The future of meeting room audio

Meeting room needs change, but audio remains king. Reece Webb explores how trends and new tech are revolutionising audio in the meeting space.

What is the purpose of a meeting? While it may sound like an obvious question to most of us, it’s easy to lose sight of our true purpose when we get lost in the weeds of designing a meeting room. The answer, at its core, is to communicate ideas and information as clearly as possible.

When we talk about meetings in our era of hybrid working, video conferencing, and collaboration, that purpose must be at the heart of everything we do, and that is especially true of audio.

Many of us know the impact that Covid-19 has had on our ability to work from home, how the pandemic let the ‘cat out of the bag’ and how that transition has not only changed the way that we work, but has also affected our expectations of quality equipment as workers.

“Some companies are going back to the office full time, but those are the outlier,” says Rob Smith, senior director, strategic market development, Shure. “Most companies, including Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet [have people in the office] around two-and-a-half or three days a week.

“My day is mostly talking to people on Microsoft Teams, and if you solve for the hybrid workspace, then you have solved your meeting problem completely. If you can do remote work, and mixed meetings with people in the office and working remotely, then the social impact is really good. By allowing flexible work, you can reach out to a potential workforce that can’t come to a head office every day. With the meeting room, [the key is] audio. If you’re spending more time in meetings, the thing that makes you tired, and makes the meeting unworkable is poor audio.”

Hybrid working has given the meeting room a new lease on life, with videoconferencing at the centre to open up a world of greater communication, collaboration, and connection, despite workforces and colleagues being physically further away than ever before. This, of course, is not without its challenges.

While a competent room design, sophisticated tracking cameras, and crystal clear visuals enhance a meeting, without clear and comprehensible audio, there is no communication and therefore, there is no meeting.

Patrick Buschman, manager technology, consultancy & design, Kinly, explains: “Now people are coming back to the office, the question is – how can we make them feel at home in the office? People at home have a certain standard; people are used to quality and using AirPlay to stream and it’s easy, that’s what they expect in the office now.”

“When it comes to audio quality, it is very important to make participants feel at home with a certain standard – acoustics have a psychological effect, and meeting fatigue is an important topic, people experience stress from poor audio quality. Video can stop and we can continue a conversation because the audio is still there.

But, if the audio is failing, important information is not communicated, misinterpretations become a problem, and it’s hard to focus. If the audio is bad, then focusing on the content of the meeting is very hard. With no audio at all, the meeting cannot continue as intended.”

CR van Wyk and co.'s boardroom in Windhoek, Namibia 

Workers’ expectations have evolved; what is accessible and high quality in the home must be translated seamlessly into the workplace environment. With the hybrid-working genie firmly out of the bottle, the professional meeting room has no choice but to offer a standard as good as, if not better, than the home.

“End users now expect seamless integration between physical and virtual meetings, placing a greater emphasis on clarity, ease of use, and adaptability,” says Zec Voislav, product manager, WyreStorm.

“As organisations shifted to more flexible work arrangements, audio systems needed to accommodate smaller huddle spaces as well as large boardrooms, each requiring scalable solutions.

“With the rise of video conferencing, demand has grown for echo cancellation, noise suppression, and clear audio reproduction. Additionally, end users now seek wireless solutions and simplified setups, often managed through a single unified platform. This evolution reflects a shift from traditional AV setups to more network-based, scalable, and user-friendly systems.”

Adaptable audio 

Scalability and flexibility have become essential to a modern meeting room; businesses today are often using their workspaces in smarter ways, harnessing audio technology to maximise use of a space regardless of its size.

Emce Smit, Stage Audio Works Namibia, clarifies: “It’s very seldom that we specify a system for one specific need; systems need to be flexible, anything from a small meeting room to large auditoriums. We use technology such as beamforming, tracking microphones, and group framing cameras. Sometimes, you have a large meeting space, but only two people in the boardroom, and with the right technology this is still perceived as a small, comfortable discussion.

“We use technology to make these spaces closer and sociable. The floor space is often being used for different kinds of solutions, and Sennheiser beamforming microphones allow us to use a room in different seating arrangements; you don’t necessarily need to have a boardroom table with microphones fixed to it, you can have open spaces and put the tables where you like while still capturing the audio as people move around.”

Beamsteering technology has opened up a new world of flexibility that not only allows rooms to be rearranged as needed but enables greater meeting equity between in-room and remote participants.

A thought-out audio system must make a participant’s place in the room (or lack thereof) completely superfluous to their ability to engage with meeting content.

"If people are aware of the audio technology, then we have done a poor job." - Patrick Buschman, Kinly

Smith continues: “You can feel excluded if you can’t hear half of the participants in the room, there are side conversations going on that you can’t hear. Shure’s beamforming technology offers eight beams that we can steer, so you can hear side conversations and two people talking at once, we get close to the ‘golden target’, being in a meeting and not being aware of the technology. If people are aware of the audio technology, then we have done a poor job.”

