Acoustic Magic exhibited at InfoComm for the first time this year.
We learned a great deal.
The professional audio world is now taking array microphones seriously and the catalyst for this is the MXA 910 array microphone from Shure, a respected Pro-Audio microphone leader.
Two other companies introduced array microphones, so there are now six or seven companies offering array microphones for conferencing.
The good news is that all these competitors price their microphones much, much higher than the Voice Tracker. And according to a lot of our Resellers, these competitive microphones do not perform any better than our microphone. In some cases, they don’t perform as well.
Part of the reason for this is that they use a different technology. The Shure microphone, the Clear One microphone, and the Phoenix Audio microphone create several listening beams that are fixed (but adjustable) to cover certain parts of the room (where talkers are expected to be).
In contrast, The Voice Tracker creates a scanning listening beam so one beam covers the entire room. A single beam is inherently less complicated, and less expensive. And with our technology you can’t miss talkers that happen to be in between the competitor’s listening beams.
The Shure MX a 910 is $4500 (plus mounting Hardware)
The ClearOne Beamformer Array is ~$2500 (plus it must be connected to a ClearOne DSP)
The Condor from Phoenix Audio is ~$1200
New Products:
The CS- 700 from Yamaha/Revolabs is $1200 (includes speaker and camera, but it has a small array that is only good to 12 feet)
The HDL 300 from a new Company called NUreva is $3000.
So clearly, we have a big cost advantage. Several Resellers told me this is their “secret weapon”.
From one reseller: “I just did a demo up against a competitor that was using a Shure MXA910 array microphone. The customer didn’t notice much of a difference between that and a VT I. I won the deal because on a $78,000 lecture system, I was $1,800.00 less than my competitor, and I went in with 50% mark-up. Nice, huh? Keep up the good work!”
From another Reseller: “I had to work too hard to make the Clear One work”.
Several Resellers came to our booth to tell us how great the Voice Tracker was. That made us feel good.
16 years of experience with array mics makes a difference.
