Winning sound at Yamaha Motor Racing headquarters

ADECIA delivers clearer audio for more productive meetings

The ADECIA ceiling microphone and line array speaker solution has been added to two prestigious meeting rooms at the head offices of Yamaha Motor Racing (YMR) in Gerno di Lesmo in Italy, making Microsoft Teams meetings clearer and more productive for all participants.

A suitable solution for prestigious rooms

YMR is the company which manages the Yamaha Factory Racing MotoGP Team (YFR), Yamaha’s wholly owned full Factory Team in MotoGP. YMR’s workshop was rebuilt as a state-of-the-art facility in 2008, giving the team a superb new headquarters with all technical, logistical, managerial and marketing/communications departments under one roof.

The Headquarters showcases two main meeting rooms, servicing YMR employees as well as colleagues from the three Yamaha companies that are also based at Yamaha’s Campus in Gerno di Lesmo: Yamaha Motor Italy, Yamaha Motor R&D Center and Yamaha Music Italy. As such, the meeting rooms needed a high-end audio system, allowing the staff to perform at their best even during online meetings.

Named after three-time 500cc Grand Prix world champion Wayne Rainey, the ‘Wayne Rainey Board Room’ hosts YMR’s most important meetings. It features a 24-seat oval table which encircles one of the most iconic Yamaha bikes ever ridden: Yamaha’s 50th anniversary-liveried YZR-M1, ridden by seven-time MotoGP world champion Valentino Rossi in 2005 at Laguna Seca (USA).

The second room is named after Italian legend and multi 350cc and 500cc world champion Giacomo Agostini. Used for daily meetings, this room features a 12-seat rectangular table.

Both rooms have a sophisticated, refined design, but with a lot of flat, acoustically-reflective surfaces, they pose audio challenges, especially for speech intelligibility during meetings that include remote participants. Microsoft Teams is frequently used and, with ADECIA being fully certified for use with Teams, it is the ideal solution to improve speech intelligibility, while ensuring ease of use and not impacting on the visual design of each room.

High quality, low impact sound.

Installed by Milan-based systems integrator VideoGecom, the ADECIA system for each room includes two white RM-CG dynamic beamforming ceiling array microphones, an RM-CR conference processor with RM-MTL table mount kit, an SWP2311P-10G PoE+ switch and two VXL1W-16P slimline line array speakers.

With its advanced IP-based PoE networking, the ADECIA system needs minimal wiring, it is straightforward and very neat to install. The two RM-CG microphones more than adequately cover each room, picking up the voice of whoever is speaking in very high quality, while their low-profile ceiling installation meaning they do not visually impact on the décor.

Just as importantly, the dispersion pattern of the VXL1W-16P speakers makes sure that sound is directed towards people in the room and kept away from the reflective walls and windows, ensuring remote participants are clearly heard at all times.

Thanks to the ADECIA system’s ability to automatically calibrate itself, commissioning the system was quick and easy, with the sound quality optimised from the first use.

Users are not even aware of its presence

The combination of Microsoft Teams and ADECIA is the ideal solution for meetings which involve present and remote participants in both YMR’s ‘Wayne Rainey Board Room’ and the ‘Giacomo Agostini Meeting Room’. ADECIA has been fully integrated into both meeting rooms and, with echo cancellation, dereverberation and noise reduction automatically applied by the system, users are not even aware of its presence.

The only reason they know ADECIA is working is that remote users can clearly hear them and vice versa, without any of the difficulties often associated with the sound in acoustically-reflective meeting rooms.