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Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how that worked. Assuming the microphones were on the screen plane rather than the body, it wouldn't be able to tell the difference between "straight in front" and "straight behind".

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Straight in front is likely to be unobstructed while straight behind is likely to be obstructed by computer hardware. Therefore, straight in front is likely to have crisp sound while straight behind is likely to be muffled and/or distorted by reflections.

Yes, but that's not something you can beamform away with a planar array. Especially if your goal is to record what's going on behind the screen. You need something out of plane. Which they may have had! I don't know the details of the hardware.

As someone who made the mistake of putting a webcam cover over the tiny little microphone hole above the screen (it picks up very little besides impact noises now), it wouldn't be hard to have a mic hole facing in both directions to solve that problem

A single mic facing in both directions, or one mic next to the other but facing opposite directions, doesn't really help. You need separation between them in the direction of wave propagation (so in the front-back dimension of the laptop screen in this example) to tell which direction the sound is coming from.

They're in somewhat random locations, not symmetric and parallel as one might expect.

Sennheiser has a model that is mounted on ceiling. Haven’t seen this live.

https://www.sennheiser.com/en-us/catalog/products/meeting-an...

Our office has this. It works really well.

The attenuation provided by the tablet case / shell is quite significant. I bet they had some extra foam, or, something, to make it even stronger. So the "right behind" signal would be heard only if "right in front" is not readily drowning it.

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