Every teacher knows the student who asks what page we're on thirty seconds after you said it. Sometimes that's attention. Often it's acoustics.
A classroom soundfield system — the industry sometimes calls it a classroom audio distribution system, or voice lift — doesn't make a teacher louder. It distributes the teacher's voice evenly across the room so that the back corner receives roughly what the front row receives. The technical term for what you're buying is speech intelligibility, and it is a different thing from volume.
The Lightspeed Redcat classroom soundfield system is the version of this most Australian schools end up looking at, largely because it asks the least of the building. Here are five things worth knowing before you cost it.
1. One unit covers a whole teaching space. The Redcat's flat-panel speaker uses exciter technology rather than a conventional cone driver, spreading 15 watts RMS across a room of up to 110 m². Frequency response runs 110 Hz to 18 kHz, which is tuned for speech rather than music. In practice that means even coverage rather than a loud spot near the speaker and a quiet one at the back.
2. There is genuinely nothing to install. This is the reason it suits retrofits. The Redcat sits on a table or a shelf and plugs into a standard power point — 24 V DC via its supply. No ceiling tiles, no cable runs, no work order, no waiting for a facilities window in the holidays. If your rooms are older, or heritage-listed, or you simply don't want to open a ceiling, this is the difference between a project and a purchase.
3. Pairing is one gesture. Point the Clearmike wearable microphone at the Redcat and the two connect. That sounds like a small thing until you're a specialist teacher moving through four rooms in a day, or a school sharing one system across a faculty. The wireless runs on 1.9 GHz Access Technology, which sits outside the Wi-Fi bands — worth knowing if your IT team has opinions about anything new joining the network.
4. The microphone is designed to be forgotten. The Clearmike is a 37 g pendant worn on an earbud lanyard with a magnetic clasp. It runs up to eight hours on a charge, which covers a school day, and recharges either in its cradle or over USB-C. It has an e-paper display, volume controls, a mute button, an alert button and two buttons you can programme. Total harmonic distortion is under 1%, which is the spec that matters for a voice at the back of a room.
5. It expands, so the first purchase isn't the last decision. Add a Sharemike or Qball and student answers reach the whole class, which changes what discussion is possible in a large room. Add a Media Connector and computer, panel and mobile audio come through the same speaker. Connect the Redcat to a computer by USB and you get two-way audio, so a student at home hears the live classroom rather than whatever a laptop microphone at the front can pick up. There is also an optional battery for outdoor and off-site teaching, sold separately.
How to work out whether you need one. Stand at the back of your room while a colleague teaches from the front. If you're working to follow it, your students are too — and they have less vocabulary and less context to fill in the gaps with than you do. Then check the room: hard surfaces, high ceilings, glass, open-plan connections to neighbouring spaces, or a class size that has crept up all make it worse. If more than one of those is true, a soundfield system is doing something no seating plan will.
Physical dimensions, if you're scoping a shelf: 406 × 55 × 241 mm, 1.6 kg.
Schools, TAFEs and government institutions can order on purchase order, and we'll quote a multi-room rollout.