The Penn Group It just took home the top prize at InfoComm 2026. We have been putting KLVR’s 48-bay rack charger in front of churches, theaters, and touring crews, and the savings story is even better than the trophy suggests.
Every audio team has lived this moment. The room is filling, the worship set starts in four minutes, and a handheld mic flashes red on the receiver. Somebody sprints to the drawer of loose AA batteries, peels open a fresh four-pack, and prays the next one lasts through the closing song. Multiply that scramble across a year of services, rehearsals, and midweek events, and you are looking at a real line item, a real pile of dead cells in the trash, and a low but constant hum of risk under everything you do.
The KLVR Charger Pro was built to end that scramble. It is a single rack unit that holds 48 rechargeable AA or AAA batteries, charges them safely and fast, and tells you exactly how healthy each cell is before you load it into a mic. In June 2026 a panel of judges named it the Best New Product of InfoComm 2026 in rAVe’s Best of InfoComm Awards, the single overall award handed out at the largest pro AV show in North America. That is not a category ribbon. Out of every display, camera, speaker, and control system on the floor, the judges pointed at a battery charger and said this one matters most.
We think they got it right, and we want to show you why. The Penn Group is an authorized KLVR dealer, so yes, we sell it. We also install, rent, and service gear for a living, which means we have a low tolerance for products that look clever in a press photo and fall apart on a real call. This review walks through what the Charger Pro actually is, the engineering that earned the award, and the part most reviews skip: the money. By the end you will have a clear picture of whether it belongs in your rack, and roughly how fast it pays you back.
The short version
A 1U charger holding 48 true 1.5V Li-Ion cells, rated for 1,200 charge cycles each, with software that shows you real battery health. One full pack used to its lifetime can replace up to 57,600 disposable batteries. MSRP is $3,199.00. For most venues that burn through alkalines, it pays for itself well inside its service life and then keeps saving.
Why a battery charger won Best of Show
It helps to understand what InfoComm is. It is the room where the AV industry shows off its newest and most expensive ideas, the giant LED walls and AI cameras and signal processors that integrators spec for stadiums and corporate campuses. A judging panel that picks a rechargeable battery system as the best thing in that building is making a statement about priorities. The flashiest technology in a venue still goes silent the instant a two dollar cell dies in the wrong wireless pack.
KLVR won because it solved a boring problem that quietly drains budgets everywhere, and it solved it in a way nobody had quite nailed before. Disposable batteries are expensive over time, wildly wasteful, and unpredictable. The proprietary rechargeable systems that some microphone brands sell solve part of the problem but lock you into one manufacturer and one device family. Consumer rechargeables from the electronics aisle are cheap up front but cannot hold the voltage that professional RF gear expects, so they trip false warnings and die early. KLVR sits in the gap: pro-grade rechargeable cells in the standard AA and AAA sizes every brand already uses, managed by hardware and software built for show conditions.
The company behind it is not a battery conglomerate chasing a trend. KLVR is an Oslo-based outfit started by sound engineers and working musicians, the kind of people who have personally done that four-minutes-to-doors battery sprint. That shows up in the details. The award is recognition that the details add up to something the whole industry needed.
“AV teams need pro-grade batteries they can trust in critical live environments, and that work across different devices from their favorite audio brands.”
Stian Sagholen, CEO and Founder, KLVR
What the KLVR Charger Pro actually is
Physically, the Charger Pro is a lightweight 19 inch rack unit that takes up a single rack space (1U) in your existing audio rack. Slide it in above your wireless receivers and it disappears into the system. Inside that one space sit 48 charging bays, enough to hold a full inventory of cells for a large wireless rig with spares left over. You can run AA or AAA in it, which covers nearly every wireless microphone, bodypack transmitter, and in-ear monitor receiver on the market.
The cells are the other half of the system, and they are where KLVR did the hard engineering. These are custom 1.5 volt lithium-ion batteries, not the 1.2 volt nickel-metal hydride cells most people picture when they hear “rechargeable AA.” Each one is rated for 1,200 charge cycles and delivers roughly 30 percent more runtime than typical commercial rechargeables. They charge quickly too. A full bank of AA cells comes back to full in under three hours, and AAA cells in about two, so a set you drained at the morning service is ready again long before the evening one.
What turns a good battery into a manageable system is the Klvr Control software. Connect a laptop and you get full visibility into every cell: state of charge, time to ready, cycle history, and health. Inside the charger drawer, simple LED indicators give you the same read at a glance when you do not want to open software at all. You stop guessing. You stop loading a pack and hoping. You look, you see green, you go.
