Leon Brings Semi-Custom Speakers to Telepresence

You can’t just throw a couple of speakers in with a TV and camera and call it a videoconferencing system. The audio should match the application, just as it would for surround sound or an outdoor concert.

Leon Speakers, known for being that company that customizes speakers for any type of residential environment, is now applying its custom touch to boardrooms and serious home offices with the new Horizon Interactive Series speakers.

Leon has worked on telepresence projects for about 10 years but every job was a one-off. The rising popularity of videoconferencing, however, spurred Leon to launch an “official” line of speakers for the cause.

“We saw a need to formalize the line because there are some commonalities between jobs,” says marketing director Ethan Kaplan. “To treat each one as custom didn’t really make sense.”

Those “commonalities” include at least one obvious feature: a nook for a video camera, smack dab in the middle of the speaker.

But Leon’s biggest contribution revolves around the audio properties of the speakers, which are “vocally optimized” to be “very present in the vocal range,” says Kaplan.

And depending on the width of the speakers, they present a “very wide sound stage” to reflect “different people in different places.”

While accommodating the vocal range, however, Leon’s speakers do not sacrifice “high-impact presentations” that include streaming media.

To support both applications, Leon employs a Peerless HDS woofer and a Morel MDT 29 – “a magic tweeter that is super smooth, crisp and natural sounding with great power handling,” says Kaplan. “That pairing accommodates the gamut.”

The highest-end Horizon model is a 6-3-1 design featuring a 6-inch Peerless woofer paired with a 3-inch Peerless mid-range and the Morel tweeter.

What Makes a Good Telepresence Speaker?

A good set of teleconferencing speakers isn’t all about the audio properties, Kaplan will tell you.

For example, one of the first lessons learned was all about mechanics. Leon was approached during Infocomm 2006 by a “premier” telepresence company seeking a loudspeaker partner. From there, Leon worked with designers for about seven months to develop a design that was “efficient from an audio standpoint as well as an installation standpoint,” Kaplan recalls. “When you walk into a fortune 100 company, you get an hour of time.”

The whole telepresence system, he says, “had to be installed in a day.”

Thus, the early “telepresence speakers” generally snapped onto a display via fixtures equivalent to rack-mount ears. My how things change.

Today, Leon speakers still attach to the display but in a much more elegant fashion. The company makes custom brackets to mesh with the display and the décor – just as it does in the residential realm.

“The way they mount in the system always varies,” Kaplan says. “Sometimes they’re on these crazy articulated lifts, or have doors that open and close so the system disappears.”

And depending on the location of the screen in a room, Leon may angle a speaker’s baffle up or down.
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Kaplan explains that Leon competes with a variety of speaker types in the telepresence business, including in-ceiling speakers. But the company wouldn’t think of separating the display and the audio that way.

“In our mind, there’s a huge benefit of attaching the audio experience with the video – literally, attaching,” Kaplan says.

In fact, Leon doesn’t consider itself a speaker manufacturer per se. “We’re an ‘audio for video’ company,” according to Kaplan, who notes that the fusion of sound with video is integral in both home theater and videoconferencing applications.

Speaking of the home, Kaplan sees the telepresence trend migrating there: “Executives are doing business at home, catching up on China time or India time. We’re seeing those [telepresence systems] coming into the personal space.”

Read Press Release: Leon Speakers Intros Horizon Speakers for Videoconferencing, Telepresence