Boardrooms are always interesting! This one seemed to be well equipped when I did my first site visit. Large monitor at the head of the table and ceiling mics to keep a non-cluttered aesthetic. The Cisco codec was out of date but that’s an easy fix. Give me some pain!

So what’s not working here?

Lets take a closer look. Though the monitor was large (over 100”) it was an older consumer grade model. No matter how you tried to scale or format the image it always looked wrong. Either there were large black bars of wasted space or you experienced something I like to call stumphead syndrome.

Nobody wants to look like a stumphead while talking with the CEO of their company

The other pain point was the microphone setup. Though the room was tuned and had a decent DSP it just didn’t sound great. Upon closer inspection we figured out part of the problem, single element choir mics.

Work great when your capturing a group of singers, work poorly when your trying to focus in on a single talker. 

The Upgrade

The customers VTC standard was dual monitor, one for far side video and one for content. In this case though the room was built with a nook to house a single large display. We talked to the rooms users and determined that a multi monitor approach would work while still keeping a single large monitor for content. We replaced the old consumer grade monitor with a new 4k Planar and in a bid for symmetry, we flanked it with two smaller far side view monitors. Though the 4k Planar was a couple inches shorter than the one it replaced it could be formatted correctly to eliminate the dreaded stumphead. 

I am a big fan of table microphones. The closer I can get the mic to the talker the better. In this case though the customer wanted to keep the clean table look so we upgraded the single element choir mics with multi element beam trackers. The new microphones do a better job of picking up the active talker while ignoring softer background sounds.

The boardroom now has a fresh new look and people on the other side of the calls are appreciating the improved audio and correctly proportioned faces 🙂

On to the next project!