Author Topic: Whole home mic system  (Read 23963 times)

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LilFonky

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Whole home mic system
« on: September 02, 2014, 02:56:11 PM »
I know multi-mic solutions are thin on the ground so I just wanted to point out this product:

http://www.pyleaudio.com/sku/PDWM8300/Professional-conference-Desktop-VHF-Wireless-Microphone-System

There's a 4 mic UHF version as well but sadly each transmitter requires AA batteries on the 4 mic version.

MSRP is $639 USD but street prices are in the $200 range.

Has anyone tried anything like this?

jitterjames

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Re: Whole home mic system
« Reply #1 on: September 02, 2014, 03:14:27 PM »
In theory it would probably work well enough, except that you'd need to find an alternative to batteries.  Also those microphones might require you to stand pretty close to them, which is good and bad, depending on how you look at it.

LilFonky

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Re: Whole home mic system
« Reply #2 on: September 02, 2014, 05:25:11 PM »
The eight-mic VHF system actually will take wall power for the mics, it's the 4-mic UHF rig that is batteries-only.  Pyle is one of those "manufacturers" that doesn't manufacture anything, they just buy up surplus capacity from random Chinese factories and resell whatever they can get their hands on. Some of their stuff is passable, and some of it is horrible, but these are the only cheap wireless mic systems I've ever seen that come with an integrated mixer so I'm very curious.  Insofar as they're electret condensers (I assume cardioid) they should be sensitive enough so I might take a chance in a month or two and report back on my findings.  8 mics is probably overkill in my application but whatever, I suppose it wouldn't hurt me to have some spares. I'm also worried about dealing with the extra-looooong vhf antennas...

Has anyone else cracked the multi-mic nut?  My original plan was to run VoxWav on a bunch of cheap wall-mounted android tablets in "always on" mode but I'm not having great luck with that on my network (I'll post more about that in the Android  forum once I test it again on more devices).  WO Mic works fantastically, but I can only hook in one Android device at a time and it takes away my ability to run a second mic using the regular windows driver. I've not tried out VAC yet so maybe that's a solution, or part of one at least...

Anyway I can see from browsing the forum that this is a perennial topic, so I'd be really excited to know if anyone has had any recent luck.

jitterjames

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Re: Whole home mic system
« Reply #3 on: September 02, 2014, 05:46:41 PM »
You probably don't just need a mixer but one with auto mic gating.  Don't know if the one you linked to supports that but probably not.

LilFonky

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Re: Whole home mic system
« Reply #4 on: September 02, 2014, 06:33:46 PM »
No almost certainly no gates to be had here.  Do you have any experience with the summing of background noise and VC?  I'm wondering if the old strategy of just turning things right down might not do the trick. Another thing to test would be to stick an expander between the output of the mic and the computer input.  I actually have one of those in my collection so maybe if I get my courage together to buy these goofy mics I can stick it inline and document my results. It's not happening this month as I've already got a couple of Vox-related purchases in the pipe (with a purchase of VC itself OTW), but I'm intensely interested in the distributed microphone issue and I think working on it would be super fun. 

Kalle

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Re: Whole home mic system
« Reply #5 on: September 02, 2014, 07:18:15 PM »
After I read some reviews about the pyle, I would say don't waste your money for such a "Pro" Microphones - here are some reviews on amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Pyle-PDWM8300-Professional-Conference-Microphone/product-reviews/B003D2O15W/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_2?ie=UTF8&pageNumber=2&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

maybe this is interesting, but I'm sure this will be Ultra-expensive  ::yuck

http://www.revolabs.com/documents/solo-executive/solo48_sell_sheet_pr0911
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LilFonky

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Re: Whole home mic system
« Reply #6 on: September 02, 2014, 09:01:32 PM »
HI Kalle-

I actually have some of these Revolabs mics at my job and I've never been too fond of them, mostly because of the stupid wired-in li-poly packs in the mics, which tend to bubble and are not easily replaceable. They're expensive, but not crazy expensive if you're hell-bent having some. You can get a pair with a charger and receiver for about $500...

For my purposes, though, I need something that's commodity priced.

I'm sure the Pyle mics are crap-tacular, and there's essentially no QC, as one would expect at this price. I expect I'd have about even odds of getting a set that works, so I'd be operating in the land of calculated risk if I went ahead.  But the idea for the product is conceptually almost exactly what I want, and it's the only thing I've ever seen at almost any price that ticks all the boxes (except quality). I am afraid! But if they work it would be a cool proof of concept.

Anyway, there are still plenty of things that need done before I haul off and buy a bunch of mics. I'm just really interested in multi-room strategies since my home, small though it is, has multiple rooms...

