Can you hear me?

Can you hear me? What is that noise?

All looks great on the surface, but scratch a little deeper and you realise picture perfect is still not good enough.

Poor sound quality is a common complaint in the market place when it comes to meeting rooms, and something that is often overlooked when designing meeting spaces and integrating audio visual technology.

Even here, at Universal AV, we were guilty of falling into the same trap when designing our new office space.

The Issue

We had a lovely blank space to create a fabulous office space for our Universal AV team. We needed open plan offices, individual offices and meeting rooms.

All were created, decorated, the furniture was ordered and AV technology integrated (of course – it is what we do best!). However, what we failed to take into account was the acoustics of the new building.

Teams Meeting

We had it all: a bright new meeting room equipped with the latest integrated audio visual technology incorporating screens, microphones and cameras. We were set. The first Teams meeting took place in the office with employees also working in a hybrid manner from home. Unfortunately those at home complained that they could not hear us speaking, and that every time we moved the noise was unbearable.

“It couldn’t be that bad, could it?”

That was what we genuinely believed until those of us in the meeting room worked from home, dialled into the call, and had the same experience.

How could it be so bad? What did we need to do to change it? From that point onwards we did not make external calls in this manner until we had it resolved.