Positioned on a picturesque hillside not far from Busan City Hall, Busan Kyungsang College continues to increase its online education offerings, with about 40 courses now availability through its growing Cyber Center program. A continued focus on this proposition in response to the pandemic drove the higher-education institute to modernize their collaboration systems to improve audio quality and speech intelligibility for the increasing number of students who participated in blended learning.Â
Challenge
As was the case with learning institutions worldwide, schools and colleges in South Korea found themselves adjusting to a new way of providing lessons to students with limited access on campus. Busan Kyungsang College had 22 classrooms with simple analog audio systems, which caused feedback for remote learners attending classes through soft-codec platforms. The college also wanted to institute contactless AV environments inside their spaces to minimize touch as much as possible. That required flexible system design software to unify Xilica DSP solutions with other AV elements, and establish an integrated control solution that offered a one-touch experience.
Solution
Xilica Solaro QR1 micro-format DSP was selected for each classroom, leveraging its scalable modularity to address all advanced requirements across student-teacher communications and general audio signal processing. Each Solaro QR1 is equipped with one Solaro USB card, two Solaro analog audio output cards, and two analog audio input cards to support both the UC compute device, the in-room microphone arrays, and the analog loudspeaker system.
Perhaps most important was the exceptional performance of Xilica’s HearClear AEC algorithm for acoustic echo cancellation, which was instrumental to providing clarity for physical and remote students alike. The ultra-compact, quarter-rack-width Solaro QR1 also allowed technicians to cleanly install the DSPs underneath integrated AV lecterns used by college instructors. The Solaro QR1’s low profile keeps the DSP out of sight inside classrooms, while its cost-efficiency also kept the project affordable and on-budget for Busan Kyongsang College.
The flexibility of Xilica Designer software, with its Lua scripting environment, also provided technicians with a way to easily program custom drivers for third-party AV products in the same classrooms. This allowed the college to cleanly unify all audio and video products with a third-party integrated control system.
Impact
Busan Kyongsang College’s new Xilica Solaro DSP systems provide both faculty and students with smooth, high-quality audio performance that results in a better learning experience for both in-room and remote class participants. The AEC algorithm includes a feedback module built into each Solaro QR1 that eliminates all echo problems generated inside the classroom. This solves the problem of distracting audio feedback sent to remote learners through the in-room audio system. Meanwhile Xilica’s IT-friendly approach to collaboration rooms, including modern classrooms retrofitted for blended learning programs, ensured ease of integration, interoperability with third-party control systems, and the flexibility to further scale existing Solaro QR1 DSPs thanks to their impressive modularity.
