The showpiece of today’s innovative meeting rooms is rarely the meeting room microphone, and Scott Krueckeberg, director of MXL microphones, a division of Marshall Electronics, knows that. However, at InfoComm 2018, he talked with CI about how quality audio is at least as important as quality video to make corporate meetings successful.
[related]“Video has kind of been at the forefront, right?” says Krueckeberg
“What are we watching? How does it look? What are the cameras like?”
That limited mindset is changing, Krueckeberg adds.
“Now people are paying just as much attention to the audio as they were the video. They want voice definition. They want clarity. They want intelligibility that you would get from the studio quality microphone. And we can offer that with tabletop USB mics.”
One of those USB mics, the MXL AC-360-Z, earned a 2018 CI BEST Award, unveiled at InfoComm 2018.
The conference microphone is designed to capture crystal-clear audio from 360 degrees within a 25-foot radius. MXL developed the AC-360-Z with engineers from Zoom.
Bringing Audio Legacy to the Meeting Room
When it comes to bringing high audio standards to meeting room conferencing solutions, MXL’s Krueckeberg relies on the brand’s long history of manufacturing quality mics. MXL has been around for three decades designing and manufacturing condenser microphones for music production and recording studios, says Krueckeberg.
“We’ve captured a lot of [MXL’s] knowledge and history and we brought it into the UCC market,” he says.
“We have a long history in manufacturing high-quality microphones, and we’ve captured a lot of that knowledge and history and brought it into the UCC market. And a lot of it is starting to pick up steam.”
Krueckeberg says the focus on the unified communications and collaboration market happened organically for MXL.
“It started with having a very high-quality product, people getting clear clean results from our meeting room microphone for web conferencing and then attaching it to video. We’ve seen substantial growth year after year with just bringing quality products at a good price point into this market.”
Watch the entire interview above.
