UK systems integrator Involve has equipped a two-room meeting space based with Symetrix Radius AEC technology for ITV Central.
Aiming to make its meeting spaces more flexible and productive, ITV’s brief was also for an easy-to-use interface: ‘We put two programmes out every day with reporters based in multiple locations. At the end of the day we hold a debrief from those same multiple locations and we were finding that the phone system we were using was unreliable and we had great difficulty in hearing those at the remote end,’ says ITV’s Ian Glen.
‘Our head of news instructed me to look into a solution and that led me to Involve. Initially we were only looking at kitting out a single room, but the solution fitted our needs so well that we decided to go for two rooms.’
Involve called on UK distributor CUK Audio for a Symetrix Radius AEC (acoustic echo cancellation) and support throughout the design process: ‘ITV required a solution that would enable those in the meeting space to communicate intelligibly via a range of VoIP services including Google Hangouts with reporters and other staff in remote locations,’ says CUK’s Simon Druce who helped specify the system.
The meeting table needed to be kept uncluttered, so a wireless tablet is used to allow users to dial and adjust volumes via the Symetrix Arc-Web browser interface. The tablet communicates with the Radius AEC device via a wireless access point. With an external amplifier and loudspeakers, the Radius AEC mixes all the remote sources to highly intelligible audio to the local room, while the AEC inputs process the hanging mics in the room to provide the same high quality audio to the remote user.
‘It’s an ideal solution for this application,’ Druce says. ‘The icing on the cake is the addition of an Atterotech unDUSB USB-Dante bridge which enables local users to connect laptops or other mobile devices via USB to the Dante network and use those to call, present and facilitate a meeting if they prefer to work that way. Both USB and VoIP can run concurrently so the Symetrix Radius then becomes a bridge for all parties and allows multi-participant conversations. It’s an elegant, efficient and highly cost-effective solution that ticks all the boxes for ITV Central.’
‘Staff are very happy to go into a room and use it,’ Glen agrees. ‘It’s made the process of group calling so much more efficient and a much nicer experience generally. Previously it could take ages to sort out a meeting, and even then, some people ended up sitting with their backs to the mic and the audio quality was poor, which is stressful. Now, everything is ready to go in minutes, we have proper coverage of the room and the audio is crystal clear at both ends.’
