St. John’s University recently began standardizing the technology within its classrooms, conference rooms, and meeting spaces, and settled on Sennheiser’s TeamConnect Ceiling as its primary audio-conferencing solution.
With an international student body and dynamic faculty that are pushing the boundaries of modern post-secondary education, St. John’s primary goal in implementing Sennheiser’s TeamConnect Ceiling conferencing solution was to provide greater flexibility for its faculty, while delivering the best possible communications experience: “When we look at an AV solution, it is meant to facilitate communication, whether inside or outside of the classroom,” says Eric Alvarado, director of Academic Technology, St. John’s University. “Teaching is at the point where the traditional walls of a classroom are no longer a limitation; so, our spaces have to perform and be flexible.”
Before settling on the TeamConnect Ceiling solution, St. John’s had already been utilizing Sennheiser wireless microphones across its campus.
“We started installing the wireless mics in Manhattan around 2013 and we probably have well over 300 wireless microphones from Sennheiser at this point,” explains Salvatore Frucci, audiovisual systems engineer, St. John’s University. “I met our Sennheiser sales representative, Tom Conte, at InfoComm in 2015 and we set up time to demo the TeamConnect Ceiling system, and it was quite impressive. This was the catalyst that started the process of us installing them here on the campus.”
“The great thing about TeamConnect is that it really follows your voice around the room with the beamforming technology,” Frucci continues. “This feature caught our attention pretty quick, and as we started deploying them, the difference in intelligibility was night and day.” Currently, St. John’s has TeamConnect Ceiling units in four locations: its St. Augustine Faculty Development Classroom has two of them in one of its larger spaces, and three other units are located in conference rooms across the University’s main campus in Queens.”
Now that St. John’s has several TeamConnect Ceiling units installed, the Sennheiser Control Cockpit software is being used to monitor and manage the status of the network enabled microphones across campus — including TeamConnect Ceiling units and several other Sennheiser microphones across campus. By using Sennheiser Control Cockpit, the team can gain status information at a glance and make adjustments for one or multiple devices at the same time.
“We are using Control Cockpit to remotely check the battery levels of our microphones, as well as frequency placement of our wireless mics,” says Frucci. “We have 80 rooms in one building, so you have to be very careful with frequency assignments. Control Cockpit helps us manage this and ensure that all our frequencies are aligned so we don’t have any performance issues.”
