> I believe that improved acoustics would non only benefit people with bad hearing, it would also reduce fatigue for people with good hearing +100. I’ve been using English in a professional context for more than 35 years now, but English via bad audio really exhausts me. I don’t think we should meddle with the actual A/V engineering (although the DECT microphones that Telefonica had for the STRINT workshop in 2014 were amazing). But we can show that we care about audio by asking for some simple specifications (RT60 was suggested, maybe frequency response if installed ceiling speakers are to be used — a high pass might help with some rooms). ISTR that the microphones I looked at in Singapore said they were SM58s, so unless they were cheap fakes, the problems with them were mostly lack of training (you need to be very close to those, and unless you are an accomplished singer, this means you need to hold them as opposed to using them on a stand). There were some microphones though that needed to be tapped or shaken now and then, pointing to badly maintained battery contacts. And battery discipline apparently was lacking as well — batteries need to be replaced in a regular process and not after they finally fail. There were some serious speaker placement problems in some rooms, with no direct sound at all in significant parts of the room (including the presenter and chair areas themselves). Maybe we can complement the presenter TV with a monitor speaker (which would also help the presenter with knowing when they are close enough to the microphone), but the speaker placement for the rest of the room simply needs to be checked in place and corrections made where needed. If we really want to help people who can benefit from that, there could be a monitor frequency per room that can be picked up by a receiver (I’ve used those with specific students in large-room lectures). Those of course require additional planning, as they are regional and licensed; instead of doing it per room there could also be a set per person needing it, with a place in the room to plug the transmitter in. (I have used meetecho as a cheap version of that when I happened to sit down in a bad area of the room, but the delay is generally too high compared to an analog solution.) At least the leakage from adjacent rooms (another spec we could ask for) was limited this time. Audio problems excepted, this was definitely one of the better venues we had. Grüße, Carsten
