Why remain seated?
Let’s face it, when it comes to most meetings, conferencing etiquette is not a top priority. No matter how much everyone tries, most attendees can’t sit with perfect posture while speaking up; and some may even be a little shy. While there are many ceiling-style microphone solutions to choose from; they are all very different and far from equal.
Here are a few bullet points to think about when you are about to choose a ceiling microphone solution:
- Do I need microphone coverage across the entire meeting space?
- Are there members who speak extremely quietly most times?
- Is my room multipurpose and will the furniture need to be moved around depending on the meeting style?
Despite the large variety of ceiling-style microphones available; today's most popular are beamforming arrays such as the ClearOne's Beamforming Mic Arrays. Beamforming technology has been around for quite a long time; however, ClearOne was the first to innovate this technology into a conferencing environment with powerful echo cancellation.
One of the most important features— still not to be found anywhere else—is the incorporation of adaptive steering (thinks of it as "smart beam selection") into the ClearOne Beamforming Mic solution. This important feature truly makes the array very different from any other offerings. It's very important to note this feature, and how it moves far beyond static beams that are simply focused in any one area.
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 Beamforming Microphone Array table mount coverage.
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 Beamforming Microphone Array ceiling mount coverage
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 Beamforming Microphone Array wall-mount coverage
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The Beamforming Array's adaptive steering allows the microphone’s beams to adapt to attendees in a meeting in real-time, as they move around the room, without ever being lost. Despite speakers who may be on their feet, moving around as they speak, they are never "out" of the pickup pattern of the microphone. Arrays that do not have this technology certainly work well; but they only pick up the static, given area which has been pre-programmed for coverage. There may be scenarios in which these static coverage areas may be desired; but certainly not ideal for most audio or video conferencing environments.
It seems that the point of using a Beamforming Mic Array in a conferencing environment is to know your participants' audio will be picked up no matter where they are or how softly they talk. Using a ClearOne Beamforming Mic Array gives you piece of mind knowing that you won’t miss a word during that all important conference call.
If you are thinking of using a beamforming style microphone array please take a moment and review ClearOne’s innovative offerings and don’t hesitate to ask for a demo!
