Club meeting using Bluetooth conference mics and Bluetooth speakers

Ronald Cz

Ronald Cz

Member
I will be live streaming a club meeting with 10 round tables in the room. I plan to be in the middle with OBS on a windows laptop. I want the conference mic to come into OBS through Bluetooth and OBS tp output to Bluetooth speakers in the back.

The output should show Bluetooth available and input conference mic would show up as a mic input.

Question would the computer be able to handle outputting Bluetooth as well as inputting Bluetooth?

What if I had two conference mics would they show up separately as inputs?

Would feedback be a problem?
 
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AaronD

Active Member
If your computer can connect multiple bluetooth mics as separate devices, then OBS will capture them just fine. Same for the speaker.

For feedback, possibly. Sounds like the mics and speaker will be separated by more than what an echo canceller can account for, so you're back to the same problem that any live audio rig has:
speaker(s) -> air -> mic(s) -> electronics -> same speaker(s) -> air -> same mic(s) -> etc.
That sets a hard limit on what you can do.

I would not be comfortable using Bluetooth or WiFi, either one, for anything critical. Anything wireless is an opportunity for things to go wrong - mostly batteries and random unpredictable interference - and both Bluetooth and WiFi are on the same radio frequency for the same reason: Microwave ovens drove away any dedicated use, and so that's where the consumer-accessible stuff is.

So, a misbehaving phone can easily kill your bluetooth-heavy rig, and its owner has no idea. Or a poorly-shielded microwave. Or a poorly-configured WiFi network. Or......
 
Ronald Cz

Ronald Cz

Member
I bought a Behringer Eurolive B112W and a Ankerwork PowerConf S500 Speakerphone. Seems I am able to bring the Speaker phone as my input and my monitoring device as the Behringer both with Bluetooth connected.

OBS with desktop was choppy through the Behringer with Bluetooth, OBS with Laptop Behringer with Bluetooth worked once but now I can only get the Media Source music to output to the monitor with Behringer in OBS. When I made the monitor output through headphones I could hear the audio input capture mic fine but when I switched to Behringer with Bluetooth I could only hear the Media Source music playing. Why?

I think the webcam on the laptop has a mic and I am getting an echo from that mic when I plug in a handheld (when it was working).
Why is OBS not playing audio input capture mic through the Behringer with Bluetooth but it can play music?

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OK, I hard wire the headphone output to the Behringer and the audio input capture mic worked fine. The music and mic played through the Behringer.
Next I added the S500 and this worked too under Bluetooth however I had terrible echo.
Tomorrow I will try a bigger room and see if I can get some of the echo out.
 
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AaronD

Active Member
Again with the echo. Both of you will have the speaker and mic farther apart than an echo canceller can account for, and so you have to think like a live PA. Like a concert or church or something like that.

Mics pick up EVERYTHING, not just what you want them to, and that includes the speaker(s). The best way to solve that problem is to know and choose the mics so that the pickup pattern rejects sound from the direction that you're going to point towards the speaker(s). Design the *nulls* more than the forward direction.
Automatic-directional mics (which use an array of omni's and some processing) probably aren't good for this because the processing just looks for the strongest direction and "turns" itself towards that, period. It doesn't know the difference between anything, let alone a person or a speaker.

If you can't design the nulls, then you can do like I did with a hybrid meeting rig. (combined local and remote) I have a compressor on the local mic mix, with its side-chain connected to the remote audio mix, and VERY aggressive settings. When the remote is quiet, the compressor does nothing (how side-chain works), but when the remote starts talking, the compressor clamps down hard. Effectively drops out the local mics entirely so that the remote people don't hear their own echo.
I've also had some complaints from remote people about the audio dropping out, and there are two possible answers:
  1. That's how it has to work. When you talk, we drop out.
  2. You really need to keep yourself muted unless you're talking! You have lots of background noise that's triggering the dropout.
 
Ronald Cz

Ronald Cz

Member
I was going to try an ENG mic which does great for muting echo however I cannot get back to outputting audio input capture, I can only output to monitor the media source...why? What did I do different?
 
Ronald Cz

Ronald Cz

Member
Ok I got the OBS to work with audio input capture and media source playing by...going hard wire to the speaker not bluetooth. Then when I went back to blue tooth only the media source would play. [Important] I had no feed back echo when hardwired.

Why is bluetooth not working on mic input?
 
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AaronD

Active Member
Ronald Cz said:
Ok I got the OBS to work with audio input capture and media source playing by...going hard wire to the speaker not bluetooth. Then when I went back to blue tooth only the media source would play.

Why is bluetooth not working on mic input?
Click to expand...
BT and the wire are two different devices. You're sending everything to one and only some things to the other.

Ronald Cz said:
[Important] I had no feed back echo when hardwired.
Click to expand...
For now... That's the thing with acoustic feedback. Acoustics are always changing, so if you're close but not quite yet, and you move something physically, it can start then. People are also acoustic objects for this purpose, and they're *always* moving!

About the only way to see how close you are to acoustic feedback, is to turn up the volume at a time when it's okay to ring or echo a little bit (which it is depends on the round-trip delay), and turn it back down again to where it was. See how much you had to turn it up to make it start. The more "headroom" you have, the better.

A lot of live rigs are right on the edge. It takes some extra skill and constant monitoring to manage those. Been there, done that!
 
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