Signal Distribution: AMEC Conference and Training Rooms
Sep 16, 2014 7:27 PM
Simplicity was the key to AMEC’s new audio/video system in its Houston oil and gas office. The consultant, engineering, and project management company serves customers in the oil and gas, minerals and metals, clean energy, and environment and infrastructure markets. According to Tom Austin of Industrial Audio/Video (IAV), the local integrator who installed the system, the executives at AMEC wanted to outfit its conference rooms and training rooms with easy-to-use equipment that allowed the use of both HDMI and VGA. They wanted to get presentations up on the screen in two easy steps: 1. hook up a laptop, and 2. a picture appears.
IAV designed sleek, no-nonsense systems for three different parts of the building: the training room, the executive conference room, and 23 smaller conference/training rooms. Each room had a simple system that accessed the necessary digital technology with the push of a single button. There was no adjusting of projectors, resizing screens, or poor-quality images on the screens.
The primary training room, which seats about 30 people, inherited equipment from the executive conference room. It included a tablet for annotating, two ceiling-mounted projectors, and Kramer Electronics VGA and HDMI cables within a custom podium.
Twenty three smaller conference/training rooms were outfitted with identical systems that included either a Kramer Electronics VP-434 or VP-435 scaler along with Kramer VGA and HDMI cables. In each room, the Kramer scaler converts the selected video signal to a computer graphics or HDTV output resolution and outputs an HDMI signal, which is transmitted to the projector using Cat-5 cabling. Because the cabling already existed in most of the rooms, it saved the time and money of rewiring. The VP-434 and VP-435 scalers, along with a Cat-5 transmitter, switcher, and all of the VGA and HDMI cables are housed under the conference room tables for a clutter-free space. A simple eight-button wall controller with easy-to-understand functions controls each system.
The AMEC executive conference room also features a 25ft. conference table with hidden systems. IAV incorporated an under-the- table mounted Kramer Electronics autosensing VP-435 Pro- Scale digital scaler to scale HDMI and VGA signals to a computer graphics output resolution. The room also uses a Kramer FC-46 audio de-embedder for audioconferencing.
It took about eight months to complete the installation at the pace of about three or four rooms each week.
