Cary Institute conference rooms

10/05/2019

Designed and installed AV systems in a suite of three conference rooms for Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.

The image below, from my first site survey, illustrates some of the design challenges; glass walls in highly reverberant rooms and large, low-hanging, acoustically opaque light fixtures.

As the furniture arrangement is flexible, and the client did not want microphones on the tables, we used beam-forming ceiling mics. However, we felt that a square ceiling tile form factor would look horrible with the round light fixtures so went the the ClearOne BFM2 which is rectangular. For speakers we used the JBL Control 62P satellites with the subwoofers above the lights. All the audio transducers were kept as low as feasible to avoid reflected sound.

The low lighting fixtures also made video projection impossible, and even installing a display large enough for the biggest room was compromised. Atlona was chosen for wireless presentation as it is platform agnostic and does not require any non-native software for the presenter. The video switching for laptop inputs and PTZ cameras for soft-codec tele-conferencing are also by Atlona. In addition, there is an IP video feed from the auditorium, in another building on campus, for live event overflow.

With all the Atlona equipment, their Velocity system was the obvious choice for the AV touch panel control. This was the first ever project to control audio DSP from this platform. Yes, there were a few hiccups (hyphens are illegal characters!).

Here is an image from Cary Institute showing the largest of the rooms in use. The satellite speakers and microphones are all at the same height as the bottom of the light fixtures, though the image distorts this.