidistant from action. Indoors, he’ll plant the antenna on banisters or around corners. Outdoors, it goes on 20-foot stands or inconspicuous mounts, always pushing the limits of range. “The Diversity Fin lets me pull off situations I don’t think would be possible with any other system, sometimes on a weekly basis, sometimes daily,” says McDonald.
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McDonald’s Diversity Fin has survived eight years of punishing fieldwork—including three plunges into the Pacific Ocean, being blown across a helipad by a helicopter rotor, smashed on the ground four times, and even blasted by a windstorm that snapped off one of its ears. “A production assistant once came up to me and said, ‘Hey Ben, I never told you this, but a year ago when we were working together, I knocked your antenna into the ocean.’ We were on a show with multiple barges, each of us on our own little platform, and he explained that after it fell in, he fished it out, reset it, and never mentioned it until that moment.”
