Improving Sacrament Meeting Teleconferences
Posted: Sat Nov 28, 2015 11:34 pm
Most Sundays my non-US branch meets in homes of three branch members due to space constraints in the meetinghouse in our city, and legal restrictions on the size of gatherings at unregistered meeting locations. While we conduct thesacrament at each location independently, we use a teleconference bridge line to connect the three locations for the remainder of our Sacrament meeting. The teleconference is conducted using 3 Polycom soundstation2 teleconferencing consoles.
Sharing most of the sacrament meeting allows us to have a more normal sacrament meeting, and it works well except for a couple things. We are meeting in people's homes, and the Polycom system is not a soundsystem. The shape and furnishing of the rooms have a significant impact on the audibility.
1. Members sometimes speak as if the microphone for the phone were a mic in a standard chapel. And even when a speaker is projecting and enunciating well in the home they are speaking in, the Polycom even at full volume is sometimes still not capable of making the audio easy to hear at the back of the living/family rooms used for our meetings. While I could encourage the members to speak up, the variation in capability is significant.
2. Polycom conference phone consoles are equipped with omnidirectional microphone capability, so that they can pick up all participants within 10 feet in a conference room. They are very effective at picking up all the noises young children make during talks and prayers.
While there are now web-based conferencing systems that could easily be connected to directional microphones, and even provide video, internet signal quality here is often intermittent so we are not ready to switch away from a POTS connection.
What I think I need:
Amplification of the speakers and of the telephone audio.
A telephone/teleconference console that has only directional mics. Preferably two that can be muted separately, so that the piano can be heard independently at appropriate times.
But I don not know how to identify which equipment I need.
If you can help identify the right equipment, or if you have a better idea of how to do this please speak up!
-Matthew
Sharing most of the sacrament meeting allows us to have a more normal sacrament meeting, and it works well except for a couple things. We are meeting in people's homes, and the Polycom system is not a soundsystem. The shape and furnishing of the rooms have a significant impact on the audibility.
1. Members sometimes speak as if the microphone for the phone were a mic in a standard chapel. And even when a speaker is projecting and enunciating well in the home they are speaking in, the Polycom even at full volume is sometimes still not capable of making the audio easy to hear at the back of the living/family rooms used for our meetings. While I could encourage the members to speak up, the variation in capability is significant.
2. Polycom conference phone consoles are equipped with omnidirectional microphone capability, so that they can pick up all participants within 10 feet in a conference room. They are very effective at picking up all the noises young children make during talks and prayers.
While there are now web-based conferencing systems that could easily be connected to directional microphones, and even provide video, internet signal quality here is often intermittent so we are not ready to switch away from a POTS connection.
What I think I need:
Amplification of the speakers and of the telephone audio.
A telephone/teleconference console that has only directional mics. Preferably two that can be muted separately, so that the piano can be heard independently at appropriate times.
But I don not know how to identify which equipment I need.
If you can help identify the right equipment, or if you have a better idea of how to do this please speak up!
-Matthew