The choices of audio solutions for any meeting space are many. To determine the appropriate solution, it's often best for a designer to listen to the user to learn of their expectations and experience with technologies. Quite frankly, any consumer can acquire a product for an application, and that product may, or may not, meet the expectations of the user’s application. The user will benefit by enlisting a qualified AV designer to determine what products and technologies are most appropriate for an application. The AV designer can draw from their own experiences, coupled with a knowledge of the history of the technologies, a knowledge of the capabilities and appropriate application of current products, and a sense of the possible future progression with technologies.

 

To understand where current technologies are, it’s important to understand the prior history. During the past 20 years, video conferencing has migrated from a hardware codec solution, supported by custom analog audio capture, and amplification solutions that were reserved for organizations that could afford it. Today’s solution is readily available software solutions supported by every type of desktop and mobile computing device. With high bandwidth Internet access more commonplace, the Internet has replaced the expensive telecom ISDN, T1, and other circuits. The industry has also migrated from NTSC resolution video displays and cameras to today's 1080 p and 4K resolutions, as well as from analog audio to a mix of analog and digital audio solutions.

 

Consumer demand for software video and VoIP conferencing apps to visually meet with friends and family soon became a global staple of business. As mobile personal devices, mobile phones, and tablets, for example, became more powerful and affordable, consumers demanded simple to use video conferencing software applications, using their personal devices; for example, Apple Facetime, Microsoft Skype, etc. Those personal conferencing and content presentation apps have directly influenced the planning of meeting spaces in the corporate, educational, and governmental markets, with the expectation of the same simple user experience.

 

For a period in the later 2000s, the focus of the AV industry was the development of collaboration tools in concert with migration to PC-based conferencing, and the advent of USB AV bridging technologies, a user’s mobile device could become the host of a call, with the room’s professional AV system as the conferencing peripherals. Users benefited from reduced costs of travel and the ease of inviting people from all over the globe to participate in virtual conferencing meetings. Still, very few meeting spaces and classrooms were equipped to support electronic conferencing, and few employees worked from their homes.

 

When the global pandemic occurred, to keep the economy alive and to keep the community safe from the virus, employers recommended that employees work from home. However, in order for the employees to be productive, including the ability to easily communicate and collaborate, the remote working employees required dedicating a portion of their homes to office space, adding office IT equipment, subscribing to reliable broadband Internet services, and acquiring cameras and audio peripherals supporting software conferencing applications. Home users also learned about the importance of room lighting and the distractions of family life.

 

During this time, employers also prepared for the return to the office, upgrading their office suites to support conferencing. Employers and the workforce quickly embraced the benefits of software conferencing, and it became a necessary application for the entire workplace; however, employees who conferenced frequently were frustrated with the overall experience and feeling disconnected from their peers. Conferencing and collaboration software developers responded with innovative solutions for enhancing the experience, with options for personal choice of backgrounds, games, and quizzes, separation into workgroup virtual rooms, and immersive and collaborative video and audio features.

 

Innovation and demand drove advances in AV technologies, with laser-based higher brightness and higher resolution video projection, larger LCD displays, and finer pitch LED image display technologies, which have dramatically improved our image viewing experience and enabled an immersive conferencing experience. The AV industry also improved the user experience with automation of room control and integration with enterprise IT for automation of room and conference scheduling, as well as networked audio and video (Dante and AVoIP, for example).

 

For any conferencing solution, without high-quality audio capture, processing, and transmission technologies, electronic conferencing would not be possible. Verbal communication between humans may be more important than our other senses of sight, smell, and touch. We often share images, but these images are most often shared with texts or verbal explanations, and we should not forget that our cinema experience began as silent cinema films, quickly migrating to talking films, and audio-only radio programming came before television, CATV, and now on-demand streaming.

 

For any high-quality communication, the conversations electronically captured and transmitted from one site to another must be highly intelligible, despite our many languages, dialects, personalities, location acoustics, and ambient noise intrusion.

