iZotope ANR-B Brings Commercial and Educational Sound Reinforcement to The University of Arizona

Large Campus Lecture Hall Uses ANR-B to Help Students Focus

Starting this past Fall, the University of Arizona began to teach classes of up to 1,200 students as part of a mass teaching project. These classes, located in a large performance hall on campus called Centennial Hall, tended to become a bit noisy. To further complicate things, the University decided to have instructors podcast their lectures in order to better serve the large number of students.

Centennial Hall at the University of Arizona - Photo courstesy of Gary Mackender, UITS

Podcasting these lectures had many academic purposes for the University. They wanted to allow students to just listen during class and review the podcast later for note taking as well as relieve instructors and teaching assistants from having to individually review material for students who missed class. These podcasts would also serve as an exam preparation tool. Students would now be able to review the recordings shortly after class.

When recording the podcasts, the main goal was to create a clear and intelligible file. This made the audio capture process extremely important. Excellent podcast audio quality would allow students to focus on the presented course material, but poor audio quality would demand that they focus on the intelligibility of the podcast and not content. The University turned to iZotope's ANR-B to 'clean up' the captured audio as it came in. The real time noise reduction provided by ANR-B allowed the podcasts to be uploaded for students following the class.

Gregory Anderson, Multimedia Technical Specialist for University of Arizona, described the reasons why ANR-B works for the U of A; "What we needed was a device which was easy to set up and would clean our audio to make the podcasts sound great. ANR-B does this and does this easily." Anderson went on to add, "Instructors are not always well versed when it comes to using audio equipment but ANR-B does the work for them."

Anderson is the technician responsible for installing and maintaining the podcast capture system. Thousands of students listen to the podcasts each week and iZotope is glad to support their academic pursuits.

ANR-B on the rack at Centennial Hall

Visit http://izotope.com/products/audio/anrb to learn more about ANR-B.