> Capturing high-quality audio in a meeting room for videoconferencing is a notoriously complicated problem
Not from my experience of 20 years ago setting up VC systems, biggest issue was video and making sure lighting was good, and plane wall behind (sky blue was good colour for that).
Audio wise, was many desk standing mic's (can't recall main brand) but was a few.
Did have one issue once with setting up a connection to a remote french company, was no audio from there end - turned out that the technician at the other end was sat on the end of the table in front of the camera and also was sat upon the mic that was on the table. Soon solved but still, most funny.
Back then we had VC systems that could roll into a room on a cart and worked well - picturTel IIRC being one solution back then and PolyCon being another that soon overtook them as well as doing wonderful conferencing microphones.
But as bandwidth got cheaper and more accessible, many meeting rooms that would be too noisy visually for VC became accessible and the need for dedicated rooms drifted away for more client usage.
Though audio from my experience back then was the easy part.
Quality video is definitely hard too, but it's just not as important.
If we have beautiful, well-lit video feeds if every participant, but no one can hear what they're saying -- that's a deal breaker. The other way around, if we have clean, crisp audio from everyone and inconsistent video, at least the conversion can still move forward.
Even just watching a random clip on Youtube, it's fairly easy to forgive a low quality video feed but bad audio gets really annoying very quickly. Any lag or stuttering or artifacts etc in the audio is a dealbreaker for most people.
Not from my experience of 20 years ago setting up VC systems, biggest issue was video and making sure lighting was good, and plane wall behind (sky blue was good colour for that).
Audio wise, was many desk standing mic's (can't recall main brand) but was a few.
Did have one issue once with setting up a connection to a remote french company, was no audio from there end - turned out that the technician at the other end was sat on the end of the table in front of the camera and also was sat upon the mic that was on the table. Soon solved but still, most funny.
Back then we had VC systems that could roll into a room on a cart and worked well - picturTel IIRC being one solution back then and PolyCon being another that soon overtook them as well as doing wonderful conferencing microphones.
But as bandwidth got cheaper and more accessible, many meeting rooms that would be too noisy visually for VC became accessible and the need for dedicated rooms drifted away for more client usage.
Though audio from my experience back then was the easy part.