Ask HN: Conference room audio using laptops

My company needs an audio solution for a large conference room where each person's laptop provides their individual audio without creating feedback to the central Polycom speaker at the far end of the table which is connected to MS Teams. We provided Covid separation between attendees by increasing the room and table size, but now the Polycom at the far end doesn't. pick up the audio from the far end, even though we have the satellite microphones connected. There are super fancy solutions available, but wow, they are expensive. Everyone already has a laptop connected to the same network and most people are looking at the presentation slides on the shared MS Teams meeting. However, if they activate. their microphone or speakers there is a major issue with feedback, echo, and repeated audio.

Seems like there should be an audio server that could collect the audio from everyone's laptop, pick the strongest source and cut out the broadcast sound from the incoming MS Teams audio