SALEM — City council’s finance committee recently heard an offer to upgrade the audio system.
Radi-O-Sounds Vice President Ron Stratton presented the committee with a proposal to upgrade the system to address ongoing issues with reverb and echo and with overheating, as well as issues regarding the volume of microphones.
Stratton said that the most effective way to address the echo issues would be to make modifications to the microphone setup as to address the acoustics of the room directly would require having a sound engineer come to council chambers to conduct an analysis and develop a plan to implement noise dampening techniques.
The proposed changes would include adding buttons to switch microphones on and off as they are being used, and replacing the boundary mics used in the outer wings of the chamber with six microphones similar to those used at the primary desk. The implementation of the switches allows for only those microphones in use to be active and picking up sound and would drastically reduce the amount of background and ambient noise picked up by the system. Similarly, Stratton said that the replacement of the boundary microphones would drastically cut down the amount of background chatter as they pick up audio in a wide range.
Stratton also suggested the city upgrade its recording system from the current cassette recorder to a solid-state model. Stratton said such a model would allow recording to be stored both to an internal hard drive and easily exported to a removeable thumb drive, and would even make creating duplicates of recorded meetings simpler and faster. While Stratton didn’t have a quote for such a model on hand at the time, but he said they typically aren’t very expensive.
Councilman and Committee Chairman Andrew Null requested a quote for the solid-state recorder to be considered during further discussion of potential solutions to the sound issue, noting that the committee was still in an exploratory phase regarding the issue.
