If you think we’re anywhere close to maxing out the uses for videoconferencing solutions, think again. There are still so many places where a robust, scalable system can make a huge difference in the lives of those who work with it every day, even if you don’t think of them as typical customers.
In April 2015, the North Texas Municipal Water District, the largest water district in the state, had outgrown its existing office space and began making plans to move into a new facility to better accommodate its growth.
The NTMWD’s previous executive conference room had been challenging to use, with issues such as intelligibility and lack of video collaboration capabilities. NTMWD officials contacted Media Design Group (MDG) of Covington, Texas, to design and install the conferencing solution in the new NTMWD administration building. Media Design Group developed an improved system that would not only meet the current needs of the NTMWD, but would be scalable to allow for future growth too.
“They were having problems hearing each other and wanted to visually see presentations and other documents during these conferences,” says Rick Robinson, principal consultant for Media Design Group. “We had several meetings to present and discuss ideas before we began designing the system that could rectify these challenges.” [related]
The end result is a system that includes the executive board room, which seats 32, as well as two additional rooms: a large conference room for committee meetings and a training room. After testing mics from four manufacturers, Robinson and his team chose Audix Micropod microphones to outfit each of the spaces, he says.
The Micropods “had the most gain before feedback and provided much better pattern control” than other possibilities and maintain “sufficient level of control,” says Robinson.
“We could take the Audix microphones up 2 to 3 dB higher than the other mics before feedback,” he says.
Additional system components in the executive board room include Crestron room controls, providing controls to the boardroom and committee room for audio, video, lighting, drapes, and recording. Biamp Tesira provides the digital signal processing over AVB to AMK loudspeakers. Video components include Planar monitors, NEC and Christie projectors, and Da-Lite motorized video screens.
