I’ve been working remote since ’06 – way before remote was cool – and I was in audio for 14 years before I started doing anything related to video.  I still remember my first day working for an integrator back in ’00 and attending computer interface training from one of the ‘trons.  I didn’t even know this ‘tron stuff existed before then.  I say all that to say this: I’ve been around a while.

As I mentioned, I’m remote and I’ve been on video calls using Skype, GoTo, Zoom, Teams and others for almost two decades.  Granted, the audio I’ve heard from most one-on-one video calls has been almost acceptable with the other person’s laptop mic.  Never great, but okay-ish.  It’s the audio from the typical meeting room that has been the real problem.  To describe it from the perspective of a far side participant, I will quote the late Scott Sharer, “It would have to suck to be better”.

“In the beginning”, meeting rooms used gooseneck mics, but the gooseneck farm was deemed ugly.  So we moved to boundary and button mics, but they were subject to liquid spills, inadvertently covered up by folders or papers, or the laptop fan blew directly across the mic.  Then we tried all sorts of ceiling mics from the big Plexiglas things to hanging shotgun and golf ball mics – all with varying levels of unsuccess.  With each aesthetic “improvement” the mics kept getting further and further away from the participants – the audio source.  If we kept moving displays further and further from the viewers like this, you would think we were nuts.

All too often, you’ll see a meeting room with a conference phone in the middle of a 20 ft. table. Or worse, they’re using a 360-degree ”bird” camera in the middle of that same table and they think they’ve achieved meeting equity.  Or, the meeting room is an acoustic nightmare and the microphones are just too far away from the participants.  While the people in the meeting room get a chance to converse, share ideas and come away with valuable information, the remote participants are left to fend for themselves as they haven’t been able to hear much of anything because of the poor and indistinguishable audio.  If they can’t hear you, you can’t expect them to feel included and make meaningful contributions.

I also wonder how much poor audio may have affected career advancements for remotes when full participation with the larger group has been hindered in this way.

Admittedly, conferencing audio has improved over the years with the ceiling mic arrays and large wall mounted audio conferencing systems, but nothing replaces sticking a mic directly in front of someone’s face.

In March of 2025, NPR ran a piece on All Things Considered about how people perceive you in relation to your audio and I think it’s worth quoting here:

“People who participate in online meetings using platforms like Zoom may want to pay closer attention to how their computer microphone alters the sound of their voice.

That’s because high-quality audio can make the speaker seem more attractive and convincing to others, according to results published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lower-quality audio, in contrast, can make people seem less appealing.”

Wow.  No mention of video, lighting, framing or camera quality.

It’s all about the audio – whether it’s a one-on-one call or picking up a room full of people.

I consider audio to be the “blue-collar worker” of our AV world.  Without audio, you’re not communicating.  After all these years, I still believe that the audio is more difficult to get right than video because you while you can see light, you can’t see sound.  Worse, most people seem to have the expectation that some new microphone located far from the participants or some new DSP can fix all things audio and acoustic.  Yes, you can be heard but what about the quality and how you’re being perceived?  Fast forward into the 23rd century and even Scotty couldn’t change the laws of physics.

Consider for a moment if the emphasis on meeting room design was flipped, and audio and acoustics became the primary considerations rather than the latest display technology or interior design fad.

Imagine better communication.
Imagine sounding more attractive and convincing to others.

Being an “audio person”, I have always felt that my audio was important.  I typically use a standard broadcast microphone model first introduced back in 1968.  1968. That’s not a misprint.  That’s back when only 25% of households had a color television.

This mic is so good that it even has its own Wikipedia article.  It uses a connector that’s been in use since at least 1955.  The pinout for that connector was finally set by an AES standard a mere 33 years ago.

On the other end of the signal chain is the loudspeaker, typically a moving coil design patented back in 1925.

While the signal path in between the mic and loudspeaker could be analog or digital, the transducers on either end really haven’t changed that much.

You could argue that the quality of audio has certainly improved since 1925, especially on the loudspeaker side but the design of this broadcast standard microphone that I use almost every day is almost 60 years old and it’s still revered today.

Displays and cameras are great, but if you really want to improve your image, improve your audio.

NTSC, VGA, 4:3 have all come and gone.  Basic audio is still just as essential as it has always been.

If you’re unsure of the best audio approach for your communication needs, let us know here at Almo ProAV.  We have audio specialists ready to help.

About the Author

Tom Kehr

CTS-D, CTS-I, Network+, LEED Green Associate, ISF-C, ATD Master Trainer

In-House System Designer and Trainer

Supported Applications: System Design

In August of 1955, LIFE magazine ran an article in their Modern Living section called, “Throwaway Living: Disposable Items Cut Down Household Chores”.

