What Is a DSP and Why Does Your Meeting Room Need One?
- Chris Gore
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
What is a DSP and does your meeting room need one? This plain English guide covers what a digital signal processor does and when you need it.
Chris Gore \ Updated 2026
You have bought the ceiling microphones. You have the right speakers. The camera tracks speakers automatically. And yet somehow, remote participants are still hearing an echo of their own voices, or the air conditioning keeps bleeding into the call, or the quiet person at the far end of the table sounds like they are calling from a different country.
The missing piece in most of these situations is a DSP. Digital Signal Processor. It is the invisible component that sits between the microphones and the speakers and does the work that makes a meeting room actually sound like a professional environment rather than a conference call from someone's kitchen. Here is what it does, why it matters, and whether your room needs one.
What a DSP Actually Does
Think of a DSP as the brain of the room's audio system. Every sound that a microphone picks up passes through it before it goes anywhere else. The DSP processes that audio in real time, applying a set of algorithms that clean up the signal, remove unwanted noise, balance levels and route the output to wherever it needs to go.
In a meeting room without any DSP, what the microphone captures is what the call receives. Every keyboard tap. Every air conditioning rumble. Every scrape of a chair. The echo of the loudspeaker fed back into the mic. All of it. In a room with a properly commissioned DSP, the call receives only what it should: clear, balanced speech from every participant in the room.
Acoustic Echo Cancellation
This is the one most people notice when it goes wrong. When someone on the far end of a call hears their own voice echoed back at them a fraction of a second later, that is an acoustic echo problem. The DSP compares the speaker output with the microphone input and subtracts the speaker signal before it goes back out. Done well, remote participants hear nothing but the room. Done badly or not done at all, the call is almost unusable.
Noise Reduction
HVAC systems. Keyboards. Air conditioning units. Paper rustling. A meeting room is full of sounds that have nothing to do with the meeting but that a raw microphone signal picks up faithfully. DSP noise reduction identifies and filters these sounds in real time, passing speech through while attenuating the background. The result is a cleaner signal without any manual adjustment from anyone in the room.
Automatic Gain Control
Different people speak at very different volumes. Without automatic gain control, the quiet person at the end of the table is barely audible on the call while the loud person nearest the microphone dominates the audio. AGC continuously adjusts the level of each microphone channel so that every voice reaches the far end at roughly the same level, regardless of how quietly or loudly the person speaks.
Automatic Mixing and Gating
In a room with multiple microphones, not all of them should be active at the same time. A microphone near a noisy air vent that is not near any speaker should not be feeding audio to the call. Gating means the DSP selectively activates microphones when speech is detected on them and deactivates them when it is not. Automatic mixing combines the active microphone signals into a clean output, ensuring no double-pickup or phasing issues between adjacent microphones.
Equalisation and Room Tuning
Every room sounds different. Hard surfaces reflect sound. Soft furnishings absorb it. A room with glass walls and a concrete floor has completely different acoustic properties from a boardroom with carpet and acoustic panels. Equalisation in the DSP allows the audio to be tuned specifically for the room's acoustic character, compensating for resonances and improving intelligibility throughout the space.
What do the experts have to say?
Without DSP vs With DSP
The difference between a room with a properly commissioned DSP and one without is not subtle. It is the difference between a meeting where people can focus on the conversation and one where someone is constantly asking others to repeat themselves, or turning down the call volume because the echo is distracting, or muting their microphone because their local speaker is feeding back.
We spent time at the Shure showroom in London going through exactly this. Shure's Andrew demonstrated what happens when you turn off the DSP processing and what happens when you turn it back on. The improvement is immediate and significant. You do not need to be an audio engineer to hear it. If you want to understand more about what professional microphone setup looks like, read our guide on the Sennheiser vs Shure microphone comparison.
Does Your Meeting Room Actually Need a Dedicated DSP?
You probably do need a dedicated DSP if
• The room has multiple ceiling or table microphones that need to be managed together
• It is a boardroom or large meeting room with ten or more participants
• Hard surfaces — glass walls, marble tables, concrete floors — are creating echo or reverberation
• Executive or client-facing meetings make poor audio quality unacceptable
• Significant background noise sources like HVAC systems are present
• The room has separate speaker and microphone systems rather than an all-in-one bar
You might not need a dedicated DSP if
• The room uses a modern all-in-one video bar with DSP built in — Logitech Rally Bar, Neat Bar Pro and others all include integrated processing
• It is a small huddle room for four to six people with a straightforward setup
• Shure IntelliMix is already built into the microphones and access points, distributing the DSP processing across the hardware
• The room is used occasionally for low-stakes internal meetings
The key question is whether the audio processing needs to happen in a central dedicated unit or whether it is already handled adequately by the hardware in the room. If you are not sure, our guide to the four non-negotiable things every conference room needs is worth reading before making any decisions.
The DSP Options Worth Knowing About
Shure IntelliMix P300
The Shure IntelliMix P300 is the audio conferencing processor that pairs with Shure's MXA ceiling mic arrays. It provides the full IntelliMix suite — acoustic echo cancellation, noise reduction, automatic mixing, automatic gain control — in a dedicated unit certified for Microsoft Teams and Zoom. The Intellimix Room Kit bundles the P300 with the microphones, speakers, cabling and compute, giving everything needed to build a complete professional meeting room audio system in a single package. For most medium-sized boardrooms, this is the cleanest solution.
QSC Q-SYS
Q-SYS is a scalable software-based AV and control platform that includes powerful DSP capability. It is particularly well suited to multi-room environments where central management of multiple spaces is required, and to larger venues where the audio routing requirements are complex. Q-SYS allows remote monitoring and management of the DSP settings across every connected room, making it a natural fit for organisations with SPORTrack monitoring in place.
Biamp Tesira
Biamp Tesira is an enterprise-grade DSP platform used in high-end boardrooms, auditoriums and large-format meeting environments. It is highly configurable and capable of handling complex audio routing, multiple zones and bespoke tuning requirements. For organisations with a dedicated AV infrastructure and complex audio needs, Biamp is the professional benchmark.
The right DSP for a room depends on the room size, the microphone and speaker setup, the number of rooms to be managed, and the complexity of the audio routing requirements. SPOR Group specifies DSP as part of every professional AV installation — not as an optional extra. For a full picture of what this adds to a room's cost, read our 2026 meeting room AV cost guide.
READY TO GET STARTED?
Get a price for your meeting rooms — in minutes
Fill out a short form — tell us your room sizes, headcount and platform.
We'll come back to you with exactly what we'd recommend and why, with a price guide included.
No jargon. No pushy sales calls. Just a straight answer.
TAKES 2–3 minutes | INCLUDES Full price guide | COST Completely free |
Why Commissioning Matters as Much as the Hardware
A DSP that is installed but not commissioned is not doing its job. The acoustic echo cancellation needs to be calibrated to the specific speaker and microphone positions in the room. The noise reduction needs to be tuned to the specific background noise profile of the space. The gain structure needs to be set correctly for the microphones in use. None of this happens automatically by plugging the unit in.
SPOR Group commissions every DSP installation properly. Every setting is tuned to the specific room before handover. Every parameter is verified. And every installation is backed by SPORTrack, which monitors the audio system in real time so that changes in performance are caught before they affect a meeting. The rooms we delivered for Masdar and the NFL both include properly commissioned DSP as part of the complete audio system.
Related Posts
Comments