LilFonky

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Re: Whole home mic system
« Reply #7 on: September 03, 2014, 07:36:45 PM »
OK so I have some gadgets coming in the mail, which include (another) android tablet, a tiny PC, and these:

http://smile.amazon.com/Movo-MA100-Omni-Directional-Calibrated-Microphone/dp/B00LCIVLRK/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1409782302&sr=8-3&keywords=movo+microphone

http://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00ADR2B84/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=P4UH7DQ1L9ET&coliid=I2Q0S6CZHBKDJX


I've also done a little more testing with VoxWav and after some tweaks I'm having better results than I was the other day. Raising the gate threshold really high and turning off UDP broadcast improved VoxWav's performance (dunno why UDP should matter, might be a coincidence), so I'm gonna try each of these little mics out an see how they compare with the built-in mics on my phone and the new tablet.  I'll report back on each mic soon, hopefully this weekend.

The over-arching strategy is going to be to hang a cheap tablet on the wall in each of the rooms where I want mics, which gives me touch controls and voice capture ganged together in each room where I want control. I'd like to see if I can get 3-4 instances of VoxWav to play nice with VC all at once, with the addition of possibly a boundary mic in the living room at some point.  I'd like to eventually be running the Vox computer in a headless way using Splashtop for access when I need to make changes to settings. 

We shall see...

Vangelis

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Re: Whole home mic system
« Reply #8 on: September 04, 2014, 07:58:38 AM »
I am running VC with these Ceiling Mounted Boundary Mics (http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/like/281138724185?limghlpsr=true&hlpv=2&ops=true&viphx=1&hlpht=true&lpid=108&device=c&adtype=pla&crdt=0&ff3=1&ff11=ICEP3.0.0&ff12=67&ff13=80&ff14=108) along with a Shure SCM-410e

The Mics are quite sensitive and the Shure Mixer has Gating and a logic output for speaker selection (for VC response). All this connects into a PC

Its quite interesting to see what VC hears and the confidence level it assigns. I my situation, the more of a vocab you setup, the better the confidence (and recognition) is.
The hardest part was to setup the input and output gains so that VC was happy - It helped to be able to record the input and play it back as I was able to pick up and tune out some noise.

Not played with the UDP setting but this maybe a VoxWav thing??

Vangelis

jitterjames

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Re: Whole home mic system
« Reply #9 on: September 04, 2014, 09:14:00 AM »
Raising the gate threshold really high and turning off UDP broadcast improved VoxWav's performance (dunno why UDP should matter, might be a coincidence)

There is no way that turning off UDP will improve your recognition accuracy.  All it will do is make it so that you can't send messages by clicking on things like the last recognized command or alternates or confirmation popups.  It will also stop VoxWav from sending events to VC.  In your case this won't matter but sometimes we use this to reduce audio volume while speaking a voice command.

Raising the silence threshold to the correct value makes sense, but "really high" could just as easily make things worse.  It will be different for everyone depending on their setup and their device's microphone sensitivity.  I must caution other users not to assume that setting this value "really high" is going to be a magic fix because it could just as easily make VW unusable.

I talk about these thresholds in this video:
&feature=youtu.be&t=3m14s
The link will take you to 3 minutes 14 seconds into the video which is where I start to talk about the thresholds.  Rewind if you want to watch the whole thing.
« Last Edit: September 04, 2014, 09:16:53 AM by jitterjames »

Kalle

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Re: Whole home mic system
« Reply #10 on: September 04, 2014, 09:41:56 AM »
Nice microphones, never see this ceiling mics before. I think your advantage is the shure mixer, the expensive part  ;)
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Vangelis

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Re: Whole home mic system
« Reply #11 on: September 04, 2014, 10:25:34 AM »
 ;) That's what was holding me back, until I found one on EBay  ;D

jitterjames

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Re: Whole home mic system
« Reply #12 on: September 04, 2014, 02:16:33 PM »
Ebay 8:32

Quote
And ye shall know the ebay, and the ebay shall make you free.

LilFonky

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Re: Whole home mic system
« Reply #13 on: September 04, 2014, 08:39:48 PM »
Hi Vangelis-

How are you handling wire runs in your deployment? Are you running mic cable through the plenum/attic and then down to an XLR wall plate? Or are you doing some kind of surface mount thing?  I rent, so I've not really been too keen to run wire through the wall, which is why I'm so interested in wireless options.  I've got mixers and microphones aplenty but running xlr all over the place is what's keeping me from pursuing boundary mics or PZMs or similar.  I also just sort of like the idea of "cheap-and-cheerful" for this kind of thing, but I'm always looking for new reasons to buy gear so I'd be very interested to know more about our install.

Are you using the gates heavily on the scm-410?  Has it been your experience that VC accuracy drops significantly as you begin summing more mics without the gates turned on?

Dominique

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Re: Whole home mic system
« Reply #14 on: September 05, 2014, 02:34:44 AM »
Castle O/S uses Kinects all over the home in every room to do the very same thing.  The great thing is, the 1st gen Kinect is dirt cheap since the 360 was replaced by the Xbox One.  The guy seems to get pretty good dictation.

http://youtu.be/ksiJWthOxY0

Personally, I would much rather use VC instead of Castle OS since VC is so much more customizable.  However I am just showing you the concept of a whole home microphone setup.