Category: VoIP

Unexpected Friends: Pixel & Sennheiser DW Pro 2 Headset

Being in the conferencing business, I’m on the phone a lot during the course of my working life. Most of my phone calling happens via a pair of dear friends; my Polycom VVX-600 and a Sennheiser DW Pro 2 DECT headset. This pair has proven itself in literally years of office use. They’re simply tremendous.

vvx-600 & DW Pro headset

In fact, they’re so good together that my mobile phone was something of an afterthought. I only used it after hours, or when someone called me at that number. That someone was most typically my wife. Stella always calls my mobile. She never calls my desk.

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A little matter of Ego

Quite recently Dave Michels penned a review of the Konftel Ego for the UCStrategies blog. I like Dave. I especially appreciate his no-nonsense approach to things. If he says something is good, it’s probably worth a look.

Konftel’s Ego is a portable, personal speakerphone device with both USB and Bluetooth connectivity. I see that the Ego is listed under $100 on Amazon. Given Dave’s recommendation, and an attractive price, I may need to give it a try. My past experience with the larger Konftel 300 was quite good.konftel-ego-1-vl

That said, I’d also like to take this opportunity to remind you of a very firmly held belief. If you truly care about how you sound to the people at the far-end…if their experience truly matters…you’ll choose a headset over any kind of speakerphone or conference phone. When the quality of experience delivered to the other party is paramount, a good headset trumps all else.

A good headset, preferably one with a boom-mounted microphone, takes the acoustics of the room completely out-of-play. It eliminates any possibility of noise, echo, or reverberance, delivering your message as clear as possible to your audience.

No amount of engineering wizardry can make up for sub-optimal microphone placement. Period.

Conference phones and speaker phones simply cannot deliver a comparable experience. You always trade quality of audience experience for your own convenience.

Yes, a headset…When you care enough to sound your very best.

TIP – Re: VoiceMeeter and Cordless Headset Batteries

It may be that in my old age I’m becoming forgetful. Or perhaps I’m just too enthused about what I’m doing, and little things get forgotten? I write this in the hope that it helps me to remember.

For years I’ve used a Sennheiser DW Pro2 DECT headset in my home office. It connects to a Polycom VVX-600 and my desktop computer. This trio serves me very well, but occasionally I reach for the headset and find that its battery is dead.

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Dolby Voice From a Distance

In my gig at ZipDX I work with some very interesting people. Barry Slaughter-Olsen is one of those people. Barry is a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, where he teaches the art of simultaneous interpretation to a new generation of language professionals. He’s also the co-founder of Interpret America, a group dedicated to raising the profile of interpreting. Further, he’s the GM of Multilingual Operations for ZipDX.

All of the above builds upon the fact that he’s a tremendously skilled conference interpreter. He also happens to be a self-professed geek, which is handy in business that, like so many others, is facing an onslaught of new technologies.

Barry Tweets.jpg

The other day Barry posed a question via twitter. In reference to Dolby Voice he asked “is this any better than #HDVoice?” It’s good question, so I did a little digging.

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No Jitter: Still No HDVoice Either!

Here’s yet another case of the telecom punditry failing to live by their own guidance. What’s the common term? “Eating one’s own dog food.”

No Jitter, a UBM property, in support of their Enterprise Connect event, produces a podcast. This time around editor Beth Schultz spoke with Alan Quayle about the coming TADHack Mini Hackathon which will run in Orlando March 25-6, just before Enterprise Connect.

That’s nice. Alan certainly knows his stuff. He’s been a VUC frequent guest in recent years.

NoJitter on Lenovo X-1-Carbon

It’s a pity that the podcast was produced via a plain vanilla PSTN telephone call. Narrowband in the best tradition of Ma Bell, circa 1945.

The failure to tap a new age, HDVoice-capable means of podcast production just feels wrong. Most especially given the widespread emphasis on WebRTC as a key aspect of the new age of telecom creativity.

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Some Thoughts About Grandstream

In VUC625: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly I offered Grandstream as an example of a company going in a good direction. I didn’t start out feeling this way. This post describes my history with their products, and the evolution of my opinion about the company.

Voice: The Early Impression

grandstreamBT-101The very first Grandstream product I even held in my hands was the infamous BT-101. It was possibly the very first affordable SIP hard phone, which is why a friend bought one. Beyond merely affordable, it was cheap. Everything about it was cheap, which tainted my view of the company.

To be fair, there were a lot of really bad SIP desk phones at that time. Grandstream’s strategy was to own the entry level space, which they did, handily.

As a result of that initial experience with the BT-101, I actually bought a snom 200.

It wasn’t long before I was gifted (yes, gifted!) a Polycom Soundpoint IP600. That device won me over completely. It was superior in every way. It lived on my desk for years, not displaced until the Soundpoint IP650 brought HDVoice to my attention.

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