Intro

Aston University is a world-renowned institution nestled in the heart of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Like most top universities, it strives to provide a modern, best-in-class learning environment that serves the needs of its diverse 18,000-strong student population and dedicated faculty. 

For Dean Rowland, the university's long-standing AV engineer, meeting these evolving educational demands hinges on equipping learning spaces with reliable audio capabilities that facilitate inclusion and comprehension for students, without burdening faculty with technical overhead. 

“Our audio needs are voice reinforcement, lecture capture, and hearing assist systems. Hybrid teaching is mostly in the past, but we still have the capacity, if need be,"

says Dean, who gave us a glimpse into Aston University’s AV standardization efforts and why Catchbox Plus system’s Clip mic proved to be an ideal choice for presenter microphones.

Meet Aston University’s AV team

Well, you already have. 

For the most part, Dean is a one man team managing AV in around 90 classrooms – a familiar reality for many university AV departments. He does have a placement student helping out and, while technically the university helpdesk should take care of the more common issues, a majority of AV tickets and calls nonetheless find their way to Dean. 

“In general, I wait for things to break. My goal is to not have the staff ever call me because we've kept the systems running so well in the background,”

says Dean, echoing a common north star goal among higher-ed AV technicians. 

To move closer to this ideal, Dean implemented a two-pronged approach: selecting high-quality AV technology that is simple and virtually foolproof when it comes to the end users, and then standardizing it across the entire campus. 

How decades of experience informs better decisions

As Aston University’s AV engineer for over 20 years, Dean is intimately familiar not only with the needs of the university, but also with what has and hasn’t worked so far. 

Their original presenter microphone choice was radio mics, which proved to be incredibly difficult to manage and frequently suffered from "horrendous" crosstalk. These were followed by Revolabs – the now-discontinued AV-industry darling, which Dean reports to have been a marked improvement in quality, but still a hassle for maintenance, citing connection delays and fragility as the main issues. 

Dean’s experience has led him to place high value on durability. 

“For the radio mics, the actual physical clip that holds the lavalier microphone on didn’t last 5 minutes before it disappeared, and they got quickly destroyed, too. It used to be the biggest complaint – this microphone hasn’t got a clip. Revolabs were better, but fragile – one drop and the tops would just crush in.”

Dean reveals another extremely common complaint – the microphones are out of juice. Aston University runs two presenter microphones per room to guarantee one is always ready to go, however, lecturers and presenters would fail to correctly replace the microphones on their chargers. 

“With the Revolabs, I would just go on a stroll around the campus and I was guaranteed to find 5-6 placed incorrectly on the charger at any given moment,” Dean recalls.

One carelessly (mis)placed microphone by a lecturer means another’s class gets disrupted, and Dean must drop everything and scramble to provide a solution. 

Choosing the Catchbox Clip

Eager for something that “just works”, Dean’s attention was caught by the Catchbox Clip. The first impressions were that “it was a better Revolabs as far as I was concerned. It just looked solid. It felt like a better version of what we had before”.

But what really sealed the deal was the reliable charging station – “you literally can almost throw the microphone at the base and it just goes on and starts charging”. The ease of charging leaves less room for issues caused by user error. For Dean, it means he doesn’t have to keep revisiting the rooms to check up on the microphones or responding to frustrated lecturers, saving him a lot of time. 

So, why Catchbox Clip? Here’s what did it for Dean. 

“They’re nice, compact and easy to use. The clip on the back – it's a solid thing that's never going to get bent out of shape. The microphones seem to be difficult to break – I’m still waiting for the first one to break and very curious as to what’ll do it. They're very hard to get wrong, so you don’t have to keep constantly being on top of them.”

And, of course, the Catchbox Plus system also slots perfectly into Aston University’s new AV standard. 

Infrastructure and maintenance

Dean has standardized AV across all of the 90 classrooms. At Aston University, you’ll find two Catchbox Clip mics in each room working seamlessly in tandem with a carefully constructed AV ecosystem that includes speakers (QSC 8ohm Speakers), projectors (Panasonic PT-VMZ71), PTZ cameras (Panasonic AW-HE20WE), room controllers (Crestron CP4), and more – with everything connected via USB-C and AirServer. 

“We managed to refurb the entire estate over two years. So the product creep was very little,” notes Dean. 

He also reveals that this level of standardization has proven to be invaluable for preventive maintenance: “Once you apply a fix in one room, we can easily apply it to all of the rooms, even if they’re not faulty yet”. He contrasts this with the hassle that was when different rooms sported different tech and every little issue would prove unique. 

Choosing the right microphone has had a major positive impact campus-wide

Having run Catchbox Clips microphones for two years now, Dean shares that the microphones have received the highest badge of honor an AV solution can get from faculty – zero complaints concerning either usability or audio quality. 

Previous solutions would frequently break, be misused, or have connectivity delays, summoning Dean all over campus to – more often than not – deal with human carelessness.

But Catchbox Clip? 

“It just works. The mics are very hard to get wrong. It’s little maintenance and I would recommend it to other universities.”