A note on that last spec, because it matters for bigger rooms. The Charger Pro has two switched gigabit network ports and uses an IEC C13 input with a C14 link output. In plain terms, you can chain power and network across several chargers, so a large theater or broadcast facility running hundreds of cells can stack multiple units and manage them as one fleet. KLVR also ships a 48-battery transport pouch designed for touring, air travel, and remote shoots, which we will come back to in the road use section because it is more useful than it sounds.
The voltage story, and why it decides reliability
This is the part that separates KLVR from the cheap rechargeables people have tried and abandoned, so it is worth two minutes even if you are not a battery nerd.
A fresh alkaline AA puts out 1.5 volts. Professional wireless gear is designed around that number. The receiver watches the battery voltage and shows you a fuel gauge based on it. The problem with alkalines is that the voltage slides down steadily as they drain, so the gauge is always a rough guess, and the last stretch of that slide drops fast. That is why a mic can read two bars and die ten minutes later.
Standard NiMH rechargeables avoid the waste of single use, but they sit at about 1.2 volts. To a receiver expecting 1.5, a 1.2 volt cell can look half dead the moment you turn it on. Some gear refuses to show full bars at all, and under the current draw of a transmitter the voltage sags further, which throws off your meters right when you need them honest. Add the way consumer cells lose capacity over a few dozen cycles and you get exactly the unpredictability that made your team stop trusting rechargeables in the first place.
KLVR cells hold a true 1.5 volts and discharge on a flat, linear curve. Your receiver reads them the way it reads a fresh alkaline, the fuel gauge means something again, and because the curve is linear instead of a cliff, the software can tell you with real confidence how much show is left in each cell. That single design choice, true voltage with a predictable curve, is what makes a rechargeable safe to put in front of a paying audience. Everything else KLVR built sits on top of it.
| What you care about | Disposable alkaline | Standard NiMH | KLVR 1.5V Li-Ion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Voltage to the mic | 1.5V, sliding down | ~1.2V, reads low | True 1.5V, flat |
| Runtime you can predict | Rough guess | Unreliable | Linear curve, software readout |
| Uses per battery | One | Hundreds, capacity fades | 1,200 cycles |
| Cost over time | High and forever | Moderate, hidden failures | High once, then near zero |
| Fleet visibility | None | None | Klvr Control software |
| Cross-brand fit | Universal | Universal | Universal AA / AAA |
The savings case: where the trophy turns into cash
You asked the right question if you are already doing the math in your head. The Charger Pro is $3,199.00, and a battery costs a dollar or two, so how does this save money? It saves money the same way a coffee maker beats a daily drive-through habit. The up-front number is bigger and the per-use number is tiny, and tiny numbers repeated thousands of times are the whole game.
Start with KLVR’s headline claim, because it is just arithmetic. Each cell is rated for 1,200 charge cycles. A full pack is 48 cells. Run that pack through its life and you have powered devices 57,600 times. That is up to 57,600 single-use batteries you never bought, never installed, and never threw away, across more than three years of daily use. Even if you value those disposables at the rock-bottom bulk price of fifty cents each, you are looking at more than twenty-eight thousand dollars of batteries replaced by one pack. At a dollar a cell, which is closer to what most teams actually pay at retail, the number passes fifty-seven thousand.
The core math
48 cells x 1,200 cycles = 57,600 single-use batteries replaced by one pack over its life. The charger is a one-time purchase. The disposables are a bill that never stops arriving.
Now make it concrete with a venue we all recognize. A mid-size church running a contemporary service has handheld vocal mics, pastor lavaliers, a worship band on bodypacks and in-ears, and a tech booth that changes batteries before anything important so nothing dies on stage. That is how one KLVR customer, a church in Oslo, lands at keeping over 2,000 batteries a year out of the landfill. Hold that number and put a price on it.
| Illustrative mid-size church, 3 years | Disposable alkaline | KLVR Charger Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Batteries purchased per year | ~2,000 | 0 after the initial cells |
| Battery spend per year (at $0.75 each) | ~$1,500 | $0 recurring |
| Disposal, runs to the store, staff time | ~$300 to $600 | Minimal |
| Three-year cash out on batteries | ~$4,500 to $6,300 | $3,199 charger, one time |
| Mid-show failures from guessing | Ongoing risk | Designed out |
Read that bottom row twice. At roughly 2,000 batteries a year and a conservative seventy-five cents a cell, a church spends about $1,500 a year on disposables before you count disposal, fuel, and the volunteer hours nobody bills for. The charger costs $3,199 once. On battery spend alone it pays for itself in a little over two years, and KLVR cells are rated to keep going for more than three years of daily use and well beyond that for a weekend ministry. After payback, the savings are simply yours. These figures are illustrative planning numbers, not a quote, and your real result depends on how many channels you run and what you pay per cell. KLVR publishes a savings calculator if you want to plug in your own counts, and we are happy to run it with you.
