Audience Mic

This document contains brief instructions on how to configure Sennheiser MobileConnect for using the Audience Mic version in Standalone Mode. The Audience Mic is a new feature, that allows your audience to use MobileConnect as a flexible and always available microphone system.

MobileConnect Audience Mic

Note

The Audience Mic is only supported with the MobileConnect Station version 2 which needs Firmware version 7.0.0 or higher.

Audio Setup

1. Audio Routing

The Audience Mic signal is being routed into the Personal and Assistive Listening audio stream automatically. In order to route it to your loudspeakers, you need to connect to the MobileConnect Station’s audio output to your mixing console, either via XLR or Dante. To prevent any acoustic feedback, it is required to integrate a feedback canceller into your audio route.

MobileConnect Audience Mic

2. Levelling

As shown in the illustration, the Audience Mic signal is being mixed into the Assistive Listening downlink signal within the MobileConnect Station and without any gain adjustment. Please make sure to adjust your microphone input level to the Audience Mic level for the downlink side.

The MobileConnect Station does not output the mixed signal, but only the Audience Mic signal. Therefore, you need to adjust the Station’s output volume to your microphone’s level when routing them to your loudspeakers. For levelling the system, we recommend doing a side-by-side comparison of your microphone and an iPhone, a Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel device running the MobileConnect app and conducting some walk tests.

3. Feedback Cancellation

With a large variety of end devices and microphone characteristics, especially with Android devices, the occurrence of feedback cannot be prevented completely. Therefore it is required to integrate a feedback cancellation, either built into your room DSP or integrated as separated hardware component. As the feedback behaviour depends heavily on the end device, we recommend using longer release times. Below you can find an exemplary list of settings which you can use as a reference:

3.1 Device: Bose EX-1280C

  • EQ: Predictive Feedback Suppression

  • Filters: 16

  • Release Time: 30 sec

  • Sensitivity: Normal

3.2 Device: dbx AFS2

  • Filter Mode: Live

  • Content Mode: Speech

  • Fixed Filters: 0

  • Clear Mode: Live Only

  • Live Lift: On

  • Lift After: 30 sec

  • Virtual High Pass: Off

  • Sensitivity: 6.00

Please note that these are exemplary values which need to be updated according to your system and room settings.

Warning

This version does not contain any measures for feedback cancellation; hence we recommend starting with a low MobileConnect Station’s output level and slowly increasing it during your walk tests.

Hybrid Use

The Audience Mic can also be utilized for hybrid use, so that audience participants joining from remote can hear what is being spoken into the Audience Mic inside your rooms. To do so, you could simply reuse the mixed sum signal going into your loudspeakers and feed it into your Teams / Zoom / etc. software.

Switching Streaming Mode

Inside the ‘General’ tab you can see a section where you can select your preferred Streaming Mode.

Select ‘Audience Mic & Assistive Listening’.

Note

This will reduce the number of channels for this MobileConnect Station to one.

Clicking on the ‘Audio Channel 1’ tab forwards you to the Channel’s settings page. Here you can select the audio in- & output as required for your audio routing setup.

Connecting to Crestron & Extron

The intended way of using the Audience Mic is to always keep it live and available to everyone.

As this might enable misuse of the system from outside the room, we do recommend utilizing the MobileConnect API and dedicated 3rd party plugins.

This will allow you to connect your MobileConnect system to your room media control and makes key functionalities available to your moderators.

For example, you could bring MobileConnect to your touch panels and allow moderators to activate the Audience Mic, change PIN codes or moderate speech requests. You can also automate processes like refreshing the PIN code for every lecture or deactivating the Audience Mic when the room is not booked. For more information, please visit MobileConnect API.

Queue Feature & Moderation

By default, Audience Mic is being used with a queue feature. Users can now queue up during a discussion or Q&A session and see their current position in the waiting line. Via 3rd party plugins or local admin interface, moderators can see how many people are waiting inside the queue, skip to the next speaker or remove everybody from the queue entirely.

If not using the queue feature, Audience Mic works on a first come, first serve basis and blocks any additional speech request.

Note

In Manager Mode, you can create separate user accounts for your moderators. These accounts have limited rights and can only see the ‘Moderation’ page of MobileConnect Manager. This way, you can provide the means to moderate a session, without implementing 3rd party plugins and without risking changes to your MobileConnect configurations.