Flexibility of spaces is key for any manufacturer, requiring audio offerings to offer as much versatility as possible. “The need for flexible meeting room spaces has prompted us to develop audio solutions that are modular, scalable, and easy to configure”, explains Voislav. “Modern meeting rooms are no longer static; they might serve as small huddle rooms one day and as large collaboration spaces the next. To meet this demand, our audio offerings are designed to support flexible layouts, allowing for easy integration of additional microphones, speakers, or wireless solutions as needed.

“We’ve embraced networked audio systems that allow users to control the configuration through software, offering a more dynamic and adaptable setup that can be modified without the need for a technical expert. Our solutions are designed with interoperability in mind, allowing them to integrate with different video conferencing platforms and other AV devices, giving end users the flexibility to tailor their audio experience to their immediate needs.”

United solutions 

While the quality and flexibility of the audio system is essential, meeting room audio does not exist in a vacuum. At the heart of the meeting room is the videoconferencing setup, tying the wider meeting room ecosystem together and enabling collaboration with external offices and clients.

Ensuring seamless interoperability between the audio system and the videoconferencing platform is vital, as Buschman explains: “Certification is vital, as that ensures that [the product] works, and that it is tested and proven by Cisco, Logitech, Microsoft, Zoom, etc. As a systems integrator, we look at it in a broader way, as we look at standardisation as well as certification.

“In a large set up, like a boardroom, you will end up working with products that are both certified and uncertified, so you want to test it thoroughly to make sure that it is sold in a proper way and that the system will remain serviceable in the [mid-term future]. Certification makes your life much easier as partner companies have done the work for you.”

David Missal, insights manager consultants & technical application engineer manager Sennheiser, explains: “We want to make sure that we have scalability within our infrastructure. If I have one TeamConnect Ceiling microphone, or our EW-DX digital wireless system in there, we want to be able to scale it, and we can do that through Sennheiser’s Control Cockpit software. If the customer has equipment that is spread across multiple rooms that can open up into one big room, then control is necessary. If you need just one room or a larger space, then we can scale up across a campus.

“When people design rooms like this, we need to think about what other kit they are using. We need to make sure that Sennheiser solutions are brand agnostic so that our products can communicate with other manufacturers’ offerings as well, so that they can scale up with our customers. We make sure that APIs and plugins are available so that people can control our products from the room control system.

“If you’re going to play in this field, you need that certification, and we want that especially as we look at AI and security. If we are part of that ecosystem, then we have that additional security through the videoconferencing platform. It’s always early in our development plan [for products] to have that certification.”

Audio intelligence 

It’s impossible to have a conversation about advances in AV technology without talking about the emerging impact of artificial intelligence, and its impact on the meeting room experience is both immediate and impactful for users.

“Internally, we are using transcription a lot,” says Smith, “It allows meeting notes to be pretty much done as the meeting is concluded, but to make that work, you need excellent audio. We’re working with our partners, including Microsoft, and you can see the value when you start using it. AI can take away a lot of monotonous work, but you need to have good audio to start with, then you can start attributing speakers and producing a very accurate and useful transcription.

“High quality audio allows AI to do what it is supposed to do. Now, we are starting to see some real tangible benefits from AI that are saving people time. AI is taking away the drudgery so that you can focus on the important details, so we have to focus on this use case now.”

AI also has the potential to make a huge impact on the calibration of a meeting room, working in conjunction with established technologies to enhance and automate what can currently be achieved through DSPs.

Missal continues: “AI has really come a long way, and we are looking for how we can benefit from AI in terms of calibration of the room. We have all kinds of things that we can control on the Team Connect Ceiling mics now such as exclusion zones and priority zones, so how can we make this more automated?

“Even with the beamforming that we currently have, with our DSP algorithm you can get very smart with how the beam ignores different sounds within the space; it’s more of a smart beam than AI, and you can work with algorithms to identify static noises that we can eliminate so that it only recognises the pattern of the voice. We do that now, and perhaps we can get smarter with that through AI building into it.”

Next meeting  

Audio technology and meeting needs have both evolved dramatically over the past three years, and with so many unanswered questions around the return to work, the impact of AI, and the usage of meeting room spaces, what comes next?

Smith says: “I think we’re going to see a continuation of existing trends for a while. The expectation of quality is going to increase as we need to drive AI; We will see a continuation of the demand for the best experience with simpler installation, and I think that using AI to get more value out of the meeting, from transcription to meeting culture analytics. Being able to provide that information to HR as a service will be a huge benefit, and the sky is the limit.”

For Smit, elevating the listening experience to the same level as human capabilities is the goal: “In a meeting, we are trying to communicate. The human body is amazing at filtering unwanted and wanted noise that you want to focus on, and that’s where audio needs to go in the meeting room. If I start playing with a pen, or tapping the table, technology can filter it out to an extent right now, but microphones are very sensitive and there is still a long way to go, but I think we are getting there.”

“We are on the verge of something brilliant,” adds Buschman “We will be able to direct sound with even greater precision, with pin-point audio not only for microphones, but speakers too. You see it already with Sennheiser and Shure, but it’s going to become smarter. The combination between video and audio to determine who is speaking [will improve] and enable the platform and equipment to zoom in on the speaker. Body language will be interpreted, and these smart combinations will be leveraged more and more in the coming years.”

 

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