The picture associated with the piece shows dozens and dozens of household items and claimed that the objects shown represented 40 hours to clean.  Another picture in the article shows a single-use barbeque grill with stand, asbestos shell, wire grille and enough charcoal to last one hour.  Maybe not everything convenient is a good idea.

Eventually it was discovered that throwing everything away and filling up landfills was not a good long-term strategy – imagine that.

The first Ecology symbol that I recall came about in 1969, and in 1970 we had our first Earth Day.  I’m also old enough to remember the early days of Mother Earth News and the Whole Earth Catalog.

Today we talk about fighting pollution and environmental destruction with recycling, reuse and reclamation.

A few weeks back, I was doing some web searching into audio consoles and I found a comment about how that one brand was so cheap that they budgeted for two, one to use and a second as a backup for when the first one failed.  This was because of the brand’s notoriety for lack of quality, support and service.

Recently I had a request for eight wireless microphone channels.  A popular online shopping site shows an eight-channel system at $34.99 per channel.  That’s not a typo.  $34.99 per channel.  By comparison, Ronco’s Mr. Microphone was $12.88 back in 1978.  $12.88 in 2025 dollars is $63.82.  Today, Mr. Microphone would be almost twice as expensive per channel than the new online offering.  At these price points, equipment has no real value and not even worth the attempt to repair if, actually when, it fails.  We just throw it away and get another one.

Like Marty McFly, we’re all back to living like we’re in 1955 except in our Throwaway Society, we’re tossing electronics, appliances, tools and even cars away like they’re paper plates and plastic utensils.

Think about it – what can we buy today that will provide a lasting value for years to come?  We used to call them Durable Goods and it’s a real economic category.  The Durable Goods subcategory of Electronics includes TVs and computer equipment.  The items in that category should probably be updated, as seeing a modern TV or a computer as a “durable good” is hard to fathom.

A true durable good was the old refrigerator that you had in your house in the ’60s and early ‘70s that came in Harvest Gold, Avocado or Burnt Orange that would live forever.  You may still have one as your garage fridge.

In our world of AV, what product or signal transport can you spec in a project today that will still be relevant five years from now?  Is any piece of modern AV equipment a durable good?  Perhaps a good hardwired microphone or a quality loudspeaker, but that’s it.

We’re often working with refresh cycles of five years, and I’ve seen articles where the IT refresh cycle is two to four years.  People on average keep a phone 2 ½ to 3 ½ years and a car for eight.

Imagine if all of the things around your house had to be replaced every five years: lawn mowers, refrigerators, washing machines, lamps, bicycles, roofs, windows, electrical panels and wiring, plumbing, etc.  It seems crazy, but we’re replacing AV equipment and the connecting infrastructure regularly to stay current with the technology.

Current with what?  It’s not just the ever-increasing resolutions and the bandwidth required to support the higher resolutions.  I would argue that it is in large part due to the plethora of proprietary signal interfaces and protocols that we have.

HDMI with HDCP was forced upon us from the Consumer world and HDBaseT made it possible for us to extend HDMI in our Pro world.  Unfortunately, one manufacturer’s HDBaseT may not work with another manufacturer’s HDBaseT and it has always been that way.

So maybe we use a different signal type.  Maybe we use SMPTE ST 2110 or one of the SDIs.  Maybe we “simplify” and go AVoIP.  With AVoIP we can choose from Dante, SDVoE, NDI, IPMX, SRT or one of the manufacturer’s proprietary AVoIP transport protocols.

Or worse, let’s see if we can just use HDMI or DisplayPort on the USB-C connection.

Do you see part of the problem yet?  Although AVB/TSN (Audio Video Bridging/Time Sensitive Networking) promised to bring us signal transport’s version of World Peace, that was over 20 years ago.  AVB/TSN had its challenges, so everyone continued to do their own thing.  From an Alliance or manufacturer’s viewpoint, I get it – who doesn’t want to try and rule the transport world?  But in the long-term, is this wise from a client and sustainability perspective?  Moreover, how long do we think we can maintain all these separate protocols?  We are working with built-in incompatibility and obsolescence.  What if our IT compatriots say, “Enough of all this incompatible nonsense and proprietary transports” and decide for us what we’ll be using.  It’s all on the network, right?

Broadcast and Production have been using NDI, ST 2110 and IPMX in their IP-based workflows and we’re already using conferencing cameras equipped with these protocols as we seek to emulate more of a production experience.  As more of our regular conferencing and streaming looks more like a production, perhaps one of these will become our default but that still doesn’t solve the video protocol coming out of a computer.

