A video bar is the sensible answer for a small room. Everything the room needs to see, hear
and be heard sits in one housing under the display, with one power lead and one network cable,
and there is no PC to manage. For a huddle room or a four-to-six person meeting room that is
both cheaper and more reliable than assembling the equivalent from parts.
The A40's camera arrangement is the part worth explaining, because it is not the single
wide-angle lens most bars use. There are two 48 megapixel lenses, each with a 78 degree field of
view, and the images they capture are combined to form a 120 degree frame. Two things follow from
that. First, the combined image has a higher pixel count than one sensor would provide, and
Yealink cite the resulting clearer image quality - which matters at distance, where a
lower-resolution wide shot turns the far side of the table into indistinct shapes. Second, two
78 degree lenses stitched together produce a much flatter, more natural 120 degree view than a
single 120 degree lens, which would bow straight lines and stretch anyone near the edge.
The audio is arranged to match. An eight-element MEMS microphone array picks up the room and,
because it is an array rather than a single microphone, it can determine which direction speech
is arriving from - which is what allows the camera to frame the person talking and what lets the
bar suppress noise coming from elsewhere. Two stereo speakers are built in, so a small room
needs no separate soundbar. For a room shaped awkwardly, or slightly larger than the bar's
natural coverage, two expansion microphones can be added on the table.
Yealink position the A40 as leveraging industry-leading AI for hybrid meetings, which in
practice means the framing and speaker tracking happen automatically rather than needing an
operator. Ease of deployment is the other stated design goal, and it is a real one: a bar that
mounts under a display and comes up on the network is a very different installation job from a
room built out of components.
Two specification notes. The A40-031 is a bundle, and it is supplied with the CTP25
conferencing touch panel - the table console people use to join and control a meeting, which is
worth having rather than driving the bar by remote. And the platform matters: Yealink build
these for Microsoft Teams Rooms and for other services, so which one the room runs determines
the software build and any per-room licence, and should be settled before ordering.