GroupStation – Graves On SOHO Technology

VUC #472: Vaddio’s Huddlestation

January 14, 2014
Michael Graves
Video, VoIP

While it’s true that I live in Texas where football is elevated in status beyond almost everything else, in this case the “huddle” is not about football. Vaddio is a manufacturer of audio & video conference hardware based in Minnetonka, MN. Best known for their range of PTZ cameras, they have a diverse product offering that addresses media applications from broadcast to places of worship and corporate meeting spaces.

This coming Friday, January 17th, Vaddio will be joining the VUC to introduce us to their new Huddlestation. The Huddlestation is a new product that aims to address the needs of smaller meeting rooms for video conference capability, while also tapping into the BYOD trend. It’s essentially a USB-attached camera+sound bar+microphone module for use with a HDTV. You may recall that I have mentioned it once before.

November 7, 2013
Michael Graves
Video

It’s come to my attention that in recent times “Surround Sound Bars” have exploded in popularity. That’s “sound bar” as in a form of home-theatre-sound-in-a-box, not a smoky dive where musicians perform strange music. Sound bars are now so popular that they are impacting sales of more traditional HTIB solutions. I’ve come to see some parallels between surround sound bars and DIY video conference room systems, an idea that first came up earlier this year.

As I have mentioned previously, we don’t have a traditional surround-sound system in support of our HDTV. Our 42” Sharp Aquos HDTV was the largest that they offered with built-in speakers…which is all that we felt we required at the time.

In truth, it was the display size and resolution that mattered most when we made the purchase decision. In the middle of the last decade most 40”-ish HDTVs still only resolved 720p. Since my Mrs tended to watch more CBS than the other networks it made sense to get a HDTV capable of resolving 1080i.