The picture gets more dramatic the more wireless you run. Take a 40 channel musical. Forty bodypacks, many of them taking two AA each, get fresh batteries before every performance because a dropout mid-number is unthinkable. That is around 80 cells a show. Eight shows a week is 640 cells, and a six week run burns close to 3,840 disposable batteries for one production. At a dollar a cell that single show nearly funds a charger, and the charger does not retire when the run closes. It rolls straight into the next production, and the one after that.
Three places the money hides
The obvious savings is the batteries you stop buying. The second is disposal and the staff time spent buying, sorting, and swapping them. The third is the cost you cannot see on a spreadsheet: the show that gets interrupted because someone guessed wrong about a cell. KLVR attacks all three at once.
Reliability when a dead cell is not an option
Savings get a product onto the shortlist. Reliability is what keeps it in the rack. The whole reason teams have clung to disposables despite the cost is trust. A fresh alkaline is a known quantity, and “known” beats “cheap” when the room is full.
KLVR’s answer is to make the rechargeable the more trustworthy option, not just the cheaper one. The flat 1.5 volt discharge means a cell behaves predictably from the first minute to the last. The software means you are never loading a battery blind, because you can see its charge and its history before it goes anywhere near a transmitter. The 1,200 cycle rating means a cell does not quietly lose half its capacity after a season the way bargain rechargeables do. And because the cells are standard sizes, a KLVR battery and an emergency alkaline are physically interchangeable in the same mic, so you always have a fallback. You are adding reliability and a safety net at the same time, which is a rare combination.
Who it is for: real use cases
KLVR built the Charger Pro for any operation that runs wireless audio on a schedule. Here is how it lands in the rooms we work in most.
Houses of worship
Churches are the clearest case, which is why KLVR leads with them and why we do too. A worship ministry runs a surprising amount of RF: vocal handhelds, a pastor lav or two, a worship band on bodypacks and personal monitors, sometimes a kids’ ministry and a separate chapel running their own gear. Most of it gets fresh batteries before every service out of caution, and most of those batteries get tossed at maybe half their charge because no volunteer wants to be the reason a mic died during the message. That habit is responsible, and it is exactly what makes the disposable bill so large.
The Charger Pro fixes the workflow without asking volunteers to change how they think. Cells charge overnight in the rack. Before the service, the tech checks the drawer or the software, sees a bank of full, healthy cells, and loads them. After the service the used cells go back in the rack and charge for next time. Nobody guesses, nobody runs to the store, and the giving you would have spent on batteries goes back into ministry. One church technical advisor put the predictability better than we could.
“The Klvr system gives us confidence that we’re always putting in fully charged batteries that will last through both soundcheck and the full service. We’re saving over 2,000 batteries from landfill every single year.”
Knut Fredrik Valsgard, Technical Advisor, Oslo Christian Center
For multi-site churches the case compounds, because every campus is running the same pattern and the same waste. Standardizing on KLVR across locations gives a central tech director one battery platform, one set of spares that fit every device, and one predictable budget line instead of a rolling expense that spikes whenever someone restocks. If your teams are largely volunteers, the simplicity is its own reward: green means go, and that is a rule anyone can follow on a Sunday morning. We help churches plan AV systems every week, and battery management is one of the easiest wins we can hand them. You can see how we approach worship spaces on our Church AVL page.
Theater and performing arts
A musical is a wireless battery’s worst nightmare and KLVR’s best demo. Forty-plus mic packs, two-show Saturdays, and a stage manager whose entire job is making sure nothing fails in front of a sold-out house. Theaters fresh-battery every performance because the alternative is a soloist going silent on a high note. The disposable cost of a single run is genuinely startling once you add it up, and the waste fills bins. A rack of KLVR cells changes the calculus: the company charges overnight, the sound crew loads verified-full cells at the half-hour call, and the spent cells are back on the charger before the curtain call. Across a season, the savings underwrite a meaningful slice of the sound budget.
