Located in Kunshan, in China’s Jiangsu Province, Duke Kunshan University (DKU) is a 1,200-acre campus dedicated to world-class educational and research through a range of innovative academic programmes to students from around the globe.
DKU recently installed 116 Sennheiser TCC 2 Ceiling Array Microphones in 50 of its classrooms and various other spaces across the campus as part of a second phase of development. This included 22 buildings on campus – 29 classrooms, 20 conference rooms and a visitor centre.
The university offers courses taught by faculty from its counterpart in the US, as well as other locations around the world, and requires each classroom to provide an immersive online learning experience as if it were face-to-face. Audio equipment, in particular, not only needs to offer clear sound, stable transmission and be easy to operate, but also needs to accommodate different room types and teaching scenarios.
The TCC 2 uses Dynamic Beamforming technology, which automatically tracks the position of speakers, and switches between speakers in real time. Teachers are able to move around and communicate freely with students while teaching, and the layout of desks and chairs in the classroom can be adjusted to suit the classroom experience rather than technical constraints.
In teleconferencing, the integration of audio and video is also important. In this project, the TCC 2 units were accompanied by Biamp DSP and Sony PTZ camera tracking to synchronise speaker’s position with the camera.
The Visitor Center is another highlight of this project, built by the school to have a flexible layout. It occupies an area of 400sq-m and has a ceiling height of 4.8m, and is served by three TCC 2.
DKU’s Phase II project, which took three years to design and deploy and complete, was not only large in scale but also in complexity. The audiovideo system includes equipment from Biamp DSP, Bose loudspeakers and Crestron control systems.
The DKU team, led by Chief Engineer and the university’s technical lead for the audio system design, Wan Li, adopted an all-digital and fully distributed AV-over-IP architecture. Through this, TCC 2 can be seamlessly integrated into the campus network and all brands of audio equipment via Dante, allowing IT managers to monitor and control the communication, interaction and control of various devices on campus in real time via cell phones, tablets or computers.
Sennheiser’s business communication solutions have an open audio/video ecosystem with a high level of compatibility, as well as having been certified by Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Tencent Conference and Nail Conference.
During the implementation of the project, Sennheiser technical engineers visited the university several times to carry out on-site investigation and debugging – working room-by-room to ensure that the installation position and positioning of each TCC 2 provided optimal performance.
More: www.sennheiser.com
