MQU’s Pandemic Fix: Yamaha Adecia to the Rescue

The pandemic forced the education sector to ‘pivot’ in a hurry. Remote and hybrid learning weren’t just concepts spoken in airy terms by edu-futurists… schools and unis needed to refit classrooms ‘now’, to accommodate in-person teaching and far-end students.

These were the days when it was impossible to find even a USB mic for love or money, and AV managers were forced to consider left-of-field options.

This goes a way to explain Macquarie Uni’s predicament. It had a number of ‘activity-based’ classrooms that needed the ability for remote students on Zoom to participate in sessions. MQU AV Project Manager, Pete Attard, explains: “Initially I was thinking of simply grabbing a USB camera and microphone, hang those off the ceiling to get our guys out of a jam. There didn’t seem to be an alternative.”

In less ‘unprecedented’ times, the uni would install a ceiling tile mic array from Shure or Sennheiser to pick up the conversation in the room for the VC call. But no one had stock and no one was likely to have stock for some time.

The AV contractor, MNGD, recommended the AV team look at the Yamaha Adecia ceiling microphone as an alternative. In a ‘why the heck not?!’ procurement process, the Adecia UC system was installed. 

The Dante output of two Adecia tiles in each space plumb into a switch, then into a companion DSP unit. The USB output of the DSP heads straight into the room’s VC PC. A PTZ cam in the room takes care of the video.