 

Most users have become accustomed to the quality of audio when a person is speaking directly into a microphone, but the average person may not understand the likely degradation of the electronically captured audible conversations using microphone technologies located farther from the source, for example, ceiling and boundary microphones. Users experience this reduction in audio quality when using a speaker phone, in particular in a noisy environment. Modern audio digital signal processing has helped to resolve some issues, provided automatic gating, acoustic echo cancellation, and automatic ambient room noise suppression; however, if the conversation is occurring more than foot from a microphone, the overall quality remains less than a person speaking directly into a microphone.

 

Since before the global pandemic, the audio capture and listening experiences for electronic conferencing has expanded to include home and corporate offices, cubical office environments, huddle rooms, conference rooms, large meeting spaces, and lecture hall environments. Each location presents unique challenges and solutions. For each space type, the design team must collectively consider a room's shape in support of the best viewing conditions, choice of furniture solutions supporting best viewing and camera capture, application of room acoustics to minimize natural room reverberation and ambient noise, application of room lighting in support of image capture of the participants while not impacting the visual display including balancing exterior and interior ambient lighting, and the choice of colors and finishes suitable for providing an environment where video cameras can best present the participants. Decisions of the many required AV and IT technologies supporting the electronic conferencing and user experience to be made in concert with architectural decisions. With pressure from the architects to avoid AV technologies that can be seen in a modern "clean" architectural environment, modern architectural interiors also drive innovation and development of architecturally integrated audio capture product solutions. 

 

Microphone technology has benefited from innovation. An example is the development of the pressure zone microphone in the late 1970s. Product engineers discovered the benefits of utilizing the surface of a ceiling, table, or piano to compress the ambient sound to a small boundary microphone, a technology now applied to available wired and wireless boundary microphones used in conferencing. In the 1960s, microphone manufacturers developed a hyper-cardioid shotgun microphone product, capable of focusing on a voice from long distances, while also rejecting ambient noise around the microphone. These shotgun mics have supported press conferences, cinema and television production, live music production, and sporting events when coupled with parabolic dishes. AV system designers have also leveraged this shotgun mic technology in meeting spaces, focusing these microphone on room conversations from longer distances from the microphone. Thankfully, in the past ten years, many highly respected audio product manufacturers, including Sennheiser, have leveraged this shotgun microphone technology into ceiling and table conferencing, microphone technologies capable of capturing entire room conversations from digitally-controlled and processed beam-forming arrays, which are basically digitally-controlled and processed multi-element shotgun microphones.

 

Audio conferencing solutions vary for each environment. When conferencing from airport lounges, home offices, and office cubicals, the use of ambient-noise canceling headphones with boom mics are an excellent solution for a participant in a noisy environment. Private offices may benefit from a PC desktop with media loudspeakers and a web cam with an integrated microphone. A small meeting and collaboration environment may benefit from an AV bar product which includes an integrated array of video camera, loudspeakers, and intelligent microphone array. Larger spaces with larger image displays and PTZ cameras may utilize one or many intelligent active beam-forming ceiling microphones as a peripheral to an audio DSP providing matrix mixing, automated gating, acoustic echo cancellation, and digital ambient room noise suppression. For larger venues, the attendee’s personal mobile device can join the AV system using local WiFi with downloadable apps supporting managed participation with bi-directional audio, managed cuing of participants, Q&A, and voting.

 

Sennheiser's commitment to providing secure, easy-to-use solutions with unrivaled audio quality remains a key driver in enhancing the electronic conferencing experience. Sennheiser’s legendary headphones, with wired and digital wireless microphone solutions, complement Sennheiser’s innovative business communication products, such as Team Connect Ceiling and TeamConnect Bars, as well as Sennheiser’s flexible SpeechLine Digital Wireless microphone system, and Sennheiser’s Mobile Connect audience participation application using their mobile phones. These product technologies are testament to Sennheiser’s dedication to developing product solutions which provide the highest quality of audio communication and user experience in conferencing.