Reviewed by Mohammed Nazzal, of International New Technical Est. based in Amman, Jordan. He is a project manager involved in system design and implementation of systems for Hotels, Auditoria and large multipurpose venues.
What I use it for:
Conference centres and multipurpose venues as well as educational auditoriums.
What I like about it:
I particularly like the overall ease with which I can implement the product in a project. This starts with the simplest things like very accurately finished terminations for the cabling and ends with simplicity for the user. This reduces the amount of time I have to spend training the client after the installation. Another really neat feature which customers like is the built in monitor loudspeaker for monitoring the floor. This is great for smaller systems where it would be overkill to have separate monitor speaker.
The Auditel system also competes very well on price with other comparable systems.
What would I change / improve:
I think the main thing would be to increase the number of delegate units that can be assigned to each zone. There are power limitations, which mean that a maximum of 100 delegate units can be attached. However this is halved if they have loudspeakers incorporated, and falls even further if additional features such as card readers and translation are used. Another thing I’d like to see are LCD panels on the units, but these would consume even more power so I can see why they are not currently a feature.
Cabling is an area that could be made better. At the moment we’re using Belden 8777 cable on all our installations with this product, but I’d like to switch over to UTP and hopefully this will be addressed soon. We’re using so much of this cable elsewhere for video distribution it would my life much easier to standardise.
I recently installed it:
In the Jordanian parliament. This was a special job and seated 368 delegates. In the end we deployed 192 flush mounted microphone units, built into the arms of seats allowing members to share one between two.
Despite reducing the number of units we still needed more power so we used auxiliary PCIM controllers as additional power supplies. The outcome was very satisfactory, as it had to be - this was a prestige project for us.