Nobody should spend the first ten minutes of a meeting fighting the TV
Every business has a version of this. Six people in a room, one laptop, a dongle that works for two of them, and a client on the call who cannot hear the person at the far end of the table.
About this piece
- Article
- Buildings & A/V
- Written by Nicholas Backwell · Founder, Redsilicon
- Updated 2026-08-24
The room is not broken. It was assembled from parts by well-meaning people at different times, and nobody was ever responsible for whether it worked as a whole.
The short version
- Audio is what makes or breaks a call. Nobody forgives bad audio, and everybody tolerates a mediocre picture.
- One cable at the table should do everything. Two cables and an adapter means the room fails.
- A laptop webcam cannot cover a table of eight people, no matter how good it is.
- The display should be sized to the furthest seat, not to the wall.
- Almost every failure traces back to something not being planned, usually power or cabling.
Audio first, and by a distance
If you fix one thing in a meeting room, fix the sound.
People will sit through a slightly soft picture without complaint. They will not sit through a call where they have to ask “sorry, can you repeat that” four times. On a client call, poor audio reads as unprofessional in a way a low-resolution camera does not.
Three things determine whether a room sounds good.
Microphone coverage. A laptop microphone picks up the person in front of it and struggles beyond a couple of metres. A table of eight needs microphones placed across it, or a properly specified ceiling array. The person at the far end is the test case, not the person driving.
The room itself. Hard surfaces reflect sound. A glass-walled boardroom with a laminate table and no soft furnishing sounds hollow and echoey to everyone on the other end, and no microphone fixes the room. Sometimes the highest-value change in a meeting room is a rug and something on one wall, which is not an AV purchase at all.
Echo cancellation. A speakerphone that hears itself through the speakers creates the echo people on the call complain about. Purpose-built conference devices handle this properly. A cheap USB speaker and a separate microphone usually do not.
The blunt version: a $400 conference speakerphone in the middle of the table improves most rooms more than a $3,000 display.
The camera problem people misjudge
A laptop webcam has a narrow field of view designed for one face at arm’s length. Put it at the head of a boardroom table and the people at the far end are small and dim, and the people beside the laptop are out of frame entirely.
A conference camera has a wide field of view and sits where it can see the room. The good ones frame automatically, either finding the group or following whoever is speaking. That auto-framing is the feature worth paying for, because it removes the person who has to get up and adjust things.
Lighting matters more than resolution here. A camera pointed at a bright window turns everyone into silhouettes. The fix is free: face the camera away from the window, or close the blind. No camera has a setting that beats sitting with the light in front of you rather than behind you.
One cable, and the display
Whatever platform you use, the room should work like this: someone sits down, plugs one cable into their laptop, and the display and the camera and the microphone all work.
One cable. Not a video cable and a USB cable. Not a dongle that lives in a drawer and gets borrowed. A single connection carrying video out and camera and audio back, and ideally power too, so nobody’s laptop dies mid-meeting.
The moment there are two cables and an adapter, the room fails regularly, because the adapter goes missing and because half the people who use the room do not know what plugs into what.
The alternative is a dedicated room system, a small computer permanently in the room running Teams or Zoom or Meet with a proper camera and microphone attached. Nobody plugs anything in. You walk in and join from a touch panel. For a room used several times a day, that is worth the money. For a room used twice a week, one cable is fine.
On the display, the mistake is buying for the wall rather than the room. A rough guide people find useful: the furthest viewer should not be more than about six times the display height away, and less if they need to read spreadsheet text. Measure to the furthest chair before choosing a size.
Also, buy a commercial display rather than a consumer TV. Commercial panels are rated for longer daily operation, and they do not have smart-TV menus and app stores in the way. A consumer TV in a boardroom will eventually show someone a streaming advert during a client meeting.
The boring things that cause most failures
Power behind the display. Somebody has to run a circuit to where the screen mounts. If nobody plans it, you get an extension lead down the wall.
Cable in the wall. Cables should run inside the wall from the table to the display, in conduit if the wall will ever need a different cable pulled through. Retrofitting this after the paint dries costs more than doing it during.
Structural mounting. A large display goes into studs or solid backing, not drywall anchors. This is not a preference.
The Wi-Fi in the room. A glass-walled boardroom often has poor coverage precisely because glass and metal frames block signal. A video call in a room with weak wireless drops regardless of how good the AV is. A cabled connection in the room solves it properly, which is a cabling and wireless question rather than an AV one.
What this means for your building
An office in Ajax converting a small meeting room into a proper video room is usually a half-day job: display, one cable, a conference bar with camera and microphone in one unit. That single unit covers a room seating six or eight and removes most of the failure modes at once.
A boardroom in Oshawa seating fourteen is a different specification. Multiple microphones, a camera with real optics, and a serious conversation about the room’s acoustics before anything is mounted.
A shop or warehouse in Bowmanville wanting a screen in the lunchroom for training and toolbox talks needs something durable and simple, and probably shares hardware with digital signage the rest of the week.
What to do about it
- Sit in the furthest chair and join a test call. Have someone on the other end tell you honestly what they can hear and see. That is your specification.
- Count the cables on the table. More than one is your first fix.
- Check what the camera faces. If it is a window, try moving the setup before buying anything.
- Measure from the display to the furthest seat before choosing a screen size.
- Sort power and in-wall cable before the display is bought, not after.
- Decide whether this is a plug-in room or a dedicated room system, based on how often it is genuinely used.
Boardroom AV is one of the things where the same people who ran the cabling mount the display, which removes the argument about whose problem the power outlet is.
Want this scoped for your site?
Tell us the building and what you’re trying to achieve. We’ll tell you what it takes, and whether you actually need it.
Before you call
Do we need a Teams Room or will a laptop do?
If the room is used a few times a week and the people using it are comfortable plugging in a cable, a good conference bar and one cable is genuinely fine and much cheaper. A dedicated system earns its cost in rooms used many times a day, and in rooms used by clients or visitors who should not have to figure anything out.
Can we use the TV we already have?
Often yes, if it is large enough and has the right inputs. The failure mode is a consumer TV that turns itself off, changes input, or shows notifications. Worth testing for a week before deciding.
Why does everyone say they cannot hear us?
Almost always microphone coverage, room acoustics, or both. Try the test call from the furthest chair and you will hear it yourself.