ClearOne

 

The ultra-sleek design fits into any conferencing environment and delivers the clearest audio pickup available with adaptive acoustic processing. Twenty-four microphone elements can steer its pickup pattern towards participants in the room and reject unwanted noise and reflections, thereby offering superb and unmatched performance for group conferencing environments.

 

A recent review of the Beamforming Microphone Array by Leonard Suskin shows how this powerful technology is truly a game-changer for the Pro Audio industry.

 

“Physically, it’s a nice looking piece of hardware. It’s thirty inches long, five and three-quarters wide, by only one inch deep. On the bottom (if ceiling-mounted) are cutouts for the individual mic elements and two LED/touch buttons, one of which has the Clear One ‘C’ log discretely wrapped around it. It connects to a Clear One Converge DSP (and only a Clear One Converge – more on this later) and power-injector through two Cat5-type cables which can be neatly managed through the hollow rectangular support pole. It also comes with a tile-bridge to easily mount to a standard two-foot drop-ceiling. It’s certainly a nice physical package.”

 

Leonard has had some bad luck with ceiling microphones in the past, saying “There are, of course, better solutions, but the end result always seems the same; the ceiling is not the optimal place to locate microphones. They’re far from the talker. They’re close to all kinds of ceiling noise. The best results one could hope for are “barely adequate”. So it was with hope but some degree of skepticism that I took part in a test of Clear One’s new digital beam-forming ceiling mic array.”

 

But once the Beamforming Microphone Array was installed, he found that his initial skepticism about the ClearOne Beamforming Microphone Array was unwarranted and said “…it performed splendidly. Intelligent tracking software built into the mic follows the sound of voices, giving a clear and even signal as one of us walked in a circle around the room. Audio was clear from all four corners of the room. Clear One’s noise cancellation dealt nicely with the projector noise, although at the expense of slight artifacts perceived by those of us with the most sensitive ears for such things.”