Supersonic sound: Chinese university receives audio boost

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Audio quality is extremely important in the educational setting. Teachers wish their students to understand what they are saying and  we subconsciously judge the quality of what we are being taught through the audio quality.

A large Sennheiser Team Connect Ceiling (TCC) 2 installation has taken place at one of China’s most prestigious universities. These are ceiling array microphones designed to significantly enhance campus audio experience.

The installation has taken place at Duke Kunshan University across 50 classrooms and various other spaces across its campus. The intention is to deliver to students an immersive blended learning experience that is both superior in sound quality and easy to operate.

Located in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, Duke Kunshan University is a 1,200-acre campus. This audio-video project is part of the university’s second phase, covering 22 buildings on campus, including 29 classrooms, 20 conference rooms, and a visitor centre.

With the technology, the TCC 2 utilizes patented Dynamic Beamforming technology, which automatically tracks the position of speakers and switches between speakers in real time, ensuring that their voices are clearly captured.

Audio intelligibility is the means of quantifying the ease of listening and degree of comprehension of speech/audio. The “intelligibility” aspect is the key factor when judging the quality of audio on a video or recording.

This stage of the project took three years to design and deploy and complete. The project’s audio/video system includes many types of products including Biamp DSP, Bose loudspeakers and Crestron control systems. Therefore, for the success of the whole project, easy operation process and integration of products of each link was crucial.

Utilising this, teachers are able to move around and communicate freely with students while teaching, and the layout of desks and chairs in the classroom can be flexibly adjusted to greatly enhance the classroom experience.

A further addition is with the microphone’s built-in 28 broadcast-quality microphone heads. These are configured to make the sound clear and natural, and remote teachers and students can also listen to the speakers clearly as if they were in the room.

To improve the range of the audio, the TCC 2 utilizes dynamic beamforming technology to automatically track the speaker’s position and switch between speakers in real time, greatly enhancing the classroom experience and flexibility.

There is also a video conferencing element. the TCC 2 integrates Biamp DSP and Sony PTZ camera tracking to synchronize the monitored speaker’s position to the camera, thus realizing real-time switching of the speaker’s footage.

In addition, the TCC 2 synchronizes the monitored speaker’s position to the camera, thus switching footage in real time, making teaching and conferencing more realistic, efficient and immersive.

The clarity of the sound is boosted by the software. The TCC 2’s TruVoicelift acoustic enhancement delivers everyone’s speech clearly to every corner of the visitor centre room.