Member vote - Feedback suppressor for sound system

General
1

I propose a vote of $300 for a feedback suppressor and associated cables for the main meeting sound system.
Why? Feedback is hard to avoid with our meeting setup. I have been able to mostly avoid feedback by having to adjust things frequently and carefully. But sometimes feedback just happens.
Eventually we need to have other people run the system or preferably not need someone to run it at all. The feedback suppressor would be a big step toward making that possible.

John Clark

2

I vote yes

3

I vote YES.

4

I vote YES. I’d be probably stupid not to.

5

Yes.

John O

6

yes

7

yes

8

yes

9

I’m going to vote no on this. It may be that we end up needing it, but I think there are better places to put our money and effort that are more likely to improve things. It’s been my observation that the bigger issues we have are

  1. The volume of the speakers in the space is just WAY too loud. Amplification for stuff like what we are doing should only just barely be loud enough that the volume of people’s voices feels the same as if they were talking without amplification next to you, but at the median speaker-listener distance.

  2. The speaker placement we have been using is terrible, with one of the speakers right in the middle of where most people sit/stand for the meetings. the speakers need to be outside, the region where people will be speaking and listening, Feedback only pops up when someone too close to that speaker starts trying to talk.

  3. We need sound refraction and absorption. I’m fairly certain that this same amount of money spent on a few boxes of acoustic tile, and taking them and building them into 3D shapes to hang on the ceiling would do far more for the sound in the space than this feedback suppressor.