Audio solutions - meeting rooms

My webcam is pretty washed out and dim, but a clip-on replacement is clunky. I generally just use my laptop and a headset. Since my firm is full of introverts who don't use the camera, it works fine.

Our business is small enough we don't have a meeting or conference room, and as far as online meetings I am usually multitasking so i pick audio only on my headset most of the time

I have régular meetings with my customers

a good webcam, Ligh and audio are very important 

i need to invest in ! Advices are welcome 

We use a speakerphone that is set in the middle of the table. It provides good audio and will detect the direction of whoever is talking to provide good noise cancellation. It's really nice to use.

We primarily use Teams for our conferencing solution. I've looked at the Teams Room kits that Lenovo and other vendors sell. They are a great integrated solution but they start at $2000+. For a non-profit, that's out of our price range.

95% of our staff use laptops or tablets. For our small rooms, we mounted a 27" monitor with a Logitech USB webcam that anybody can plug into their laptop. We also have several EPOS Expand speakerphones (SP30T, SP30, & SP20ML models) available in each office for people to borrow. The EPOS SP30T speakerphones are round 4.5" speakerphones that have a USB-C connector and also support Bluetooth. They work great in picking up all the voices in a 10x10 room.

For our larger conference rooms, we use the EPOS Expand 80T for audio. They cover a large room and we have two add-on microphones to pick up voices from a larger area. For video, we have a mixture of projectors and/or large LCD TVs and Logitech BC950 Conference Cameras. We are in the process of updating our conference rooms by installing Lenovo ThinkCentre M80q Tiny desktops. This simplifies the problem of people plugging in their laptops and trying to get the audio, video, and camera to work. We have the Logitech K400 Plus wireless keyboards connected to the ThinkCentres. These keyboards have a built-in trackpad so we don't have to worry about a separate mouse. The ThinkCentres are connected to the TV and projector with an HDMI 4x2 matrix switch along with a DVD player, and an HDMI cord (for laptops). The HDMI switch allows us to switch between the 4 inputs to the two different HDMI outputs.

I recently saw that some organizations that have a USB-C dock with all the equipment plugged in so it's one cable to provide video, camera, audio, and ethernet. I will probably start investigating that solution.

I love the EPOS Expand speakerphone series. We have purchased several generations of the small round ones over the years. The newer models that support Bluetooth are great because they are wireless. They run for hours on a single charge, they sound great and they pick up voices really well. The larger rooms required us to move up the Expand 80T, which has larger speakers for the larger room and you can add up to two external mics to pick up sound from all corners of our 40'x20' conference room. The Expand 80T needs to be plugged into power but it does support Bluetooth so we leave it on our conference room table.

The Logitech BC950 Conference Camera is an older camera system. The audio is good but it only picks up audio from about 8 feet away. That's why we upgrade to the EPOS Expand 80T speakerphones. There are a log of great choices for webcams now. Personally, I like the Logitech Brio cameras.

Like many of the others, I don't use meeting spaces (as the organizer/presenter) often enough to comment on the particular tech involved, other than to say: I tend to rely on my laptop built-in camera for a lot of things, but even then the quality is still underwhelming (sorry Lenovo!). I do like the mic and sound features Lenovo has built into the ThinkPads and find it works quite well without a stand-alone mic/headset. So perhaps I like the audio setup the best (though quality speakers are hard to come by these days, especially something for laptops!).

Funny story from just last month: I popped on a Teams call and, despite my default settings being to mic off (both on Teams and on the system/physical F-row ThinkPad key), somehow Teams picked up me answering the phone separately and decided to override both the Teams settings and my computer's settings. Apart from the scary thing that Teams can override my system settings just by "hearing" my voice when I explicitly didn't want it to, it led to an awkward yet amusing situation where another participant had to point out my mic was on. Thankfully the meeting was starting late 

Here's a story:  Some time ago, I attended a meeting.  Presenter couldn't access the internet.  Later found out that it was the one room in the building that wasn't(at that time) set up for Wi-Fi.

Depending on the country, there are many choices that one has to hold a meeting and also we must take in account how many will attend. I use Teams, Zoom, Classin Voov,Tencent meetings, Facebook Live, You Tube Live and some classroom platforms designed for single companies. Most chat moderator or educator scenarios are controlled and we must not use a VPN in most cases.  There are limits to how many can attend and what browser can be used. I always ask the clients what suits them. Lenovo settings are easy to manage and I never have any trouble at home or on the road.

I think solitude is the most important factor in a meeting room. The audio and visual aspects are usually taken care of by the components that are integrated into my device.

We use Microsoft Teams for conference calls.  We have an executive suite that we meet at in person and the conference room audio and visual is managed by the executive suite company.