Improving Council Chamber Audio

In all of my travels whenever I walk into another council chamber the first think I notice is the acoustics of the room. Is it a live room or is it a dead room? If I clap my hands together, how reflective is the room? Usually when a client wants to improve the audio in their Council Chambers, they usually mean they want to fix a problem, and that problem could be anything from feedback issues to unintelligible audio. It could be that participants sit so far away from the existing microphone that they can’t be heard. It could be any number of things, but in the end the client wants one thing; intelligible audio.

If someone speaks at the Council Chamber the audio system should reinforce that speech clearly so that others in the room can understand what is being said. The easiest way to ensure this intelligibility is by having quality components at the source; the microphones. Microphones should be selected to cater to the acoustics of the room and build upon the strengths of that room while hiding the weak points. If a system in place has microphones on all of the time, it becomes difficult for the microphones to do their job, but if the microphones are part of a microphone management system (meaning the microphones are only on when someone is speaking into them) then the microphone performs its job exceptionally well.

Think about it. A microphone is only present to amplify the voice of someone speaking; if someone isn’t speaking the microphone shouldn’t be there. This is what the Conference Management System offers the client, the ability to have a quality microphone there when you need it and gone when you don’t need it.

This one feature removes all of the coughs, paper shuffling, and noise out of the system right away. The next step in improving the council chamber audio is to look at the speakers, or at least their location in relation to the microphones. I can’t tell you how many rooms I’ve walked into that had ceiling mounted speakers directly over the microphones on the dais. The end result is that the audio coming out of the speakers goes directly back into the microphones and creates a positive feedback loop and that’s bad. But if you remove those speakers it becomes difficult for the participants to hear themselves and each other. The solution is to move those speakers down to the dais and give each member their own speaker to hear the meeting with. To deal with any remaining feedback issues a conference management system again comes into play by automatically muting the speaker whenever the participants microphone is on, ensuring that no audio can enter the microphone except for the original source; the participant.

So now you have a system with microphones that are only active when someone is speaking and speakers positioned so that feedback is no longer an issue, yet participants can still hear each other. All in all what you have created is a Council Chamber audio system that creates intelligible audio, and it does so by using a state of the art Conference Management System.