Assuming your customers’ space is acoustically suited for a ceiling mic solution as we discussed in our previous ceiling mic best practices post, let’s move on to step two.

Determine Appropriate Mic Placement
Biamp’s CM1-6W and CM1-6WS are 6” miniaturized, gooseneck condenser microphones with fully integrated preamps designed with very high sensitivity for distance pickup. Because ceiling mics also have a large pickup area, a good rule of thumb is to imagine the pickup pattern as a 10’x10’x10’ cube.

On the one hand, over-miking a space with ceiling mics can cause too many mics to gate on at once, resulting in severe degradation of audio performance and listener attention. On the other hand, under-miking can create uneven coverage with some talkers in the room not being heard clearly or at all.

Biamp wants its end users to be heard loud and clear. To this end, we recommend that integrators calculate the distance between each mic based on the size of the room and the seating arrangement.

As we discussed in our recent post about how to correct bad mix-minus, good mic placement should also go hand-in-hand with good speaker placement. A ratio of 1:1–one mic and one speaker for each seat at the table–is a general best practice in this regard.

Stay tuned for my next ceiling mic best practices post on determining the appropriate type of mic for any given space. You can find our first ceiling mic overview post here.