Ron we’re looking for an open industrial design for this space
Those were the words I heard echoing around the room when I did my site survey. At the time the area was being demo’d with the ceiling grid removed and the floors stripped down to the concrete.
‘There’s a bit of an echo’
Hard surfaces allow sound to bounce around. The more bounce the more noise which is bad enough for in person meetings but really bad for audio calls. The plan for this site was tile floors and an exposed concrete ceiling, plus one whole wall was glass windows. If you’ve ever been in a restaurant with this look (and there are some in Jax) you know it’s almost impossible to carry on a conversation. Cool look but lots of noise!
Customer Vision
My customer was looking for a space to do both in person and video conference calls, in this case WebEx. They also wanted to be able to divide the space into zones to allow for break out sessions. Each zone could operate independently with their own display and speakers or everything could be combined with any of the zones being the main source. In this design sound will follow video and everything is routable.
Our Design
For video distribution we used Crestron’s network based NVX solution controlled with a 3-series processor. This network-based design made it easy to route the video signal to the desired zones. The audio signal was broken out and fed into a BiAmp Tesira server. To help reduce bleed over between the zones we went with a heavy speaker count. You may be thinking, noisy space and lots of speakers? Actually, more speakers allows us to focus the sound where we want it while keeping the overall volume down.
And a little help from the architect
In a lot of AV installs we seem to be the last trade to the mix. Luckily with this project we got in early and were able to influence the overall design. While the hard floors and ceilings stayed the architect also added baffles, acoustical tiles and area rugs.
Great Project! Onto the next…