In a perfect world, I’d like to see a single interoperable Ethernet AVoIP protocol built into every computer, AV signal source and AV signal destination.  No more separate transmitters, receivers, encoders or decoders.  Configuration so simple that even a cave man can do it.

“So if AV is nothing but an endpoint, where does that leave us in the Pro AV world, Tom?”  It leaves us where we should be: Experts on the communication environment.  Realistically, this is where our true value resides – the crafting of the environment wherein humans can communicate effortlessly.

We spend so much time on signal extension and transport that we don’t have the time to work properly with the client on optimum image sizes, sightlines, content, lighting, interior design, furniture layouts, acoustics, microphone locations, loudspeaker coverages and intelligibility – all the necessary factors that contribute to a better overall communication implementation.

As I see it, the bottom line is that at some point, AV manufacturers will all need to learn to get along with one another for true interoperability – for our sakes as well as the end users and for the planet.

There is the SAVe organization that seeks to bring AV stakeholders together to take action to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  A big part of SAVe’s focus is to provide ways that companies can be more responsible in terms of reusing, repurposing, recycling and disposing of AV equipment.  Get to know them at https://saveav.org/

In the meantime, reach out to us here at Almo Pro AV.  We’ll do our best to help you craft solutions that will work best for your clients not only now, but as best we can, in the future.

About the Author

Tom Kehr

CTS-D, CTS-I, Network+, LEED Green Associate, ISF-C, ATD Master Trainer

In-House System Designer and Trainer

Supported Applications: System Design

Almo ProAV’s in-house system design experts have you covered with tools to deliver impeccable visual and sound experiences. Whether you’re working with a screen, flat panel, or LED wall, or even designing a sound system, the tools below will help you answer questions such as:

• How big does an image need to be?
• Where should the viewers be located in relation to that image?
• Will my sound reinforcement system be free from feedback?

Check out the Almo Pro AV Calculator Tools developed by Tom including:

• Basic Decision Making (BDM)
• Analytical Decision Making (ADM)
• Potential Accoustic Gain (PAG) – Needed Accoustic Gain (NAG)
• General Calculator & Converter
• Ceiling Loudspeaker Design

Back around 1989, Curt Taipale coined the phrase, “Looks About Right” or LAR for short. It referred to any “design” that was the result of guesswork rather than using any of the readily available tools that can be used to actually predict an end result.

For whatever reason, a number of projects have crossed my desk recently that look way too much like LAR.

The most common use of this poor “design” philosophy seems to be in determining the appropriate number of ceiling loudspeakers for a room. It seems everyone other than an actual AV Designer guesses at the number of loudspeakers needed using the LAR method. Take for example the 40 ft. x 27 ft. room with a 9 ft. ceiling where the initial inquiry stated, “I would think a ceiling speaker on each side of the room would be sufficient.” JBL’s free DSD (Distributed System Design) software has been around for decades and it’s a simple method for determining the number of ceiling or pendant loudspeakers required. No guesswork. Done. Quote ‘em. Put ‘em in. Manufacturers other than JBL have similar programs. Some even have nice graphics. All free, so there’s no reason not to use one.

However, once you go beyond ceiling or pendant loudspeakers, you may not be able to use a simple piece of design software; you’re into a completely different thought process using room modeling software to predict audience coverage.

In one recent example, I was shown a very reverberant house of worship space with high quality (insert reputable name brand here) loudspeakers everywhere. This included some in the back facing towards the front! It looked like the Water Sprinkler Theory of Sound where you just spray energy everywhere for “coverage”. As I remarked to the integrator tasked with fixing this, “I have never seen such quality gear implemented so poorly.”

In another recent example, the request was for a couple of two-way surface mounted loudspeakers with 5 1/4 inch woofers to cover an auditorium of 200 people. To quote Derek Bieri, “We’ll pretend we didn’t see that.”

When designing a sound system, consider these four parts:

• The acoustical properties of the room
• The background noise level of the room
• Loudspeaker choice and location
• Needed bandwidth

Acoustical Properties:

This involves the room shape, size and the materials found within the room as well as the areas adjacent to the room. Concave walls, domed ceilings, excessive volume (as in cubic feet or cubic meters) and large flat, smooth surfaces are challenging and at worst, could make the space unsuitable for the intended purpose. The only way to change the acoustical properties is to change the room physically or by the use of strategically chosen and placed acoustical materials. Unfortunately, people seem to always believe that new gear can fix a bad room. Look at fixing the room first if you think you have a room issue.

