With travel to meet clients and colleagues a less viable option and many organizations moving to a work from home/hybrid model, we are seeing an increased reliance on high quality sound technologies that enable effective collaboration and communication. 

A lot of attention has focused on the platforms and services that are powering our virtual meetings. Names like Zoom that were once niche products of the startup world have become verbs used by your kid’s teacher or grandparents.  

Without these innovative platforms and the high speed infrastructure that they sit on top of, we would be in a much bleaker economic situation. Perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that it’s COVID-19 and not COVID-95. 

But one area that has received less attention has been the actual hardware that we use to facilitate our business conferencing. The nuts and bolts, or in our case, microphones and speakers. 

Hoping to get a better sense of how the industry needs are changing to meet the current challenges, UC Today caught up with Stuart Davidson, the Technical Director at Kinly. His previous company AVMI was recently acquired by the Amsterdam-based Kinly that provides a wide range of collaboration technology solutions.  

He shared his experience as an integrator of audio visual technologies on the recent shifts in the UC space, and how his work with hardware providers like Shure are altering their approach to serving their customers. 

Spaces Change but the Mission Stays the Same 

Stuart Davidson

Increasingly, Davidson says that a lot of their work is shifting from the large halls and auditoriums to providing meeting room integrations.  

“Our customer base is really anyone that uses technology to collaborate as a group,” he tells UC Today, adding that many of their customers are now coming from commercial and financial verticals, as well as education and the military. Within these verticals, he is seeing changes in demand.   

While much of the buzz has been on how people are setting up home working solutions, Davidson’s team has found a fair amount of their work moving to enabling better communication from offices. As the months have dragged on, in areas where the conditions have permitted it, many organizations have moved to a hybrid working arrangement. This is where not everyone comes to the office all at once, but in capsules or for specific working groups a few times a week.  

However, the continued dispersal of people collaborating on projects has meant that offices have had to adapt and adopt better sound configurations so as to ensure clearer communication with those in remote locations.   

“We’ve gone from the integration business to the collaboration business,” says Davidson, explaining that many of their recent projects have been in helping organizations set in place a kind of continuity for communication, and less on large scale installations.  

“What we do nowadays is provide that line between what is on your desktop, and what’s in a meeting room so that it’s one seamless experience,” he says. 

Providing this experience for their customers means working with technologies that are built for the UC space in mind and hold up to Davidson’s standards for quality.  

“Shure is a strategic partner because they have the same ethos as we do in that, in that the quality comes first,” he says, noting that:

“We need to make sure that fundamentally we are delivering to the standard that we demand and we demand a gold standard in all of our projects” 

Shure’s new steerable microphone arrays are enabling us to provide voice lift functionality from integrated ceiling microphones and speakers, which was historically something we’ve never been able to do,” he says, adding that, ”It really helps us to provide a better experience with the customer.”    

He points to Shure’s partnerships with both Microsoft and Zoom as playing a role in their success in providing technology that has been designed to natively integrate into his customers’ UC workflow. These include a number of products like Shure’s MXA910 ceiling array microphone, the Microflex Wireless microphones, and the MXA310 table array.  

My Take 

Throughout my conversation with Davidson, one clear thread continued to pop up throughout. That is the need to provide customers with a quality audio experience that allows them to work without getting in the way.  

In a sense, it just has to work, and it’s better if we don’t notice that it’s there.  

Think of all the virtual meetings you’ve had in recent months. What percentage of the time did you spend asking the person on the other end of the line to repeat themselves because something was missed or garbled?  

It might seem obvious, but it is worth repeating. One of the goals of the audio visual technology providers, and the platforms as well for that matter, should be to interact as naturally as possible under these starkly unnatural conditions. That means sitting in the background, picking up our voices without having to hold a mic in our hands, and letting us talk simply and clearly with one another before remembering that we used to do this in person.