Using an Anker PowerConf speakerphone with a USB microphone

[Kennebunk_Larry]

Hello,

I am looking for a cheap solution to running a hybrid meeting with a 5 person board of directors and a small group of physically present participants, as well as remote participants. I am using an Anker PowerConf speakerphone for the Board and that works very well. I want a second microphone for the physically present members to use when they have questions for the Board. I have a cheap USB condenser microphone which also works well with Zoom but I can't use both at the same time because Zoom requires that I select either the speakerphone or the condenser mic to be my sole microphone. 

I have read about using multiple MXL USB microphones along with an audio interface but that is too expensive for our needs since we only will have these hybrid meetings once a year.

The speakerphone can be operated via bluetooth or USB cable. Thinking if I used the speakerphone via the cable, I could buy a powered USB hub with on/off switches for each port and could manually control which of my two audio inputs, i.e., speakerphone or condenser microphone, is the active one. I don't know if this can be part of my solution.

One manual solution which would require no additional purchases would be to use Zoom to select the speakerphone when a Board member is speaking and to select the condenser microphone when a participant in the room wants to speak. 

One more piece of information is that I am using a DSLR camera with a wide angle lens for my camera and a Bluetooth speaker so that everyone in the room can hear the remote participants.

Can anyone help me?

Thanks in advance for reading this.

Larry

[Kennebunk_Larry · Accepted solution]

SOLVED! It worked. I bought a 4 port USB hub with on/off switches for each port for $15 on Amazon. I plugged in my Anker PowerConf speakerphone via the USB cable which came with it and turned off Bluetooth on my laptop to insure the connection would be made through the cable. I also plugged in a CAD USB microphone in another port. I had turned off the microphone in my Logitech webcam. 

The cool thing we that as I switched between the two microphones, Zoom automatically detected that I had switched and put up a screen notification telling me what microphone I was now using😊

[Eliot]

great solution!

thanks,  eliot