The Importance of Audio in Huddle Rooms

And Why the Spider is the Ultimate Huddle Room Audio Solution

 

What is a huddle room?

Most of us who had a chance to roam inside of a modern office noticed that besides the disappearance of the age-old cubical, a new space has been sprawling up in-between open plan community seating and minimalistic, ergonomic, “hip” furniture – the huddle room.

The easiest way to describe this space is just as a smaller version of the conference room, however is does offer a bit more than just that.

If you Google the definition of a huddle room, the following comes up:

“Huddle rooms are defined as small conference areas that are equipped with audio, video and display system technology. These rooms are often used by groups who want to get together for impromptu, or previously scheduled, meetings to collaborate on projects.”

In other words, a casual and intimate conference room that is specifically designed for collaboration, putting an emphasis on communication whether it’s visual, audio, or both.

What’s inside of a huddle room?

Like any other design concept, there is no exact definition of what a huddle room should look like. However, if you analyze and compare most of the huddle rooms out there, you’ll find that most of them have some form of the following:

A defined space – usually closed off in some form, whether it’s fully isolated or just partitioned off. This space tends to be smaller in size, accommodating three to five people, and averages at around 65 square ft.

Furniture – a table, some chairs, lighting, maybe a dry-erase white board and some soundproofing decor.

Technology – huddle rooms need plenty of connectivity (power outlets, Wi-Fi, Ethernet) and some form of AV (HD flat screen display, projector, speakers, smart board, etc.).

Communication devices – since collaboration is so important, you will definitely find a telephone, speakerphone, video conferencing codec, and a camera.

 

Challenges:

The first three categories previously mentioned are pretty straight forward. Space and furniture are usually either chosen based on the office’s design and culture or are a trivial parameter defined by resources available.

The third element, “technology”, is important to the ease of use of the room (Do we need to use power strips or not? Can we trust the Wi-Fi signal or do we have to be tied down to an Ethernet outlet?). It also makes for a better experience if you’re using a large HD display vs. a dim low-res projector. However, these are rarely deal breakers in terms of the room’s usability.

The fourth and final category, communication, is where, in my opinion, you really make it or break it. Remember that other than size, the biggest difference between your huddle room and your conference room is that huddle rooms are designed for collaborative meetings, usually with the outside word. Because of this, good quality communication is absolutely key. It’s really what’s going to make the difference between a useful room used by all your team members and just an empty space that people go into to make a private cellphone call to their spouses.

Expanding a bit on this point, I’d have to stress that within the concept of communication, there is also a very important emphasis on audio intelligibility. And while the quality of your video conferencing is important, at the end of the day you can conduct a meeting with crisp audio and no video, but you most certainly cannot do the opposite. This point is very often neglected. We tend to spend a lot of cash and research time in finding a good camera or video conferencing endpoint, but not enough time and money on a good quality audio solution that will allow both sides to understand each other effortlessly.

If that wasn’t enough to stress out about, huddle rooms are usually accompanied by a two punch knockout – a tight low-cost budget and, for lack of a better word, crappy acoustics.

Low budget - According to numerous online resources, the equipment you normally encounter in a huddle room is much less expensive than the equipment you’ll typically find in a larger conference room. In fact, a huddle room tech budget usually caps out at around $5,000! And if you think about it, this makes perfect sense. After all, making huddle rooms smaller and less expensive is what allows us to make them accessible to more team members. So after budgeting for a TV, camera, and video codec, how do make sure to leave enough room for a good quality audio device for your video conferencing as well as for your phone?

Room acoustics – tight budgets also tend to lead to poor room acoustics. After all, who’s going to spend thousands of dollars on acoustic treatments rather than on an HD camera? Smaller rooms also make it harder to evade the dreaded AC vents that always end up blowing right into your audio device sounding to the other end of your call like a jet engine preparing to take off. And these are the least of your problems if your huddle room is just sectioned off from the rest of the office with partial walls as opposed to a fully built room. In this case, you have the rest of the office in the background to worry about - not to mention neighboring huddle rooms.

In comes the Spider

So how does the Phoenix Audio Spider Conference Phone address these issues? Well, in many ways, the Spider was designed specifically with a huddle room in mind. Yes it was also given features such as daisy chaining that allow it to be scaled to larger solutions, but at its core, the Spider is the perfect mid-sized room solution.

…and here is why:

Audio pickup – The Spider pickup range for great audio quality is between 8 and 20 feet in radius, depending on the acoustics of your room. This means that even if your huddle room’s acoustics are horrible (see previous section), you still have a solid 8 feet of pickup in all directions. We achieved this with our rich portfolio of noise canceling, echo canceling, AGC, and beamforming algorithms, all running on an integrated powerful DSP.

Sound - We also fitted the Spider with a special super capacitor and speaker duo to make sure you’ll get commanding audio levels throughout your room while working off of limited voltage. A lot of effort was put into keeping the Spider relatively small (only 8 inches in diameter) while providing a quality acoustic design to be able to drive a powerful speaker.

Dual connectivity and bridging – What’s that? Well, dual connectivity means that you can connect the Spider to both your video codec and your telephone line at the same time. This means that at any given moment the Spider can act as your high-quality audio end point for both your video conference session as well as your telephone call. Bridging means that not only can you use the Spider for both interfaces at any given moment, you can actually use it for both interfaces at the same given moment. For example, you can connect to a video conference session on Skype, then dial a phone number and speak to both parties using only one device. Not to mention that both parties can actually speak to each other through your device – which makes what we like to call a three-way audio bridge. And the best part is you don’t need to buy two separate audio devices for one room… you don’t even need a phone.

Size and design – Last but not least, we put a big emphasis on the size and design of the Spider. We kept it small without hurting its performance to minimize usage of tabletop space. We chose high-quality durable materials to make sure it withstands “public” use and concealed its connections to reduce wire clutter on your table and throughout your room.

And all this at a retail price of less than a sixth of your room’s tech budget!