Audio
AEC
Also called: Acoustic Echo Cancellation
Processing that subtracts the room's own loudspeaker output from the microphone signal so remote participants do not hear their own voices echoed back.
AEC works by comparing what the system is sending to the speakers against what the microphones pick up, then removing the overlap. It is the single most important process in a conference room, and the most easily broken: if the AEC reference is routed from the wrong point in the signal chain, echo returns even though the feature is 'on'.
AEC also has physical limits. Excessive reverberation, hard parallel surfaces, or loudspeakers aimed into the microphone pickup pattern will defeat it no matter how good the DSP is. When a room echoes after correct configuration, the fix is acoustic treatment and speaker aiming, not more processing.
Related terms
- DSP
- The processor that mixes, routes, and conditions every audio signal in a room — gating microphones, cancelling echo, and applying EQ and limiting before audio reaches the amplifier or far end.
- RT60
- The time in seconds for sound in a room to decay by 60 dB — the standard measure of how reverberant a space is and how intelligible speech will be in it.
- Beamforming Microphone Array
- A microphone with many capsules whose outputs are combined electronically to steer narrow pickup 'beams' toward talkers while rejecting off-axis noise.
More Audio terms
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