Revisiting the Alto Professional Presenter

Late last year I detailed my quest to find a small public address system for use by our local civic association. I settled upon the Alto Professional Presenter, which is a portable, battery operated PA in the form of a podium. What follows are some notes about how I’ve used it over the past nine months, and some recent tweaks to the setup that have made me irrationally happy.

While I was initially quite enthusiastic about the product, that proved to be substantially unwarranted. Out-of-the-box it’s actually quite terrible. It’s a nice idea, poorly executed.

The major problem is the included gooseneck microphone. You can’t turn the device up loud enough to be useful without generating feedback. As a practical matter, the position of the microphone is fixed relative to the front-facing speakers. Also, I suspect the microphone suffered from being physically connected to the podium. The physical connection increases the likelihood of feedback, as vibration was passed directly to the gooseneck.

So, the first thing I did was ditch the gooseneck mic. Instead, I connected my the output of the receiver for my Shure wireless microphone system to the 3.5mm AUX input on the podium. That was better. Much better in fact. However, there wasn’t enough gain available. While I was typically loud enough to be heard, when a quiet speaker took the mic they sometimes could not be heard.

That’s a solvable problem. I added my little Soundcraft Notepad Folio mixer, to provide some flexibility with microphone gain. Problem solved.

The trouble is, the podium, wireless microphone system and mixer all together were a bit fiddly. It took some time to set it up. While the podium is battery powered, I had to provide some kind of power source for the wireless receiver and the mixer. There were cables. It just wasn’t as tidy and convenient as the freestanding podium had promised at the outset.

Be that as it may, I used this arrangement for a number of meetings. It was certainly handy. Two wireless microphones allowed me to have one at the podium while an second was available to take question or comments from the floor.

Quite recently I realized that I’d overlooked a potential refinement to how I was using the podium. The gooseneck microphone has an XLR connector at its base that normally fits into and XLR connector on the top right corner of the podium. While I had abandoned the use of the gooseneck microphone, I was continuing to connect the mixer to the 3.5mm AUX input on the back panel.

If I connected the output of the wireless receiver to the XLR where the gooseneck would go, I no longer needed the mixer. The microphone input had enough range of gain control to accommodate any situation.

If I don’t need the mixer, I can go back to powering the wireless receiver from the USB charging port on the back of the podium. It provides 5v DC at 2.1A suitable for charging a smart phone. I have a USB voltage step-up cable that provides the 12v DC that the Shure receiver requires.

The trouble is that the active part of the step-up cable sticks out from the back of the podium a couple of inches. It’s not hard to imagine it getting bumped and breaking, or worse damaging the jack on the podium. So, I acquired a little set of USB right angle adapters.

One of these gadgets allows the dongley part of the step-up cable to fall flat along the back face of the podium. Nice and tidy.

Similarly, I acquired some short XLR cables with a right angle connector on one end. That means I don’t have a straight XLR connector sticking up from the jack on the top of the podium. Again, nice and tidy.

The Shure wireless receiver is literally velcro’d to the side of podium. Accessible, but tucked neatly out of the way. The aux input is now free for other purposes. It’s shared by a Bluetooth link, so I can connect a laptop or phone if required.

Given these few little refinements, I am now very pleased with this arrangement. It works really well. It’s easy to deploy. It’s portable and powered from the battery in the podium itself. There’s a minimum of things to connect.

As The A-Team’s George Peppard used to say, “I love it when a plan comes together.”