ISE 2018 - Sennheiser's innovative ceiling microphone is a blessing from above

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a single microphone for all types of conferences and meetings? A microphone able to capture speakers’ voices in perfect quality? One that’s independent of the furniture arrangement and seamlessly blends into ambience of the room, which also offers excellent price-performance ratio with low installation and maintenance costs? Thanks to its leadership in microphones, audio specialist Sennheiser has a groundbreaking solution that ticks every item on this wish list: the TeamConnect Ceiling microphone with automatic beamforming technology. 

A new culture of communication

Today, spontaneous unscheduled meetings make up an ever-growing part of our working days, as changing groups of people come together to collaborate as “virtual teams”. The difference between internal and external meetings (“remote conferencing”) is increasingly blurring as modern technology makes cross-site communication effortless: image, sound and accompanying data are transmitted using fast networks, virtually in real time, to any point on the planet.

This development is progressing exponentially, but the communication technology used in companies is not always keeping up: Conventional conference room equipment, for example, with a fixed microphone unit assigned to each seat, makes it difficult to freely arrange tables and chairs due to the wiring. Equally, removing furniture to make more space for the creative process is not an option.

Break free from fixed seating with one array for everyone!

Sennheiser’s TeamConnect Ceiling is a state-of-the-art microphone solution for medium to large conference rooms. Instead of having many different microphones throughout the room, TeamConnect Ceiling uses a single central microphone array equipped with 29 high-quality condenser capsules – a reliable, visually inconspicuous ceiling microphone for audio and video conferences. This set up is often described as a “room microphone” or just as a plain “Speakerphone”, but this term doesn’t quite tell the full story: There’s much more to TeamConnect Ceiling than meets the eye.

Thanks to innovative beamforming technology, TeamConnect Ceiling automatically focuses on the voice of the active speaker with the precision of a shotgun microphone. This ensures excellent speech intelligibility, regardless of whether the person currently speaking is sitting, standing or moving freely around the room. The need for a fixed seating arrangement is eliminated. This automatic position detection combined with dynamic directivity adjustment is currently unique in the market. The Sennheiser TeamConnect Ceiling Microphone is able to cover an area of up to 60 square meters and deliver excellent audio quality. For larger groups or unusual floor plans, additional ceiling microphones can be included in the system. 

TeamConnect Ceiling supports typical audio and video applications with its analog output and is compatible with all market leading conference codecs.

Reliable in (continuous) operation

The aesthetically pleasing TeamConnect Ceiling is mounted using a supplied mounting kit (suspension, mounting or base) - the dimensions are equivalent to a standard 600 mm² ceiling plate, which makes installation as simple as it is discreet. Ceiling mounting keeps the tables free of microphone units, cables and boreholes. TeamConnect Ceiling is not directly accessible to people in the room, so damage is virtually eliminated – problems caused by knocking glasses over, cable breaks or acoustic obstacles such as laptops / folders do not occur; maintenance is pared down to the minimum. After successful installation, the highly effective factory settings are able to cover the vast majority of use cases. Hence, by contrast to competitive offerings on the market, no complex configuration is required.