The End of Bad Audio in Conference Calls

If you have ever joined a conference call and felt that some of the participants seem to be calling-in from a construction zone, then you are definitely not alone. For a few decades now, the highly-priced "UFO" shaped devices placed in the middle of most conference rooms, have left a lot to be desired. Despite the considerable progress, these devices struggle to achieve their objectives.  That is why some people are so frustrated with these devices and even using them as shooting targets. 

To get a better feel of how bad the situation is, we did a simple test. We took one of the best conference calling devices in the market (priced north of $3000) to a large open space, on the 18th floor in the Pruneyard of Campbell. And placed it in the middle of the room. 

Needless to say, this result is far from satisfying (and that's me being charitable). As soon as background noise and/or reverberation appear in the acoustic environment there, the performance of these devices degrades rapidly, often in an ungraceful fashion, resulting in degraded speech quality, reduced (rather than improved) speech intelligibility, and addition of annoying and distracting artifacts.  As such, even in what could be considered mildly challenging acoustic conditions, these devices fail to perform as expected. They fail to facilitate effective speech communication for distant participants.

To show what can be achieved using state of the art technology. We placed a low-cost makers-fare mic array board called Matrix Voice next to this high-end conference calling device. We captured the raw audio on using the Matrix Voice 7 mics and processed it using BabbleLabs multi-mic technology

The difference speaks for itself. As this is the time of the year to make predictions for the new year, I think it is safe to say that 2020 will be touted as the year when bad conference calling experience comes to an end.  

Happy New Year to you all!