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7 minute read
Summary
On this episode of Direct from the Expo, the Collab Collective's Craig Durr talks with James Rempel, VP of Products at Nureva Inc., at InfoComm 2025. Their conversation focuses on the evolution of Nureva’s audio technology and how it’s designed to simplify deployment in large, complex spaces. James offers a preview of the HDX product line and explores the real-world problems Nureva’s solutions are built to solve.
Their discussion covers:
- Solving Audio in Large Rooms: Why acoustics in big spaces remain difficult and how Nureva’s Microphone Mist technology addresses those issues.
- IT-Friendly Deployment: How simplicity in installation and room management benefits IT managers.
- Introducing the HDX Series: Expanded capabilities beyond conferencing, including media playback, voice amplification, and adaptive voice lift.
- Assistive Listening with Auracast: Built-in Bluetooth broadcast support for inclusive audio accessibility.
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Transcript
Craig Durr: Everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective, and I'm excited to bring you this edition of Direct from the Expo at InfoComm 2025. And I have a great guest here to talk about some really new, exciting products.
Jason Rempel, VP of product from Nureva. Glad you're here. How's it going?
James Rempel: Great. Great to be here, Craig.
Craig Durr: It's going again. This is actually a great show for you guys because I think you have some new products you're announcing. But before we dive into that, I want to introduce the world to Nureva to make sure they understand what you're doing. Tell me a little bit about Nureva to begin with.
James Rempel: Yeah, well, at Nureva, our mission is to make it easy to deploy high quality audio in big spaces. So we have a line of audio conferencing systems that use our own Microphone Mist technology. It covers large spaces with high quality microphone pickup while still being very easy to install and easy to manage.
Craig Durr: Well, help me with that. Let's talk about that. Why are large spaces still such a challenge for audio? I mean, I know it's a difficult space, but talk to me about these challenges and how you're helping overcome this in some ways.
James Rempel: Well, yeah, large spaces are difficult acoustically. With acoustics, the room is always part of the equation, so a lot of what we do with our technology is to try to manage the room as a variable. But big rooms, you know, they can be reverberant. They've got lots of different surfaces. The acoustics can change over time. A room will sound different when it's empty versus full of people.
Craig Durr: That's right. As well as furniture changes or something like that, too, right? So there's this constant adjusting taking place in those rooms as well.
James Rempel: Exactly. And what we find with our customers is that the traditional ways of outfitting large rooms with audio… they can be very complex, and they often require specialized expertise to set them up, tune them, and even maintain them over time. For IT managers, their teams are growing, but their budgets aren't growing and the demand for equipping rooms with high quality audio is growing. You always have remote participants in meetings these days.
Craig Durr: That's true. And the fact that these large rooms are getting used a lot more, not only for these townhall gatherings, flex meetings, but also for different types of spaces. You hit a really key thing though, you're very IT-centric in an AV-oriented world, and you've got some really great technology right now that you utilize to help solve these problems.
Why don't you talk to me a little bit about that?
James Rempel: Yeah, yeah. So our Microphone Mist technology is a very unique way of processing audio through microphone arrays, and it was developed in-house. It's fully patented, whereas beamforming microphones sort of focus on direction of arrival. And so you're really creating a pick up beam that extends out into the room. With Microphone Mist, our system generates a field of virtual microphones that cover the entire space. A virtual microphone is essentially a point in space where we can focus microphone pickup.
Craig Durr: Really. So to address those problems, you talked about furniture moves, more people in the room–this is like dynamically adjusting to how that room changes over time, right?
James Rempel: That's right. Our solutions auto calibrate over time, so they will kind of pick up on the way the sound reflects back into our microphones, and we'll adjust the calibration accordingly.
Craig Durr: And that technology obviously is core right now to some current products you have in the market, like the HDL line. What kind of feedback are customers giving you about HDL and how it's working?
James Rempel: I mean, they love the microphone pickup and the quality and clarity of the microphone pickup. And then they love the simplicity of installation, as well as the ease of management after it's been installed. One of the highest compliments we get paid is when an IT manager says, “Hey, your rooms are the quiet rooms.” And they don't mean acoustically, they mean, you know, there's no support calls. It just works.
Craig Durr: That's fantastic. I mean, we can't overlook… I've seen the installation of these devices before. It's super simple, right? The way that these align in the room, whether you have one device or two devices in the room. And the coverage is fantastic.
James Rempel: Yeah, that's been very successful.
