Since the work-from-home movement gained traction, businesses have realised how crucial superior video conferencing capabilities have become. As hybrid workplaces and international conferencing becoming more common, so are high quality ceiling array microphones in many offices.

In fact, the development of ceiling array microphones has transformed the very nature of video conferencing, allowing a room full of speakers to be clearly heard as they each weigh in during meetings. This has reduced the need for individual video windows cluttering screens, especially in larger or rapidly growing companies. These specialised microphones have helped make video conferences more seamless, giving participants a sense of all being in the same room and reducing awkward moments like individual microphone echoes and feedback.

Shure, a market leader in sound devices, has taken ceiling array mic performance to the next level of sophistication and clarity, with the launch of its MXA920 microphone.

Out of the box, the MXA920 will give you perfect coverage of a 9 x 9 metres room, making it more than sufficient for most office conference rooms, without all the tricky configuration that some other ceiling array microphones demand before they’ll give you the performance you need.

It also frees you from having to choose your seating positions carefully – with blanket room coverage, the MXA920 delivers “fix it and forget it” performance immediately.

However, if you want to focus on speakers in one part of the room and minimise pickup from another, the MXA920 is also equipped with a simple web tool to allow you to configure pickup in minutes, minimising interruptions and letting you get on with your meeting stress free. You can define up to eight separate coverage areas with a simple drag-and-drop tool. Configuring the MXA920 is as easy as taking a screenshot – it uses familiar processes, so you can easily define your areas of interest.

For example, you can set the MXA920 to focus on picking up a single presenter standing and moving around on stage or on an entire round-table discussion group with minimum technical knowledge. Combining multiple functionality and extreme user-friendliness, the MXA920 is designed to make your day-to-day video conferencing as straightforward as talking to the person sitting next to you.

Certified for use with Microsoft Teams along with a whole host of other productivity and conferencing tools such as Google Meet, the MXA920 “plays well with others,” working with others seamlessly.

Part of the reason it works so well with a wide variety of conferencing tools is that the MXA920 comes with Automatic Coverage technology, which gives you directional sound quality, picking up all the voices you want to hear, and cutting down on extraneous noise that can make both your video conferencing experience and any auto-transcription a confusing and garbled affair.

To improve the audio capture of the MXA920 even further, it comes with on board IntelliMix® Digital Signal Processing (DSP), that means you can cut down extraneous noise even further, remove echo from your audio, and boost the intelligibility of your speakers. That’s an important consideration, as those experienced in both video conferencing and those who transcribe or translate video conference meetings know that intelligibility can suffer in unscripted situations, where there is a lot of overtalk or pauses.

Their patented IntelliMix® audio processing software can deliver clarity across a wide assortment of room types. Whether you’re in an executive boardroom, a government office space, or any other kind of meeting space, the IntelliMix® DSP will cut out the room’s acoustic disadvantages and give you crisp, clear, intelligible audio.

They say if something isn’t broken, you shouldn’t fix it, so the MXA920 also brings the ability to turn off Automatic Coverage and manually configure the lobes of your pickup, just as you could with the Shure MXA910. The MXA920 gives you the best of both worlds – an exceptional pre-configured coverage profile with Automatic Coverage, and the freedom to turn it off and personally configure your microphone pickup as needed for any given event in any given room. With eight configurable pickup lobes, it deepens the control you have over what you hear, and how you hear it.

In an improvement over previous designs, the MXA920 is available in both round and square form factors, so it can fit with multiple design aesthetics, rather than sticking out. You can even paint the MXA920 so it fits in more seamlessly into the décor of your most frequent video conferencing room.

For more complex audio requirements, you can even configure a whole host of MXA920s – and other devices – from the Microflex ecosystem. That’s a premium audio-visual ecosystem which lets you turn any room into the perfect audio environment for video conferencing. That means that you have the flexibility to use the MXA920s for a simple 30 x 30 feet square room up to a much larger, more cavernous space, to add dynamism to your conferencing or simply bring in speakers from around a huge room, rather than funnelling attention to a single, static space.

And if you need it, using the Microflex ecosystem brings Shure encryption to your system, securing the flow of content from your MXA920 to other Microflex devices in the same room.

The MXA920 is the latest in a long line of outstanding Shure microphones stretching back 90 years. A leader in the business of sound pickup, clarification and amplification, Shure packs all its considerable experience into the MXA920, delivering a microphone that advances the technological capabilities of ceiling array microphones to serve a demanding worldwide business audience.

If you’d like to see – and hear – the Shure MXA920 in action, you can contact a Jands Audiovisual Expert, or you can find a handful of high-quality walkthroughs of the MXA920’s capabilities available on Youtube.