Louis Roberts Blog: Sennheiser TeamConnect Ceiling 2 Follows the Active Speaker's Voice

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges to collaboration sessions is handling the one or more speakers who are mobile during a meeting, drawing on the board or whatever they happen to be doing.

Meetings are tough enough with poor cellular and VoIP connections, having substandard equipment at the endpoints only makes things worse.

The new Sennheiser TeamConnect Ceiling 2 automatically focuses on the active speaker within a room. Integration of the ceiling microphone is easy and straightforward thanks to redundant Dante ports, Power over Ethernet, compatibility with the Sennheiser Control Cockpit app and an open media control protocol.

This is the company's flagship A/V conferencing solution, employing the company’s patented automatic, adaptive beamforming technology — which follows the active speaker wherever he or she moves in the room.

Beamforming is also used in advanced WiFi access points and will be a huge part of 5G networks when they finally deploy.

TeamConnect Ceiling 2, which is available from April 15th 2019, can be used together with existing analog conference systems or integrated into fully digital systems, where it can also be controlled and monitored via the IP network. The ceiling microphone supports Power over Ethernet (PoE), Sennheiser Control Cockpit, Dante Domain Manager and the Crestron control platform. Via an open media protocol (API), TeamConnect Ceiling 2 can also be integrated into media and camera control systems.

“This second generation of our ceiling array microphone not only delivers a wider choice of connectivity options but has also been created with an entirely new manufacturing process. We developed this to allow us to sell TeamConnect Ceiling 2 at a considerably lower price than its predecessor, while at the same time enhancing this next generation with many more features,” explained Jens Werner, Portfolio Manager Business Communication at Sennheiser.

TeamConnect Ceiling 2 is an ideal choice for medium-sized to large meeting rooms, where it is unobtrusively (flush-) mounted to the ceiling and powered via Ethernet. For larger or oddly shaped rooms, several ceiling microphones can be combined to ensure the best coverage.

Tags: collaboration, Sennheiser, uc, ucaas, video, videoconferencing.microphone Related tags: teamconnect ceiling, sennheiser teamconnect, active speaker, follows active, ceiling microphone, ceiling