Help with Streaming Classroom Audio for My Wife

J

Joshua Cadmium

Well-known member
I am trying to figure out the best way to capture audio in two small classrooms with a budget of about $500 for each classroom.

My wife is a teacher for a small school and is trying to mimic the classroom environment for live-streaming. Part of her classroom meets in person and part is on Zoom.

Her organization got Owl Labs Meeting Owl Pro conference cameras (https://www.owllabs.com/meeting-owl). The cameras work very well - they are literally 360 and follow the speaker across the room. The audio is poor, though.

The device was meant to be used with everyone sitting at the same table. On top of that, the proper height for video is not the proper height for audio. We also tried putting the Owl on a 3x3 foot table in the middle of the room to see if audio would better be reflected into it, but it made no difference.

Here's an example of two classrooms where they use the devices in (they have an Owl in each classroom):


Yellow.jpg


Green.jpg


I was looking to see what would work best to capture the audio for each chair in the classroom, which can be moved around somewhat to whatever makes the most sense. As it is right now, each chair is about 8 feet from the middle of the Owl. Also, because of COVID-19, the microphones need to not be touched by the students in order for them to work.

The solution I was looking at was the Philips 9172 mic: https://www.dictation.philips.com/products/transcription-accessories/meeting-microphone-lfh9172/ . Up to six of them can be daisy chained together. I was thinking maybe four of them would be needed for each room - placing them in the corners of the rectangular layout of the tables and chairs. The mics are $125 each on Amazon, so that puts it at $500 plus about $100 for an Behringer U-PHORIA UM2 and cabling.

Does anyone have any other suggestions, though?

My wife and I would super appreciate any help. Audio is not really my forte.
 
Those actually look like a pretty good low cost option. They will function as boundary mics, which means that they use the table surface to enhance pickup. One mic should easily cover two to four seats on each side of a table, but they should be placed in the middle of the table for best coverage. If all the seats are on one side of a table, place them about a foot in from the opposite side and in the middle of the seat spread left to right.
 
It may be better than using the Owl's audio only because at least you get mics closer to the students. My concern is that unless you have an audio operator to mute any mics not near the student currently talking that the sound is still going to be pretty hollow. Or you could get a mixer that uses an "automix" function. I assume both of those options are way out of the budget for this application.
 
I might have missed it but do you have any type of mixer that can be used? Does the setup need to be put away every day? I would think ANY combination of mics will be better than the single mic in the camera. But, you are in a classroom environment, not a recording studio. So usage limitations are probably more important than audio improvements right?

The MXL CR21 mics are 2 for $100 on Amazon and they sound great for the money. They need a mixer with phantom power though.
 
Razz16mm said:
Those actually look like a pretty good low cost option. They will function as boundary mics, which means that they use the table surface to enhance pickup. One mic should easily cover two to four seats on each side of a table, but they should be placed in the middle of the table for best coverage. If all the seats are on one side of a table, place them about a foot in from the opposite side and in the middle of the seat spread left to right.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion!

Rob Neidig said:
It may be better than using the Owl's audio only because at least you get mics closer to the students. My concern is that unless you have an audio operator to mute any mics not near the student currently talking that the sound is still going to be pretty hollow. Or you could get a mixer that uses an "automix" function. I assume both of those options are way out of the budget for this application.
Click to expand...

This was super helpful. I don't know what I don't know, and I didn't know automix existed. Thanks for pointing me in that direction.

Bassman2003 said:
I might have missed it but do you have any type of mixer that can be used? Does the setup need to be put away every day? I would think ANY combination of mics will be better than the single mic in the camera. But, you are in a classroom environment, not a recording studio. So usage limitations are probably more important than audio improvements right?.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion about the mics - I haven't seen those before. Yes, the setup needs to be somewhat portable.

After looking at some additional options, it looks like the teaching structure is going to adjust to shrink the total amount of students at once, so the Owl by itself may end up working in this case. I super appreciate the time you guys spent on this and the nudges in the right direction. It was helpful to see that the best solution was going to end up being a little too unwieldy for other teachers or cost prohibitive.
 
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