Craig Durr: All right. I’m excited to talk about HDL. It's a great product line. But what I'm really excited about is that you're actually giving a preview of how you guys are solving some new, exciting use cases with a new product line called HDX, right?
James Rempel: That's right, that's right. And whereas our current product offering is really geared around audio conferencing, what we've been finding is that as we get into larger and larger rooms–our customers love audio conferencing and that's an important use case–but they want to do more. They want rich, speaker output for playing media, you know, program audio, playing movies, music, etc. They want technology to help people hear each other in large rooms. And then they're also looking for technology to help them provide assistive listening for people who have hearing challenges.
Craig Durr: But now, when you're talking about large rooms, you're talking about these new divisible rooms, you're talking about large rooms that are multi-purpose. Is that what we're talking about?
James Rempel: Yeah, we're talking about rooms up to about, 40ft by 60ft or 12 by 18 meters. So fairly large rooms. And the rooms we see the HDX series fitting into best would be large classrooms, so either kind of lecture style classrooms or collaborative classrooms. We see them going into larger meeting rooms, corporate training spaces, flex spaces, divisible rooms.
One of the trends we see in the corporate space is the desire to put audio technology into nontraditional meeting rooms or things that wouldn't be normally considered meeting rooms. So lunchrooms, flex spaces for doing town halls or having collaborative sessions.
Craig Durr: Well, you really hit some really interesting features. I want to double click on these more. How are you able to help amplify voice and help people be heard throughout the room?
James Rempel: So there's two key features that the HDX series supports. One is voice amplification, and that's where you can connect up to four wireless microphones that could be headset microphones, lavalier microphones, or handheld microphones. So a presenter or instructor with a wireless microphone, their voices will get amplified through the speakers… the HDX speakers in the room.
Another feature we're offering is… we call it adaptive voice lift. This is using the microphones built into the HDX system to pick up people talking in the room. And one of the big advantages of the microphone in this technology is that we know where people are in the room when they're talking. So with that information, we can intelligently and automatically route the speaker output to these speakers that are furthest away from where the person is talking.
Craig Durr: That solves a great problem there. I mean, that person might be presenting in the front. The people in the back get to hear much better, right? You also mentioned assisted hearing as well. And I thought I saw something Auracast. Is that right?
James Rempel: That's right. Yeah, so first of all, the HDX system can be easily connected to an existing assistive listening system, like a hearing loop or an infrared transmitter using the analog outputs. But it also has Auracast built in. Auracast is a one to many broadcast technology built on top of Bluetooth. So an IT manager can, using our app, set up an Auracast channel, name it, and then anyone coming into the room with or Auracast enabled hearing aids or earphones or EarPods can find the channel on their smartphone and connect to it. And then the audio gets piped directly into their ears.
Craig Durr: This is a great expansion of the use cases. I love it, and what I like about this, too, is you're keeping that DNA of being IT-friendly, right? These are very complex AV use cases right now, but what you're talking about is a way to roll this out that's very IT-centric, easy to deploy, easy to manage, it sounds like, right?
James Rempel: Yes, exactly. Exactly. One of the benefits of having a tightly integrated audio system… there's often complexity when you start layering these different audio use cases on top of one another. They often conflict. So we're building in features to make that seamless, using them together. A good example, we have a feature we call adaptive sound mode. So, as we know, with audio conferencing, lower frequencies are very difficult to echo cancel. So if you have a pure audio conferencing system, generally you tailor the speaker output to be a little thinner on the bass side. With the HDX system, because we know when the microphones are active, when the microphones aren't active, the subwoofer is on, the full bass output is active, as soon as someone joins a conference, we automatically drop off the subwoofer and tune back the bass so that you get clear speech audio and no echo leaks.
Craig Durr: This is fantastic. So this product has been announced. When do you think we might see it in the market?
James Rempel: Yes. So we're going to be doing live demonstrations of the product starting in the fall, and then we'll be shipping early 2026.
Craig Durr: This is exciting. I can't wait to see this out. Well, James, thank you so much for the update. I really appreciate it. I think this audience has a lot to look to. Where should they go if they want to learn more here or online?
James Rempel: Yes. Go to nureva.com. We have all sorts of information on our website and we're going to be adding to it as the year progresses.
Craig Durr: Fantastic. All right. Well, thank you so much. Everyone, this is another great update from InfoComm 2025. I appreciate the information you shared with Direct from the Expo. James, thank you again. And everyone, tune in later for some more updates from InfoComm.