Background Noise:

Another key component to consider for a successful sound system is the acoustic signal-to-noise ratio. You can’t just crank the sound system to 11 because the room is noisy and expect the listeners to be comfortable. A common offender is the noise emanating from the HVAC system. However, ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers) publishes their Handbook with a handy Design Guideline Chart in the Noise and Vibration Control chapter. It shows NC (Noise Criteria) and RC (Room Criteria) ratings for different room types. You might be surprised that they list a target of NC/RC 35 for Conference Rooms and NC/RC 30 for Teleconference Rooms and Classrooms. Churches are listed as NC/RC 25. Our lives would be so much easier if we found these levels out in the wild.

Loudspeakers:

The more challenging the acoustics, the more critical loudspeaker choice and placement become. You need to direct the energy from the loudspeakers to where the people are and off of all the other surfaces in the room and this requires pattern control. You need the correct loudspeakers located in the correct position and as every room is different, loudspeakers are not one-size-fits-all.

So how do we keep all that sound pointing only in the direction we want it to? Directivity comes in two forms:

1. Interaction with a boundary like a wall (which creates its own problems) or a loudspeaker mounted within a horn or,
2. Interaction with another loudspeaker like you would find in a line array.

Regardless of whether it’s a point source loudspeaker or line array, size matters when it comes to pattern control.

The issue is that over the ten octave frequency range from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, we’re dealing with wavelengths from over 56 ft. long to less than 3/4 in. long. In other words, if we want to control the spread of energy down to the lower frequencies, we are going to need some really large devices. How practical are the loudspeakers that will provide adequate “throw” and pattern control over that range? This can be difficult if someone decides loudspeakers should be heard but not seen.

Bandwidth:

The analog telephone system that some of us grew up with had a frequency response of about 300 Hz to 3,400 Hz and it worked quite well for intelligibility. Our clients probably have a bit higher expectation from a modern sound system.

On the other hand, do we need a full 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz bandwidth?

What’s important as far as frequency range? We find that the octave bands of 1 kHz, 2 kHz and 4 kHz account for about 75% of speech intelligibility with the 500 Hz octave band contributing about another 13% and the 8 kHz octave band only about another 6%.

Intelligibility is a different criteria from quality speech reproduction as the average speech spectrum covers from the 125 Hz octave band to the 8 kHz octave band and even beyond with the additional harmonics affecting speech quality.

Full-range loudspeakers designed for sound reinforcement can certainly extend below 100 Hz, but how much of that range do you need? It depends… Usually, we’re designing a dual purpose system – one that’s used for speech and music. The need for low frequency extension usually depends on the genre of music being played or reproduced.

On the other end of the spectrum, we may have to contend with air absorption in very large rooms. Air absorption can act as a natural low pass filter with the cutoff frequency decreasing as a function of increasing distance.

Unless we’re in a recording studio or a post-production facility sitting in the sweet spot with high-end monitors just feet from our ears, getting 20 Hz to 20 kHz just isn’t practical or even necessary. It’s also good to remind yourself that the SM58 has a stated frequency response of 50 Hz to 15,000 kHz as a reality check.

There have been some articles written recently about how others’ perception of you – rightly or wrongly – may be based upon the quality of your audio, and that high quality audio can make you sound more attractive and convincing to others.

It’s all a balance between desire and practicality.

Summary:

There will be tradeoffs between desire, practicality and budget. There isn’t any loudspeaker, venue or system implementation that’s 100% perfect, but there certainly seems to be a lot of “very wrong” out there.

If you would like help avoiding the LAR approach and “very wrong”, let us know at Almo Pro AV. We can assist the system integrator with product recommendations, resources as well as paid engineering services and more through our LinkLab professional services division.

About the Author

Tom Kehr

CTS-D, CTS-I, Network+, LEED Green Associate, ISF-C, ATD Master Trainer

In-House System Designer and Trainer

Supported Applications: System Design

Almo ProAV’s in-house system design experts have you covered with tools to deliver impeccable visual and sound experiences. Whether you’re working with a screen, flat panel, or LED wall, or even designing a sound system, the tools below will help you answer questions such as:

• How big does an image need to be?
• Where should the viewers be located in relation to that image?
• Will my sound reinforcement system be free from feedback?

Check out the Almo Pro AV Calculator Tools developed by Tom including:

• Basic Decision Making (BDM)
• Analytical Decision Making (ADM)
• Potential Accoustic Gain (PAG) – Needed Accoustic Gain (NAG)
• General Calculator & Converter
• Ceiling Loudspeaker Design