sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Conference Phone-Digital?

Hi,

i have a Samusung DSC phone system. The handset have a speaker button. but with more than one person talking the quality is poor.

The system is digital, so i brought a polycom sound station and a konexx digital adapter. The quality at the other end of the conversation was poor. So i tried a Konftel 100D, specifically designed for Digital and had the same problem.

I also tried the polycom on an analogue line to make sure it wasn't an adpater problem. The quality was poor.

What are my options?

the room is one brick wall, and three half glass half chipboard walls. KMaybe its the environment?

That does sound like a very poor environment for a speakerphone. Too much echo. Have you tried it in another room which has more sound absorbing materials?

Well, something is curious! I would agree with nfc, the environment sounds like a big problem. We have litterely houndreds of the polycoms out in the field and have not had a problem with sound quality.....it could be a defective unit though. Try it in another room, or maybe put up some of those sound proofing foam things that musicians use. They could be used only on calls and taken down when you are not on a call. They are cheap, something like 75 pounds for a set so they could be worth a try!

Steve

I agree with both comments, it sounds like either a bad phone or the phone you have is not capable of handling that size of room. If it is a large conf room, you might need to switch to the next step up in phones, one that can handle a large room. For large conf rooms we use polycom's VTX 1000. Another thing to look at, is to see if the speaker is full duplex, it should be if it is a polycom, but if it is old then it might not be full duplex.

We had a polycom in a conference room that ended up being too small for the unit and had bad sound quality. Now we have it in a very large room and it's fine.

I do know that the polycom is a fully duplex unit and if someone calls on a single duplex or a cell phone you will have call issues anyway.

Good luck!

I have never heard of any such thing as a "digital" conference unit. Given that they all run off of analog T/R ports, I would see no point in getting in an analog signal at the mic, converting it to digital signal, then converting it back to analog for transmission. I think that perhaps someone has misinformed you as to what the term digital means.
That said, Polycom is the state of the art as far as confrence units go. Just make sure you pay attention to the room size/dimensions that they recommend. I agree with what the others have said: room size and furnishing materials make a world of difference.

Paul, we have several customers which use a Norstar Conference phone (Made by Polycom)that connects to the Norstar digital station ports.

Clanier, that is because Norstar had Polycom make some with the ATA built in.
It is still taking in and putting out analog signal, it just uses the built in ATA to transform it into system digital. Functionally and electronically it is exactly the same as plugging a regular Polycom unit into an ATA adapter on a Norstar.

I also recommend the Polycom units. We have several units and they perform quite well. They are also in various size rooms. I deffinatly think the glass has a lot to do with it.
I never understood glass walls in a conference room. Its like being in a display window.

We use offer 2 types of analog conference phones . Polycom and Mitel 5303 . Both work well . Our biggest failure problem is people running over the cords with chair wheels . We have some "Robust" women working in our buildings.

Hate to be the devils advocate here but... you have tried Polycom and Konftel which are the two best that I know of regarding conf/spkr phones. We have had very good results with both. I would have to question the system or location at this point!

Why not start with basic information?

How large is this room in metres/feet?

How high is the ceiling in metres/feet, normal, high?

Is this specifically a conference room or is it your office?

Do you have a budget for putting rugs on the floor, curtains that could be used to cover the glass when using the conference phone, a lowered "acoustical material" ceiling, whatever measures that would "soften" the sound quality in the room?

Have you tried putting soft cloth on the table so that you are not getting bounced sound from a hard table top?

How often are you using this phone?

Are you doing calls with 2, 3, 4 locations on the same call?

If you can answer all these questions, I am sure that people on the board would have enough information to help you resolve this situation.

Information is power, we need more information to properly help you.