First of all, happy new year everyone, specially for those of you who might be thinking “look who’s back from the ashes”
I’ve missed you all
I’m looking for a low budget solution for skype conference calls in a meetings room.
For some hidden reason this forum immediately pops up in my head when I think about buying audio equipment
Room setup: fairly large rectangle room with horrible acoustics (lots of echo hehe), bunch of tables packed together in the center, chairs around it, empty walls.
Mic needed: omni mic to sit in the center and able to capture the voice of 5/6 people sitting around it.
Speakers: 2.0 speakers for listening to the person(s) talking on the other end of the skype calls and also occasionally to provide audio for some videos projected on the wall.
Today I did some tests on a skype call using a T.bone SC1100 connected to an ART USB Dual Preamp (usb connection to laptop) and some fairly old Creative Gigaworks T20 speakers.
Audio on the other end sounded wonderful (according to my testing mate).
Sound coming out of the speakers not so great, but I think mostly because the mic oh the other end was terrible (even with headphones I couldn’t hear it very clearly…).
Then we put the speakers on the other room and the sound coming from the T.bone (through skype) apparently was good enough to understand perfectly what I was saying.
I also had a quick go with a cardioid T.bone SC140 in place of the SC1100, but the results were not quite satisfying (as expected…).
BTW, using the built-in high-pass filter on the SC1100 was top-notch
Extra note: even with the speakers near the mic there was no echo, so it seems echo cancellation on skype works pretty well with decent equipment (not so true when you move to a crappy built-in mic/speakers on a windows laptop)
Anyway, back to business… t.bone + art preamp is completely out of budget, so I’m looking into a Snowball or Samson UB1, which are about the same price and still a bit over the budget I was given, but I don’t think I can go much lower without severely compromising the audio quality.
But if anyone has a better/cheaper alternative I’m listening
Also not sure between snowball and samson ub1, never had any of those… Any insight?
And will either be able to get anywhere near the results I achieved today with the t.bone sc1100+art preamp? Maybe better than with the sc140?
As for speakers, gigaworks T20 sound reasonable, but also slightly over the budget. Creative Inspire T10 and Logitech Z200 are both within the budget (nearly half the price of the T20), but not sure if it will have enough power to fill in the room (5 watts for T10 and Z200 vs 14 for T20).
For when the other skype caller has a crappy mic, maybe a software high pass filter could do some wonders… and make it audible on speakers.
Any other alternatives I could look into?
No fancy stuff, I need something fairly mainstream that I can buy in europe
Thanks in advance
Bruno