Duke Kunshan University is a world-class university that brings together educational resources from around the world, with an international team of virtual faculty members, and high-quality requirements for blended smart education. Located in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, Duke Kunshan University (DKU) is a 1,200-acre campus offering innovative academic programs and a diverse, inclusive culture to students from around the globe.
Duke Kunshan University offers courses taught by faculty from Duke University in the United States as well as other locations around the world. As a result, the university requires each classroom to provide an immersive online learning experience as if it were face-to-face. Audio equipment, in particular, not only needs to be clear in sound quality, stable in transmission, and easy to operate, but it also needs to fit seamlessly into different room types and teaching scenarios.
The audio video infrastructure for this blended education approach covers 22 buildings on campus, including 29 classrooms, 20 conference rooms, and a visitor center. A total of 116 TCC 2s serve as a unifying technology for every space.
The Zoom and Teams-compatible TCC 2 utilizes patented Dynamic Beamforming technology, which automatically tracks the position of speakers and switches between speakers in real time, ensuring that their voices are clearly captured. Teachers are able to move around and communicate freely with students while teaching, and the layout of desks and chairs in the classroom can be flexibly adjusted to greatly enhance the classroom experience. The microphone’s built-in 28 broadcast-quality microphone heads make the sound clear and natural, and remote teachers and students can also listen to the speakers clearly as if they were in the room.
In addition to classrooms, schools also place a high value on the design of audio systems in conference rooms. In teleconferencing, the seamless integration of audio and video is very important. In this project, TCC 2 integrates Biamp DSP and Sony PTZ camera tracking to synchronize the monitored speaker’s position to the camera, thus realizing real-time switching of the speaker’s footage, which makes the meeting more realistic, efficient, and immersive for remote users.
The Visitor Center is another highlight of this project. In order to provide excellent conditions for teachers and students to communicate, display and hold activities and exhibitions, the Visitor Center built by the school has a flexible layout and a bright and spacious space, with an area of 400 square meters and a height of 4.8 meters, in addition to the need for high-quality sound pickup, the site of the local sound reinforcement is also a very high demand. Three TCC 2s were installed in the Visitor Center, whose TruVoicelift acoustic enhancement feature delivers everyone’s speeches clearly to every corner, with natural, full sound quality and no distortion or delay.
The AV project, which took three years to design, deploy and complete, includes many types of products including Biamp DSP, Bose loudspeakers, and Crestron control systems.
Wan Li is the chief engineer and the university’s technical lead for the audio system design. His team adopted an all-digital and fully distributed AV-over-IP architecture for Duke Kunshan University. The TCC 2 can be seamlessly integrated into the campus network with all brands of audio equipment via Dante, allowing IT managers to monitor and control the communication, interaction, and control of various devices on campus in real time via cell phones, tablets or computers.
During the implementation of the project, Sennheiser’s technical engineers went to Duke Kunshan University several times to carry out on-site investigation and debugging work room by room to ensure that the installation position and angle of each TCC 2 could achieve the optimal effect and realize the best voice clarity.
