Sneak Peek: An Audiovisual Engineer’s Notes

Here’s the thing: we’re pretty geeked out by the technology our engineers get to use as they create custom IT and audiovisual solutions for our customers — so much so that we snuck in and snagged part of their to-do list for a recent project. Shhh!

This project was for a multi-million dollar, nationwide corporate customer with multiple locations in nearly every state in the U.S., so we wanted a sneak peek at the exciting elements of this huge project.

The project was a tear-out and re-build of existing conference rooms in many of the locations, with the goal of helping the company utilize videoconferencing for better remote collaboration between their employees, leadership, vendors and customers no matter where everyone was located. One of the big requests was that the experience in each conference room be the same as the others, and feel authentic with crisp sounds and easy-to-use, dynamic technology … they really wanted to feel like they were in the same room despite being spread out in their offices across the country.

The leadership at this company really wanted to use technology to feel like they were all working as one team together. And with the exciting audiovisual technology available, working together across thousands of miles is an easy task — you just need to have the right design architects and engineers to achieve the ideal solution. Trinity Dynamics features a team of AVIXA-certified engineers who can engineer custom solutions using the latest technology in advanced applications, so let’s take a peek at their notes for this project:

5×5 Planar LED Video Wall

This wall featured the newly released Planar TVF 1.5mm LED product. This product contained simple to use data and power distribution that is built into each LED panel. The 5 x 5 Panel system reached an exact resolution of 1920 x 1080 which meant we did not need to use any outboard scaling.

Cisco SX-80 and Touch 10 Videoconferencing Equipment

The customer’s design requirement was to use a Cisco SX-80 and Touch 10 as the primary video source, as well as being the single point of control for all hardware. This approach was implemented by our customer’s internal support team which utilized a custom GUI on the Touch 10 coupled with the use of a pair of Raspberry PI 3 units to achieve the complete control solution for the room.

QSC Q-Sys Audio Solution

The audio DSP for this space was upgraded to the Q-Sys based solution that included a Core 510i and a Core 110f. Due to the flexibility of the Core processors as well as their onboard control logic capabilities, these two units were able to simplify the commands between the Core processors and the Raspberry Pi 3 for control purposes.

Shure TableTop & Ceiling Button Microphones

The original design contained 10 Shure MX393 tabletop microphones which were not mounted to the table. This allowed for the microphones to be moved to positions that were not optimal for audio pick up during meetings. These 10 units were replaced with 10 Shure MX396-Tri microphones and connected to the Core 510i. This allowed for complete flexibility in terms of auto-mixing and controlling the number of open mics. 8 Shure MX395 button ceiling microphones were added to pick up areas off to the side of the conference table to supplement the MX396 units.

Tannoy ceiling speakers

Upgraded the room from four 6” ceiling speakers to 7-8” Dual Concentric, 8 ohm Tannoy ceiling speakers for a more even distribution of the audio throughout the room. Speakers are driven with QSC SPA2-200 amplifier in pairs.