Latest News

Major Defense Contractor Chooses Symetrix for Conference Room Communication

One of the largest defense and aerospace contractors in the USA, recently replaced a clunky teleconferencing system in a 140-seat meeting room at their Clearlake-based facility with a SymNet-controlled distributed microphone system. Whereas before, a room full of the nation's brightest engineers had to pass two wireless microphones like teenagers with beach balls at a summer concert while holding high-level conference calls with clients such as the Defense Department and NASA, now every two engineers share a stationary microphone with a "push to talk" button. The old system was muddy, awkward, and prone to errors. In stark contrast, the new SymNet system is crystal clear, elegant, and rock solid.

Symetrix' SymNet, along with Shure mics, change the course of communications between various government agencies.

When the company had finally had enough, they contacted the original contractor, along with a competitor, for possible solutions and estimates. Both contractors envisioned affixing microphones to the ceilings that would hang down in "strategic" locations, not unlike choir mics. The solution, while relatively inexpensive, didn't strike the company's engineers as the sort of thing they would come up with. In other words, it didn't seem quite perfect. Seeking a better solution, they contacted Tom Bohacek, senior engineer and project manager for Audio Visual Technologies Group (AVTG), a Houston-based design firm of 55 years. Bohacek brings over a quarter century of experience in sound design to his projects, which range from church sound reinforcement to government courthouses.

Bohacek assessed the situation and pointed out one obvious flaw in his competitors' suggestion: the room's unusually noisy HVAC rumble would seriously compromise the quality of the captured audio and would make gating unused mics iffy at best. He spoke with the company's IT technicians and learned that the room had been built with a fully functional Cat5 network for phone and Internet connectivity. Fortunately, panels located at every table of six to twelve chairs had at least one unused Cat5 jack that was simply dead-ending at a patch panel in another room.

With experience using SymNet networked DSP units in past projects, Bohacek was aware of their potential and instantly saw the solution to the problem: he would give every pair of engineers at a table their own microphone, which would be mixed and processed with a SymNet Express 12x4 Cobra DSP (12 units at 12 tables in total). Each of these units would use the Cat5 infrastructure to send signals to the patch bay via the CobraNet digital audio protocol, where a SymNet Express 4x4 Cobra DSP would mix them and deliver the analog result to their existing Clear-One teleconferencing and Crestron control system. The solution resonated with the engineers at the company, who dispatched the other bids and went with Bohacek and AVTG.

Bohacek and his small team completed the installation in just five short days. A mill worker cut holes in the tables for the 70 Shure MX 412 V/C supercardioid gooseneck mics, whose cables ran in an existing gutter trough system under the tables to the end with the SymNet. They mounted the SymNet units to the table legs with custom clips and hid them behind custom millwork.

Bohacek wrote the programs for the network of SymNet devices with the easy to use SymNet Designer software well in advance of installation day. Everything appeared in order, except for one detail regarding SymNet's handling of the CobraNet pathways. Bohacek contacted an engineer at Symetrix who asked for the code file. In less than 15 minutes, the engineer sent the corrected file back and contacted Bohacek to explain their fix. After the physical installation was complete, Bohacek loaded the program into the SymNet devices (he gave each device a unique ID number so that a single program could run the entire network).

"Right out of the box, the system worked flawlessly!" he enthused. "I used the SymNet automixer algorithm to handle all of the pre-amplification and "adaptive level gain sharing technology." It's the best automixer algorithm in the business - super clean, super quiet. Once the system was in place, I made some minor EQ and level adjustments, which were easy to do, and that was it."

As part of the design, Bohacek implemented four JBL speakers to the very long room, evenly spaced along the front wall. The original intent was to add these four speakers to provide better sound reinforcement for all audio playback. As something of an afterthought, Bohacek decided to create a mix minus configuration with the components at hand. He then fed microphones on the right side of the room to the left speaker and vice versa so that everyone could hear what was being said, no matter where it was being said. With an easy modification to the program and two spare outputs on the "master" SymNet Express 4x4 Cobra DSP, the engineers would not only speak more efficiently to their clients and vendors, they would speak more efficiently with each other.

As the team finished up the installation on the fifth day, a lot of the engineers began milling around, excited to try the new system. Bohacek recalled, "They said, 'let's make some calls!' I was still tweaking things a bit, but, like I said, the system was basically ready to go as soon as it was hooked up. So we made some calls. First they called another company site in California that had put up with the old system from its inception. They were pleased. Then they called a client, who said it was a night and day difference. Finally, they said, 'let's make the ultimate call. Let's call NASA.' So we called NASA. At one point, we had seven mics on with different people carrying on different conversations. There was no echo and no feedback. To my ears, it sounded great. But more importantly, the engineer from NASA said, and I quote, 'it sounds like you're standing right in front of me.' You can't get a better testimonial than that!"

For more information, please Contact Us.