Studio Expansion microphones (Longer cable)

[SteffenBaierUK]

Hello @Kevinavcs ,

Welcome back to the Poly Community.

I would not call this a problem. The cable length is tested and evaluated for the requirements of the proposed installation space.

If you need a longer cable this post documents what is needed.

If this is not sufficient I can only ask you to contact Poly and create a feature request to get this officially added as a SKU

Please ensure to provide some feedback if this reply has helped you so other users can profit from your experience.

Best Regards

Steffen Baier

[Anonymous]

Hi all

Would agree a longer cable option would be a good idea. 7m, 10m and 15m should be options available. 24Ft (7m) is short if you have to go under floor to come up under a conference table.

Regards

Pat 

[Anonymous]

New to the Poly world here so my apologies for chiming in on a "resolved" issue.  I love the different responses from Poly on the subject with the main point being that they are right and we, the customers, are wrong.  "This is not a problem" is the type of response that makes me cringe because the customer has a need and the vendor refuses to fix it because they only want you to use their product in the way they intend, not in the way you need. 

I've been testing the x50 and x70 and regardless of what the sales people tell you, the microphones on these devices are not perfect for mid-size conference rooms that are rarely built with acoustics in mind.  There is a real need to put a microphone or two at the table and vendors like Cisco make long extension cables for their table microphones so that they can accommodate longer runs and allow the customer to dictate how the system will be used.  Now, the Poly xStudio devices have a 3.5mm audio input jack, but apparently that is only for connecting a DSP, though it could easily support a table microphone as well.  There is also the option of using USB Audio in the settings, but no information on what USB devices may be supported but it looks like that is for a headset or external processor as well.  The documentation is just not very good and I think Poly is seriously missing the point here and should either use a more standard technology to connect their external microphones, or help the customer get what they need rather than tell the customer that "this is not a problem".

[SteffenBaierUK]

Hello @RodrigoReyes 

Welcome to the Poly community.

Can I make you aware of the fact that I am just a participant like everyone one else in this community as outlined in detail in my Signature?

I am not a Poly spokesperson, and my replies just reflect the knowledge of the product that I have. My day job is with Poly and that is why I have the title displayed with my name.

From my own experience and dealing with real life cases we design our product with certain room size in mind and there may be limitations on what cables, for example, we can offer.

Based on these Limitations we offer the product but more than often users use these in a way that was not originally designed and are working around limitations which they end up with not the best experience for how the product was designed.

You may assume a product “should” be capable of a certain feature but, only the manufacturer if it knows if it is or it is not.

Stating Poly just means a community member (me) replied to a post and if you would like a discussion, I can only suggest you work with either our official support organization or work with Poly sales as they can ask for new features based on customer asks via the feature request program.

Posting in this community does not automatically make our product management aware and we have no idea if you would be interested in 1x single unit or a thousand.

To finish this off, the Solved status comes from the poster that simply made their own longer cable.

Best Regards

Steffen Baier

[Anonymous]

Thank you for your info, this helped me find a solution for a professional installation.

The "invisible wire", or ground is key. Basically what we had to do is run Cat6 from the Poly studio (under the TV) and to the table.

We were able to use a regular RJ12 (6 pins, straight through connection) at the camera, but the mic is the tricky part. The mic is the part that needs to be grounded, not the camera.  So now we get to the solution-

Use the provided Polycom cable (25 feet) to plug into the mic, and now you simply need to ground the other end o this cable. So the metal 'head' of the cable can be grounded if you had a metal grounded port to plug into (unlikely) so we just ran some wire to wrap around the head of the cable and then ground in the junction box under the table. This is difficult to do in a professional fashion, but  using some heat shrink it's not impossible.

The overall cable run was probably somewhere around 60 feet, and it works great! Hope this info helps somebody, and maybe Polycom will decide to make and sell 50/75 feet cables as it's a requirement to use an extra mic. (do they expect people to just run it straight from under the TV to the table?)

Cheers

[SteffenBaierUK]

[SteffenBaierUK]

UPDATE

from February 2023

Product ID	Long Description
2215-88019-001	Poly External Mic Cable Extender Kit - A pair of dongles that allow extending the Poly Expansion Mic with standard Ethernet cables of up to 30m. For use with Poly PN 2200-69631-001