Horrible Echo on the Entire Call
Mon, 02/18/2008 - 11:07am — John Spotts
As received thought Breeze help at breeze@psu.edu.
This morning I had a web conference and there was a horrible echo on the entire call. I have a weekly web conference and every week it seems a different person has trouble hearing and we use the same equipment each time. Is it just an issue with the connections or what. Please advise.
Audio Echo
As I have made some previous recommendations for this particular instance (and they most always clear up the problem) there still seems to some issues that are arising. Perhaps they may be unique to this instance. That is still to be determined. So we will be making a more intense investigation into the actual Connect environment If anyone has any other suggestions, chime in. Stay tuned in as we work together to resolve this.
And thank you for the equipment suggestions. There are so many different solutions out there that it is very difficult to test all of them. That in and of itself is a full time effort. From time to time publications come out that do review and rate the different audio and video components, but not frequently enough. On such source is http://www.dv.com that does and annual evaluation that comes about just after equipment for the new year is released.
Audio Equipment Recommendations to Reduce Echo
For personal laptop use without a headset, I've had pretty good luck with the mVox USB miniVox MV-100 echo-canceling mic - a consumer product which is very much in line with WebCam and headset pricing.
Also for what it's worth, we've been using a Clear One RAV 900 and attahced Clear One Accumics for room-based local echo canceling. We're set up that way more for use with an Access Grid and INSORS installation, but it works equally well for Connect when we use that from that room. The advantage is that it allows a room-based solution with echo-canceling desktop mics and speakers, and hence better audio, so that multiple people can participate comfortably without headsets in a larger teleconference from that room. The audio setup, of course, costs significantly (i.e. $1000s) more than a headset or the MV-100 mentioned above, but it works well if you have regular need for multiple people to be together on your end of a larger teleconference.
Neither solution will address loop back echo problems that originate with equipment at remote locations.
Thank you - this is a good question we all can learn from
Web conferencing echo can be caused for a variety of reasons. The most often factor that can cause echo - or feedback - when several individuals are active simultaneously is having an open microphone (lock to talk) and using computer speakers. This causes any noise or speech that is broadcast by another to be picked up by the local microphone and re-broadcast – thus creating a loop or echo. This can also occur if a telephone conference is used and the phone call is accessed via a speakerphone as opposed to something like using the hardware Andrea PTI-3-way interface which solves this problem through a hardware solution. It is always recommended that that each individual connection run the Audio wizard at the beginning of the session to ensure that everything is set properly. If it is desirable that each connection have the “lock-to-talk” button locked on, then I recommend those who can use headsets and avoid using the computer speakers. For further information about audio and setting uou for a conference please refer to the related articles at our Adobe Connect Community site (http://meeting.psu.edu) and specifically for audio at http://meeting.psu.edu/search/node/audio .