Meeting Room and Videoconference – The Audio Visual Equipment setup

Setting up a videoconference room can be complex.

Defining your needs, choosing the right audiovisual equipment, arranging the various elements, making the room practical and quick to use, masking.

And also, removing as much as possible any trace of wiring are all elements that must consider beforehand.

We have created this guide to make your life easier and guide you step by step, according to your needs, in choosing the ideal equipment for your videoconferences.

The choice of videoconference room and its acoustics

• Whether chosen in real life or on a plan and to provide hearing comfort to its users and correspondents.
• And also, one must assess a videoconference room on its acoustic qualities.
• Indeed, all the hard surfaces: walls, windows, glass tables, certain types of ceiling, will reflect the voices.
• Doing so will make the audio part unpleasant with a hollow sound, or even sound. ‘echo or feedback.
• To reduce as much as possible all the factors that affect the excellent acoustics of your meeting room.

Some solutions are simple to deploy:

• Try to equip yourself with Venetian blinds or curtains (including on the walls if necessary).
•  And also, the installation of acoustic panels.
•  The exclusion of audio equipment from any source of noise pollution such as (air conditioning, video projector, etc.).
•  The Green plants and various decorations will be all elements slowing down sound reverberations.
• Finally, the right choice of the room upstream if different rooms are available: it may be worthwhile to assess them through the sound prism upstream of the installation.

The furniture of your meeting room dedicated to videoconferencing

Choosing the right furniture is essential.

Indeed, whether it is the sound reverberation of which we have just spoken, comfort.

And also, even the practicality of installing equipment, videoconferencing-oriented meeting room furniture has its characteristics.

Should therefore ban the different type of furniture:

• Glass furniture: messy, cold, and reverberating sounds.
• The Meeting tables and sideboards without cable management solutions.
• And also, Chairs design to take precedence over comfort (keep in mind that some meetings may last several hours, so it is essential to ensure excellent seating for all participants).

Choose your videoconferencing camera: comparison of the best webcams

Your videoconferencing room is ready.

• The furniture is in place, and it is now time to worry about the heart of your installation: the audiovisual equipment.
• When it comes to videoconferencing, the right choice of camera will be a determining factor.
• Can sometimes make it a mistake to choose a classic webcam to equip a room:
• The meetings then quickly turn into a boring event for correspondents:
• poor field of vision, poor identification of the speaker, poor general definition, or still overexposure.
• So many annoyances are ultimately making videoconferencing counterproductive and harmful in terms of image.
• To equip your video conferencing room with a suitable camera.
• Two factors should be defined upstream: the size of the room and the maximum number of participants.

Recommendations by types of videoconference room

Equip a Micro videoconference room or “huddle room” 3/6 people

Jabra panacast, The notion of a huddle room appeared a few years ago across the Channel and refers to small areas offering 3 to 6 seats maximum.

Given its small surface area, the huddle room often forces participants in a videoconference to sit very close to the screen and the webcam.

All participants can be correctly visible by their correspondents without distortion and without having to contort themselves by seeing just to its right or left.

An American manufacturer, Panacast, has designed an extremely compact webcam with an exceptional 180 ° viewing angle.

Jabra, the European manufacturer of headsets and tools dedicated to video, bought this manufacturer in 2017.

Equip Small meeting room 4/8 people

Poly studio x30 and x50: professional webcams are the direct competitor of Jabra.

The American firm Poly (a contraction of the Polycom and Plantronics companies) specializes in video equipment dedicated to this type of room through its Polycom studio range.

Two models are mainly in use: the Polycom Studio and the Poly Studio X30 (its equivalent natively embedding the Zoom and Teams solutions and therefore requiring no PC to operate).

These two webcams for videoconferencing rooms offer 4K resolution, an intelligent zoom on the speaker.

The “soundbar” format also makes it possible to manage the sound part (microphones and speakers).

Two other videoconferencing cameras have been very successful for this type of configuration:

1. The Meeting Owl Pro
2. The Kandao Meeting

Equip Medium Room 8/15 people

Meeting room with PTZ cameras, Thanks to its 5x zoom, its automatic focus on the speaker, and its “all-in-1” design – microphones + powerful soundbar.

The Poly Studio X50 is the tool ideally suited to this type of meeting room.

Coupled with its TC8 supervision tablet, it will be able to launch your Teams or Zoom web conference with a single click and without a PC.

An alternative to this product can be the Logitech Rally Bar.

Equip Large meeting room (15 people and more)

Considering many panelists, the webcams generally used in this type of configuration are PTZ cameras (motorized) and equipped with an optical zoom allowing a focus on one or more people, with impeccable image quality.

The Aver Media and Polycom EagleEye ranges are the most used in these specific cases.

However, making the right choice still depends on other factors and will require technical advice from our video experts.

The display screen: choosing the right TV for the videoconference room

If a 32-inch screen may be sufficient in a Huddle room, it is less and less rare to be equipped with large TV screens, some going up to 85 inches (over 2 meters).

Easier to install and more responsive than video projectors, professional digital signage TV screens have completely replaced business video projectors in recent years.

Audio for your videoconference

Hearing well and being heard are essential factors for the success of your videoconference.

However, If some webcams integrate microphones and speakers like the Polycom Studio, it is advisable to equip yourself with audio peripherals to increase listening comfort and voice capture.