Touring and live music
On the road the enemy is unpredictability, and weight, and the airport. In-ear monitors and bodypacks eat AA cells, and a touring crew cannot stop a set to hunt for batteries. KLVR’s flat discharge and software readout let a monitor engineer know exactly what is going into each pack before the band walks out. The 48-cell pouch is the quiet hero here. It is a lightweight case that holds a full battery inventory, sized for travel and remote production, so a crew can fly the cells, charge them at the next venue, and keep a tight, trackable battery kit instead of a shoebox of loose alkalines. Backline and monitor engineers who have toured with it, including teams working with artists like Roxette, are exactly the proof points KLVR points to.
Broadcast and production
Broadcast is unforgiving about two things: audio that cannot drop, and assets that have to be accounted for. KLVR fits both. National broadcasters including Norway’s NRK and Greece’s Alpha TV run the system, which tells you it survives daily professional use at scale. For a studio or an outside broadcast truck, the ability to chain multiple chargers and manage every cell as one networked fleet means a battery department stops being a drawer of mystery cells and becomes a monitored inventory with real status. On a film set, where a sound mixer is responsible for lavs on a dozen actors across long days, the same predictability keeps the day moving and keeps batteries off the budget.
Corporate AV and conferences
A keynote, a panel, an all-hands, a multi-day conference with breakouts in every ballroom. Corporate events live and die on wireless mics, and the audience is often the people who sign the checks. AV teams and rental houses servicing these events burn through batteries by the case and need every mic to behave. KLVR gives them a fixed, predictable battery platform that scales from a single boardroom to a convention center, with the software to prove every cell was ready. For an in-house corporate AV department, the recurring battery line simply shrinks toward zero after the initial investment.
Higher education and K-12
Lecture halls, performing arts centers, athletics, chapel services, and AV carts that roam between rooms all run on AA and AAA. Schools are also the places most squeezed on operating budgets and most eager to show sustainability progress. A KLVR rack in the campus AV shop turns a perpetual consumable into a one-time capital purchase, which is exactly the kind of line item a facilities or AV director can defend to a board. It also removes the failure mode where a guest speaker’s mic dies because the cart’s batteries were a guess.
Rental houses and production companies
For a rental operation, batteries are pure margin leakage: bought constantly, charged out at little or no markup, and a frequent source of “the gear didn’t work” complaints when a client gets handed weak cells. Standardizing on KLVR gives a rental house trackable battery assets, a cleaner sub-rental story, and a real answer when a client asks how to power a 24-channel package for a week without a trash bag of dead alkalines. The cells fit whatever wireless the client rents, so one battery inventory serves the entire shelf.
The sustainability angle is not just branding
It is easy to roll your eyes at “green” marketing, so here is the version with numbers attached. A single-use battery is mined, manufactured, shipped, used once for a few hours, and then it becomes hazardous waste. A house of worship keeping 2,000 cells a year out of the landfill is a measurable environmental result, not a slogan, and a touring or broadcast operation keeps far more than that out of the waste stream. One KLVR cell standing in for up to 1,200 disposables over its life is a real reduction in mining, manufacturing, freight, and end-of-life handling.
For organizations with a sustainability commitment, and that now includes a lot of universities, corporations, and denominations, this is a rare project where the responsible choice and the cheaper choice are the same choice. You do not have to trade money for values. The Charger Pro lets a facilities team report less waste and a lower spend in the same memo, which makes it one of the easier sustainability wins to actually get approved.
Adoption fails when a product asks people to change their habits. KLVR mostly asks them to keep their good habits and drop the wasteful one. Installation is a single rack space and a power connection, the kind of job that takes an afternoon and disappears into your existing rack. If you run a large rig, you chain additional units over network and power and manage them together.
The daily rhythm is simple. Cells live in the charger between uses. Before a service, show, or call, you confirm a full, healthy bank by glancing at the drawer LEDs or opening Klvr Control. You load verified cells. Afterward, spent cells go home to the rack. Once a team does this for a week, the old routine of buying, hoarding, and tossing alkalines feels faintly ridiculous. The software rewards the people who like data with cycle history and health trends, and it stays out of the way of the people who just want a green light. For travel, cells move in the pouch and charge wherever you land. That is the whole learning curve.
