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Ask Slashdot: Wireless Microphone For Stand-up Meetings?

Posted by timothy on from the pass-around-a-laptop dept.

rolandw writes We have daily stand-ups and normally there is at least one person missing from the room. We relay via on-line chat but the sound quality is rubbish. The remote person sounds great via our speaker when they use a headset but they can't hear what is happening in the room. We need a wireless mic that copes with a large echoing room and will stop feedback. Can you recommend one? We're not an over-funded start-up so don't have an unlimited budget...

10 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. The coping mechanism is to fix the room by ashpool7 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Microphones aren't magic like that. :-/

    1. Re:The coping mechanism is to fix the room by ottothecow · · Score: 4, Informative
      That is not even close to the right microphone.

      They want to pick up multiple people wandering around a large room. That mic works best right in front of (measured in inches) the source of the sound.

      The right answer is to just buy a polycom phone. Why try to buy a microphone and configure software (since you want a sensitive microphone that picks up everything, but then you will want noise cancellation that blocks out half of what the mic captures) when there is already a product that does this incredibly well for a pretty low price. You can get one for $50 or less on ebay.

      --
      Bottles.
  2. The corporate solution by netsavior · · Score: 2

    Pretty much every company ever has already solved this problem with polycom (or similar) conferencing phones(ranging from a few hundred dollars on up)
    http://www.polycom.com/product...

    Also conference phone numbers like Webex at all so lots of people can call in, if you need that sort of thing.

    This is not a new or unsolvable problem, this is "standard office gear" since the 1990s.

    1. Re:The corporate solution by hawguy · · Score: 2

      Pretty much every company ever has already solved this problem with polycom (or similar) conferencing phones(ranging from a few hundred dollars on up)

      http://www.polycom.com/product...

      Also conference phone numbers like Webex at all so lots of people can call in, if you need that sort of thing.

      This is not a new or unsolvable problem, this is "standard office gear" since the 1990s.

      Exactly, we have a 30 seat conference room with a polycom and 2 extension mikes. For company meetings, remote employees dial-in to the conference bridge, and the phone works surprisingly well, everyone in the room can be heard. (it does get confused though when more than one person speaks at once -- it doesn't know which microphone to use, so the two voices fade in and out)

      No need to ditch working solutions just because they are "old school" -- most of our remote users use some VOIP solution to reach the conference bridge (google hangouts, skype, etc)

    2. Re:The corporate solution by rwa2 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Heh, I used to do multi-conference room / theater AV integration for large defense companies. The number 1 problem was always audio.

      1. Test. Test test test. You can get almost any cheap thing working well if you bother to test and tune everything BEFORE the meeting. The most expensive thing can fail for silly reasons if you don't bother to test everything BEFORE the meeting (usually because some executive schlupp dials into both the audio bridge and VTC MCU at the last minute). Then freeze the configuration. Yeah, good luck freezing the configuration with engineers and tinkerers running around.

      2. POTS sucks. Maybe some telephony devices are able to negotiate better than 8kHz 8-bit audio sampling if their codecs match up, but you're better off going with something with VTC-quality audio using H323. Most VoIP teleconferencing lines don't bother trying to beat POTS audio quality. So even if you have a nice Polycom phone that does good AEC and NC, you're still going to strain to hear what's going on.

      3. Speakerphones suck. Most of them don't bother doing good AEC and NC. Get a good bluetooth or USB headset. Gaming teamspeak headsets are relatively cheap. As long as it's digital, so they don't introduce any analog amp noise from the system.

      4. PC/laptop microphones suck. I don't know why no one bothers to test them to the same level as your average cheap dumbphone speakerphone. They pick up all kinds of system electrical noise, and rely on software to do any AEC or NC, which adds more latency. About a quarter of the people in our daily standup have laptop microphone fails on Google Hangouts or Skype each day. Most end up dialing back in from their smartphone when that happens.

      Anyway, all that said, our current standup room setup consists of a Google Hangouts room on a permanently-fixed Mac mini with a $50 "Blue Snowball USB Condenser Microphone" and Logitech USB camera attached to it (the USB audio coming in from the Logitech camera was deemed insufficient, even for the small room we had it in.). For remote participants, I've had good experiences with extended use of the $200+ Jabra PRO 9470 Mono Wireless Headset, which is switchable between PC and POTS/VoIP phone use, but a simpler/cheaper bluetooth headset would probably work just as well paired with smartphone/PC.

      And set up an echo server for everyone to test their setups. https://support.google.com/cha... . Or at least go to http://www.onlinemictest.com/ or something. Did I mention you should test?

      I'm also looking forward to someday playing with Amazon's Echo thingy someday, since for $200 it seems to have a lot of the technical audio features of more expensive audio conferencing systems:
      http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo/
      assuming it will be able to act as a simple bluetooth speakerphone instead of only for all of the other AI junk they're cramming into it.

  3. Wireless headsets by rowls · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What about equipping all meeting participants with a wireless headset (headphone with mic). A base station in the room would connect to each headset, and transmit audio to remote participants. I also work for a company with many remote employees. When all meeting participants are at their desk using headsets, people are easy to understand, but as soon as some of the meeting participants are in a conference room with a speaker phone it becomes very difficult to hear people. As a result we do a lot of meetings from our desks even though many of us are in the same building and could benefit from a face to face meeting.

    Does any device like this exist at any price?

  4. Not enough information. by msauve · · Score: 2

    Is your room a natatorium, or a broom closet? How many people? Around a table, or classroom seating? Have you tried a proper conference room phone (not a regular speakerphone)? Is your phone system analog, digital, or IP (for the latter two, the solution may depend on the system in use)?

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
  5. You don't need a mic... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    You don't need a new mic, you need better cables.

    I recommend Monster or Audioquest for the ultimate in high fidelity audio performance.

  6. Re:Pass around a real mic. by bigmo · · Score: 3, Informative

    I hate to admit it but I am an AV guy, for a very long time. Passing around a wireless hand held mic (or even one with a wire if you can't afford W/L) is the only good solution. A cheap mic 4" from your mouth will sound better than an extremely expensive mic 4 feet away.

    A fairly decent W/L mic from Shure is a bit less than a grand (a really good one is about $4000). You can get a W/L mic from a cheapo audio catalog for a few hundred bucks, but if you really can't afford a decent one, I'd suggest getting a decent wired mic - maybe a hundred bucks tops. It's not that big a deal to pass around a wired mic if you're at a conference table and if the room is big, get several and put them on stands so people can walk up to them and ask questions or whatever.

    If the problem isn't big enough to warrant spending much of anything, just have the main presenter use a mic & repeat any questions.

    By the way, if you don't like how much newer mics cost, tell the FCC to stop selling off the white space frequencies that W/L mics use.

  7. Re:Pass around a real mic. by rolandw · · Score: 2

    Get one, mmaybe two real wireless microphones from Shure or someone like that -- think "audio equipment catalog", not "computer equipment catalog". Get the cables to hook the base station up to standard microphone input. Pass the mic around to whoever is talking; it doubles as the "currently speaking" token (and you only have one person at a time talking at standup, right?). Make sure you have lots of spare batteries (presumably rechargeable) in a convenient location.

    Passing around a real mic is exactly what I am hoping to do. I was asking /. for recommendations for such a mic! Looks like I've got to check out Shure and Blue Microphone's offerings. Many thanks for your comments!