MS Teams Room with Meetup - ECHO

Question

Hello, my name is Victor, nice to meet you guys.

I am having a echo problem with one of our costumers. He has a Think Smart Hub500 integrated with Teams and Meetup in the meeting room, but the quality of his voice is sounding like he is inside a aquarium.

Can it be an acoustics problem? As i saw, most of the walls of his meeting room is made of glass panels. Is this a problem?

I verified, in our call tests, that he is using the speakers and microphone of the Logitech Meetup.

Thanks in advance.

linuscansby · Answer

Hard to say but glass walls is not recommended in conference rooms with audio devices. There are some devices that handles it better, but fabric or other materials that don't bounces the sound is recommended.

thegrahamwalsh · Answer

What about if you use the Mics in the Hub 500 and the speakers of the Meetup? How does it perform then?

davechomi · Answer

Well, I would not expect that it will make it better to be honest but even worse experience. Moving mic to hub from meetup speaker would break in my opinion the echo cancellation of meetup and potentially create echo in different meaning of the word. I do believe that experience of Victor is caused by glass panels. We have such meeting rooms in various locations and it is the case for us too.
I have not found any solution on the market that would make me happy about the experience in such rooms to be fully honest. Not best but fine is the solution with MIC pods.

thegrahamwalsh · Answer

Indeed, it may not be good, but it's worth trying to move the audio away from meetup and just use that as the camera and the hub for audio input/output and let the hub do the echo cancelling.

victorhdo · Answer

Hello!! First i would like to thank you all for the replys. I was on vacation so i did no check the responses.Dear Graham, the hub500 mic performed worse than the Meetup. The echo were bigger than Meetup's microphone.We concluded that is an acoustics problem because glass does not has any sonorous absorvition, unlike some materials like Acoustic Foam. The voice reverbs all along the room and the Meetup, or hub, echo cancelling can't handle it.The room is all made of glass panels except the ceiling and the back wall, both of masonry. After some researchs, i found that this types of room (without any acoustics tratament for sonorous absorvition), is very likely to show problems.Despite the not ideal audio quality, the client is satisfied with the result and is testing his new Meeting Room. We expect that if he continues with the purchase, we will work on a project to implement a new foam to his ceiling.Here are some links and sources from my research.There is a variable for Sonorous Absorvition for building materials. "https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/accoustic-sound-absorption-d_68.html"Alpha is a number that represents certain % in absorvition. As shown in the table, Glass varies from 10% to 20%, so 90%-80% of the sound is reflected as echo.Masonry is similar to glass, brickwood ranges from 0.01 - 0.02 (10%-20%).Concluding, a room without any acoustic tratament material is very likely to show problems as many common building materials are non sound absorvents. This can be good too, it means that your room won't let your voice leak out. But in our case, it is not.

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MS Teams Room with Meetup - ECHO

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