With workplaces proactively upgrading meeting spaces to meet the demands of a hybrid world, Shane Jackson checked out ClearOne’s versatile and scalable room kit.

It seems like, these days, if you threw a stone, you’d hit three different collaboration systems before hitting a wall and bouncing back off of three more – such is the ubiquity of the hybrid model of working now.

Once upon a time, we racked up the air miles attending meetings and events in, sometimes, far-flung locations and thought nothing of it. It was just something that you did, and you probably did it every week or fortnight. The notion of talking to someone through your laptop was greeted with disdain.

But, well, we all know what happened next – pandemic, lockdowns, lives moved online practically overnight. People who once “travelled for work” were frantically scrambling to set up their home office, complete with whatever tech solution they could still find on a shelf or a website.

In the cover story of Connected #1 2021, ClearOne chairperson and chief executive Zee Hakimoglu was quoted as saying: “Organisations are poised on the edge of a new workplace frontier.”

She went on to say that a company’s success would rely on whether they could harness technology to enable effective team collaboration in the home and office.

It’s this shift in the working structure that is prompting companies to look more closely at the space they have and, in some cases, work to transform some of those spaces into professional cloud-based meeting spaces.

ClearOne’s Collaborate Versa CT kit is your rabbit out of the hat in this regard – as a complete packaged kit, it contains all the ClearOne products you need to create a fully functional, professional meeting space.

What you get

So let’s take a look at what exactly we get in this kit.

First up is the BMA CTH. Essentially the brains of the kit, this is ClearOne’s patented beamforming ceiling tile microphone array. I’ll go over what it is and does as part of the kit in a bit more detail a little later on.

Next up we’ve got the Unite 50 4K ePTZ camera – the eyes of the kit. Then we have the mouth, which takes the form of the ClearOne ceiling mount loudspeakers.

Connecting the whole lot together are the Collaborate Versa USB and the Collaborate Versa Hub – again, a little more about this later, along with some thoughts on the expansion capabilities these two components offer.

So, now that we know what comes in this kit as a whole, let’s break it down a bit more into the individual items, starting with the brains.

The BMA CTH ceiling tile has built-in acoustic echo cancellation, noise cancellation, and beam selection eliminating the need for per-beam processing in a DSP mixer. It houses 24 microphones, allowing for two patterns of either five or six beams to be set. The tile itself is a standard 600mm by 600mm, so it will slot right into a standard tiled ceiling. Alternatively, the unit can be mounted with either a flush mounting kit or a surface mounting kit. And weighing only 3.5kgs it’s not going to break your back during installation.

Next out of the box is the Unite 50 4K ePTZ, a full 4k-capable camera with down scaling to 1080p30 and 720p. It also boasts auto-focusing, 3x digital zoom, and a 120˚ field of view. The camera connects via USB3.0 and can be controlled via an IR remote. This compact unit is a great addition to a meeting room space and, even by itself, is a fantastic little camera.

Next up is a pair of ClearOne’s ceiling loudspeakers, a nice little set of speakers that look great and sound great. Driven by the BMA CTH to deliver audio into your meeting space, they are a two-way speaker with full metal back can, capable of 60 watts of power. A point to note: the BMA CTH only provides 10 watts of power, but this is more than enough for a meeting space.

The Collaborate Versa HUB is the connection pathway for most devices in the kit and allows for a single USB 3.0 to connect your laptop into the video, audio and USB peripheral system of the Versa CT Kit. It interfaces to the Unite 50 camera, the beamforming microphone, and using DisplayLink technology, it uses the video outputs to send video to the displays in the room and connect the user to a LAN connection. All via this single USB3.0 connection.

The final item in the kit is the Versa USB HUB. This unit sits in between the Versa HUB and the BMA CTH, allowing for additional USB devices to be plugged in to the system.

With the various devices and uses, it might sound a little complicated but it’s really not – it all connects together via USB cable or ClearOne’s P-Link cables. The latter is a proprietary bus that carries audio for ClearOne devices and simplifies the connections inside the ClearOne design environment.

How to runs

But how does it all work together?

Well, the good news is this entire kit comes pre-configured out of the box in an optimum default setup – it’s as simple as plug and play, and so long as you know the very basics of audio and video, you can’t go wrong.

However, if you want to get your hands dirty you can use ClearOne’s Console AI lite software package to fine tune almost every aspect of this kit. In the software, you can adjust the BMA CTH microphones pre and post gain, turn on and off or adjust AEC (acoustic echo cancellation) and you can adjust the speaker pre and post gain, plus a host of other options.

But like I said, if you’re not an audio guru, fear not as all these settings come pre-configured to a default optimal configuration.

So, this is all great news for your average AV installer who just wants something that will work well, and work first time with minimal hassle, set-up, or configuration. Setting up this kit was a breeze, particularly given that all cables etc are included in the kit. And it’s an easy kit to get the hang of using too.

The kit is certified for use with all your usual VC options such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc, and it also works well with and is certified for Barco Clickshare devices.

During my time with the kit, I tested with Zoom, and am happy to report that video quality and audio was great at both sides of the call; the Unite 50 camera does a decent job at getting video to the far side of the call, and the speakers are clear and sharp enough to easily hear the far side of the call.

Overall, this is a dynamic and versatile kit that looks and sounds great.