By Tom Riby, Global Business Development Manager, K-array
For years, meeting room audio was a box to tick. Place a speaker at the front, a couple of microphones on the table, connect it to whatever conferencing platform the client had standardised on, and then move on to the displays. It worked well enough when the people who mattered were all in the room.
Hybrid work changed that permanently. The meeting room is now a shared space between the people around the table and the people joining from a kitchen in another country, and while cameras still dominate the budget conversation, audio is what decides whether remote participants can genuinely take part or simply watch.
For integrators, consultants and corporate AV managers, that shifts the starting point of the entire design. “Which speaker should we use?” is the wrong opening question. A better one is asking what everyone in this room needs to hear and how you deliver that consistently to all of them.
Start With the Room, Not the Product
Every meeting room has an acoustic personality, and most of them are difficult. Glass, polished concrete, stone and timber reflect sound rather than absorb it, and they happen to be exactly the finishes specified in the kind of offices that also want good AV. Long tables put distance between participants and microphones. High ceilings give sound further to travel. Curved or irregular rooms add another layer on top.
Despite all that, audio is still routinely specified from a product list rather than from the characteristics of the space.
The first questions should be boringly simple.
How big is the room? Where are people actually sitting (as opposed to where the furniture plan says they will)? What are the surfaces? How high is the ceiling? How will the room really be used day to day?
A six-person huddle room and a 16-person boardroom might both run Teams or Zoom, but they don’t need the same audio architecture. Treating them as the same problem with different quantities is how rooms end up sounding wrong.
Coverage Matters More Than Volume
One of the most persistent mistakes in meeting room design is the assumption that more output means better audio. In a conferencing environment, the goal isn’t a loud room. It’s speech that stays clear and intelligible at every seat, which is a completely different specification.
Put a single loudspeaker at the front of a long boardroom and the people nearest it will have plenty of volume. Those at the far end are listening to something noticeably different. It’s not unusual that this becomes a variance of 10dB or more across a six-metre table. Turning the system up doesn’t fix that. It makes the near seats louder and everyone at that end slightly more irritated.
Controlled directivity is much more useful. Column and line array loudspeakers focus acoustic energy towards the listening plane while reducing the energy that goes into ceilings and floors and returns as reflection. In rooms where the finishes are already fixed and nobody is going to approve acoustic panels on a glass wall, that control does a great deal of the work. K-array’s Pure Array Technology approaches the problem from a different direction than a conventional point source, and in the wrong room, that difference is significant.
Don’t Separate Acoustics from AV Design
No loudspeaker compensates for a room with fundamentally poor acoustics.
Reverberation, background noise and reflections all degrade intelligibility. In a highly reverberant space, adding more sound energy actively makes things worse.
That means the AV team needs to be in the conversation early enough to influence the acoustic environment, not called in after the architect has signed off every hard surface and when the furniture is already on site. That’s a scheduling problem as much as a technical one, and it’s the most common reason a well specified system under performs.
The projects that work treat room acoustics and AV as one design problem with one set of trade-offs. Sometimes the answer is acoustic treatment. Sometimes it’s speaker positioning. More often it’s both, negotiated between the two disciplines before anything is ordered.
Microphones are Only Half the Conversation
Capture is the other half of the conversation, and it tends to get less design attention than it deserves.
Ceiling microphone arrays have improved enormously and work extremely well in the right room. They are not automatically the right answer everywhere. In a long boardroom, the distance between a ceiling array and whoever is speaking varies constantly. That variation is audible at the far end of the call.
A per-seat microphone keeps the distance consistent, giving the DSP a far more predictable signal to work with. The person at the end of an eight-metre table shouldn’t sound like they’re in a different room because of where they happened to sit down. For premium boardrooms, a discreet table microphone such as K-array’s Capture-KMC20 I is a technically driven choice as much as an aesthetic one, though it satisfies both.
The Invisible AV Challenge
Corporate AV carries a requirement most other installed audio doesn’t. The technology is expected to perform without dominating the room. That pressure is strongest exactly where the performance requirement is highest – in executive boardrooms, in client-facing spaces, and in offices where somebody has spent a great deal of money on the architecture.
The traditional response has been to hide the speakers. There is a better option, which is to design the audio system as part of the architecture rather than something concealed from it. Ultra-slim stainless steel columns read as architectural detailing rather than AV hardware. Flexible line arrays follow curved walls that no rigid enclosure can. Electronic beam steering delivers controlled vertical coverage without a speaker physically tilting out into the room. KSCAPE RAIL pushes this idea furthest, combining professional audio and architectural lighting in a single fixture.
None of this is about making technology invisible for its own sake. It removes the compromise between acoustic performance and architectural intent that was treated for years as unavoidable.
Design Beyond Today’s Meeting and Into the Future
Corporate spaces don’t stay still. Rooms get reconfigured, furniture moves, teams grow, partitions open and close, conferencing platforms get replaced and IT infrastructure evolves underneath all of it. A system designed tightly around how a room works this quarter will be fighting that room within two years.
Interoperability buys flexibility. Networked audio, DSP, Dante and room control, alongside platforms such as Q-SYS, Crestron and AMX, let the audio become part of a wider AV infrastructure instead of a standalone island that has to be rebuilt every time something changes around it.
For corporate AV managers, there are a few other questions to think about. What happens after commissioning day? Can the system be monitored remotely? Can presets be changed without a site visit? Can a fault be diagnosed without putting an engineer on a train? Can 40 rooms across six buildings be held to a consistent standard by a small team? Those answers affect the lifetime cost of an installation far more than the price on the original speaker quote.
The Real Measure of Success
Nobody in a meeting should be thinking about the audio system.
They shouldn’t be turning towards the speaker to hear it, asking colleagues to repeat themselves, or discovering that the person at the end of the table is inaudible on the call. The IT team shouldn’t be fielding support tickets because the room is too complicated to start a meeting in.
Good meeting room audio disappears into the experience of the meeting.
For integrators and consultants, getting there means designing from the room outwards rather than from the equipment inwards. For corporate AV managers, it means treating audio as infrastructure rather than an accessory bolted onto the video system. The objective was never about having better speakers. It’s always been about enabling better conversations.