The KLVR system and what The Penn Group stocks
The Charger Pro is the centerpiece, but KLVR is a small ecosystem, and we stock the pieces that make it work as a kit. Here is the current lineup and pricing through The Penn Group.
| Product | SKU | What it does | MSRP |
|---|---|---|---|
| KLVR Charger Pro | KLV-CHG-PRO | 1U rack charger, 48 AA/AAA bays, real-time cell monitoring, fast battery-safe charging | $3,199.00 |
| KLVR AA Pouch 48 | KLV-PCH-AA | 48-slot protective transport case for AA cells, keeps a full show inventory organized and ready | $699.00 |
| KLVR AAA Pouch 48 | KLV-PCH-AAA | AAA companion case, built for lavalier and in-ear monitor workflows | $699.00 |
All three are in stock and shipping. Volume pricing, tour packages, and integration support are available on request, which matters if you are outfitting a multi-site church, a season of productions, or a full rental shelf. As your authorized dealer we can also fold the KLVR system into a larger install or rental quote, so battery management lands in the same conversation as your consoles, wireless, and racks instead of becoming a separate errand.
Ready to stop buying disposable batteries?
The KLVR Charger Pro is in stock at The Penn Group at $3,199.00 MSRP, with volume and tour pricing on request.
The verdict
A rare product that is both the smarter long-term spend and the more reliable choice on show day. The price is the only thing standing between most teams and an obvious win, and the math erases it faster than you would expect. If you run wireless on a schedule, this belongs in your rack.
The Best of InfoComm 2026 judges did not pick the KLVR Charger Pro because batteries are exciting. They picked it because it takes a problem every venue has, the slow expensive leak of single-use cells and the quiet risk of guessing, and closes it with engineering that actually holds up under load. True 1.5 volt cells with a predictable curve, software that ends the guessing, 1,200 cycles per battery, and a savings story that turns a $3,199 charger into one of the best returns in your whole signal chain.
We are an authorized KLVR dealer because we believe that story, and because our customers across churches, theaters, schools, and touring keep telling us the same thing after they switch: they should have done it sooner. If you want to see what it saves in your specific room, run the numbers with us. The first step costs nothing but a conversation.
KLVR Charger Pro FAQ
What is the KLVR Charger Pro?
It is a 1U rack-mount intelligent charger that holds 48 AA or AAA batteries and pairs with KLVR’s custom 1.5V Li-Ion cells, each rated for 1,200 charge cycles. The Klvr Control software gives you real-time visibility into every cell’s charge and health, and drawer LEDs give you the same read at a glance.
Does it work with Shure, Sennheiser, and AKG wireless gear?
Yes. KLVR cells are standard AA and AAA sizes at a true 1.5 volts, so they power wireless microphones, bodypack transmitters, and in-ear monitor receivers from Shure, Sennheiser, AKG, and any other brand that runs on AA or AAA. That cross-brand fit is one of the main reasons it beats proprietary single-brand systems.
How much can my venue actually save?
Used to full lifetime capacity, one pack of 48 KLVR cells can replace up to 57,600 single-use batteries over more than three years of daily use. A mid-size church running about 2,000 disposables a year typically recovers the cost of the charger in a little over two years on battery spend alone, then keeps saving. Use KLVR’s savings calculator or ask us to run your numbers.
How long does it take to charge?
A full bank of AA cells recharges in under three hours, and AAA cells in about two. In practice a set drained at a morning service or matinee is ready again before the evening one.
Why not just use regular NiMH rechargeables?
Standard NiMH cells sit at about 1.2 volts and sag under load, which makes them read low on professional receivers and can trigger false low-battery warnings. KLVR’s 1.5V Li-Ion cells hold true voltage on a flat, linear discharge curve, so your meters stay accurate and runtime is predictable. They also hold capacity far longer, at 1,200 rated cycles.
What does it cost and where do I buy it?
The KLVR Charger Pro is $3,199.00 MSRP, in stock at The Penn Group. The AA Pouch 48 and AAA Pouch 48 transport cases are $699.00 each. Volume, tour, and integration pricing is available on request. Order it here or request a consultation.
Can I take it on tour or fly with the batteries?
Yes. KLVR offers a 48-battery transport pouch built for touring, air travel, and remote production. You move your cells in the pouch and recharge them in the rack at the next venue, keeping a tight, trackable battery kit on the road.
The Penn Group is an authorized KLVR dealer serving broadcasters, live event producers, theaters, houses of worship, schools, and film teams. Gear, rentals, installs, service, and support. Call (614) 741-5306 or email sales@thepenn.group.
Pricing reflects KLVR MSRP at time of publication and is subject to change. Savings figures marked illustrative are planning estimates based on published KLVR lifetime claims and a documented customer case; actual results vary by channel count, usage, and battery prices.
