CUK and Symetrix deliver Involving experience
- Details
ITV required a solution to make their meeting spaces more flexible and productive whilst maintaining an easy-to-use front end. “We have a regular need for remote comms,” explained ITV’s Ian Glen. “We put two programmes out every day with reporters based in multiple locations. At the end of the day we hold a debrief conversation from those same multiple locations and we were finding that the phone system we were using was unreliable and we had great difficulty in hearing those at the remote end.
“Our head of news instructed me to look into a solution and that led me to Involve. Initially we were only looking at kitting out a single room, but the solution fitted our needs so well that we decided to go for two rooms.”
Involve provided a solution based on a Symetrix Radius AEC (acoustic echo cancellation) system supplied by Symetrix’s UK distributor, CUK Audio, who worked closely with Involve throughout the design process. “ITV required a solution that would enable those in the meeting space to communicate intelligibly via a range of VoIP services including Google Hangouts with reporters and other staff in remote locations,” explained CUK’s Simon Druce who helped specify the system.
The table in the meeting space needed to be kept as free and clean as possible, so a wireless tablet is used to allow room users to dial and adjust volumes via the Symetrix ARC-WEB browser interface. The tablet communicates with a wireless access point which is in turn connected to the Radius AEC device. Outputs are connected to an amplifier and loudspeakers. The Radius AEC mixes all the remote sources to deliver clean, highly intelligible audio to the local room user whilst the AEC inputs process the hanging mics in the room to provide the same high quality audio to the remote user.
“It’s an ideal solution for this application,” remarked Druce. “The icing on the cake is the addition of an Atterotech unDUSB USB-Dante bridge which enables local users to connect laptops or other mobile devices via USB to the Dante network and use those to call, present and facilitate a meeting if they prefer to work that way. Both USB and VoIP can run concurrently so the Symetrix Radius then becomes a bridge for all parties and allows multi-participant conversations. It’s an elegant, efficient and highly cost-effective solution that ticks all the boxes for ITV Central.”
Ian Glen adds, “The Involve team were a pleasure to deal with – sympathetic, efficient and quick to react, they found us the solution we needed. Staff are very happy to go into a room and use it. It’s made the process of group calling so much more efficient and a much nicer experience generally. We’re delighted.”
(Jim Evans)
