SALT LAKE CITY, UT — General Communications of Draper, UT worked with the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce to expand and update the AV systems in its executive conference and training rooms. With an eye toward future expansion, the AV company centered the new sound reinforcement equipment on a pair of Symetrix Solus 16 open-architecture, fixed-I/O signal processors.
More details from Symetrix (www.symetrix.co):
The nearly 8,000 businesses statewide that are members of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commers provide about half of Utah’s 1,000,000 jobs. The chamber’s headquarters is a busy place, hosting meetings, training sessions and seminars every day.
“Of course, a chamber of commerce is all about helping member businesses make money, but, like every other chamber of commerce, the Salt Lake Chamber needs to use their financial resources judiciously,” noted Ingolf de Jong, president of General Communications. “As a result, the budget was exceptionally tight.”
The Salt Lake Chamber asked de Jong and General Communications system engineer Brandon Gramse to update the AV system in the executive conference room, which subdivides into two separate rooms, and to add infrastructure to a larger training room that would allow it to subdivide into four smaller rooms.
“Like other clients that have existing equipment, they hoped we would be able to keep costs down by reusing the existing equipment,” said de Jong. “However, using the existing equipment, we ran into incompatibility issues.”
To make the Salt Lake Chamber future-proof and still stay within budget, Gramse based the design on Symetrix’ new Solus 16 processor. The Solus 16 offers powerful open-architecture DSP design within a fixed sixteen-input, eight-output frame. The fixed I/O makes the Solus 16 affordable.
The setup itself is not unlike a small conference center, with the requisite flexibility to accommodate a wide range of events. The systems for the executive conference room and the training rooms are entirely separate, and each gets its own Symetrix Solus 16.
Two large Crestron touch panels and four smaller Crestron touch panels are located in each subdivided space (six total), and they communicate with the Solus 16 audio processors and the Kramer VP-4x4k video matrix switchers to control audio and video source routing out to ceiling-mounted projectors and LCD displays.
The executive conference room can be divided into two conference rooms, and in addition to VGA inputs, each contain one owner-furnished Blu-ray player, whereas the training rooms each contain four owner-furnished Blu-ray players — one for each subdivided room.
Ceiling speakers powered by QSC amplifiers are configured to deliver clear, intelligible audio. The executive conference room takes four microphone inputs and two stereo line-level inputs, using only half of the Solus 16’s inputs. The training rooms require one stereo input per subdivision, plus two microphone inputs, for a total of ten.
“The Salt Lake Chamber wanted the new system to accommodate future conversion of adjacent office space into meeting space,” said Gramse. “The two Solus 16s have plenty of available inputs and outputs for those expansions. It would be simple to collapse the stereo inputs into mono inputs if they need it,” he added. “In addition, the Solus 16’s open-architecture will allow us to program the requisite functionality for future systems without limitation.”
Chamber COO Heidi Walker credited General Communications for providing “excellent design, installation, and support for our facility. This system allows us to host people from around the world, effectively communicating the chamber message.”
