Specifications

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Picking up audience questions is a perennial problem for audio people,
primarily because there is no really effective way to do it. For their comments
to be intelligible, you have two choices: bring the audience to a microphone,
or bring a microphone to the audience. In other words, you could place a
mic on a stand somewhere in the room and ask people to move to that
location if they have a comment. Or, you could assign a person (or persons)
the task of walking around the room with a wireless mic and going to each
person who has a question. You’re probably wondering about pointing a
shotgun mic at each person to pick up their questions, but this doesn’t work
very well. Shotgun mics are not very effective beyond 20 feet in a large
crowded room, which means you will only be able to understand those
people in the front row.
Situation #4 — The Conference Table Shot: Your main goal in this
situation is to videotape a meeting of eight people seated around a
rectangular conference table. You might think that the obvious solution
would be to put a lavalier microphone on each person, but this arrangement
would pick up tremendous amounts of room noise if all eight mics were left
on at once. Having an operator bring each mic up and down as needed
would probably prove unsatisfactory, since the flow of conversation might
move too fast for the operator to keep up.
Your best bet here is to use two omnidirectional surface mount
microphones, located so that one mic is centered on each half of the table.
Each person should be approximately the same distance from the nearest
microphone. Otherwise, levels will be inconsistent and some speakers will
not be picked up as well as others. If an audio person is available, he or she
could also use a shotgun mic on a boom, although this method would make
it difficult to pick up more than one person at a time. As we mentioned
previously, a voice-activated mixer would be an excellent alternative.