– The Voice Tracker™ microphone’s 360 degree scanning, long range and high performance acoustic echo cancellation turn VoIP telephony products like Skype and Adobe Connect into high quality but economical conferencing solutions.
SUDBURY, MA, October 13 – Acoustic Magic, Inc. today began shipment of its second product, the Voice Tracker™ II. The Voice Tracker’s unique, customer proven, patented scanning beam array microphone technology, which spatially filters undesired sounds and noise over a 360° field of view, it has gained outstanding acceptance for classroom and meeting recording. The addition of a high-quality acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) algorithm running on its internal DSP broadens the Voice Tracker’s application by enabling VoIP based conferencing at a fraction of the cost of conventional conferencing systems.
Acoustic echo occurs when the sound from the far end talker is picked up by the open microphone and sent back to him. It can be very annoying.
According to Bob Feingold, president of Acoustic Magic, “ in testing with Adobe Connect, the Voice Tracker™ II provided outstanding sound quality at ranges of 20 ft or more, and its acoustic echo cancellation works very well. The use of the Voice Tracker™ II as the microphone for Adobe Connect meetings significantly enhanced the user experience.”
A comment from Al Ducharme, Assistant Dean-Distance and Distributed Learning at the University of Central Florida, is typical of the feedback about the Voice Tracker™: “One of the problems we were having was low audio from the instructor and absent audio from students. We were considering an expensive traditional audio system with hanging room microphones and wireless instructor microphones. Fortunately, we discovered Acoustic Magic before we made the purchase. We tested the Voice Tracker™ array microphone, and were amazed to discover that it could pick up students talking in almost a whisper 20 feet away. In addition, the instructor audio contained little noise and allowed the instructor to move about the room without the need for a separate wireless microphone. We have decided to use the Voice Tracker™ array mic exclusively in all of our recording classrooms”.
The Voice Tracker™ II array microphone incorporates two-stage noise reduction, coupled with the sensitivity of six always on microphone elements, to give the Voice Tracker™ outstanding range and sound quality. The two-stage noise reduction originates with the array microphone locating the person speaking and, using patented steering technology, electronically focusing the microphone elements in their direction, creating the spatial filtering that eliminates sounds and reverberation from other parts of the room. In addition to spatial filtering, proprietary digital noise reduction processing removes stationary background noise. The combination of these digital noise reduction algorithms and six continual-processing microphone elements together greatly enhance sound quality. The Voice Tracker™ is also the only array microphone on the market that can scan a full 360 degrees.
The Voice Tracker™ II is primary audio mode is USB, but it also has mic level and line level analog outputs. The Voice Tracker™ II is powered by USB, which enhances its portability.
Since the Voice Tracker™ knows the location of each talker, it can output that information as a serial word through a DB-9 connector. This is useful for camera pointing.
The Voice Tracker™ II is priced at $360.
The Voice Tracker™ I, which is useful for meeting recording, speech recognition, and other applications that don’t require acoustic echo cancellation, is priced at $249.
About Acoustic Magic, Inc
Acoustic Magic, Inc. manufactures the Voice Tracker™ desktop array microphone that has found application in automatic speech recognition, meeting and lecture recording, VoIP and conventional teleconferencing, voice control for home automation, and security surveillance. Further information about Acoustic Magic and the Voice Tracker™ array microphone can be found at //www.Acoustic Magic.com.
