At a glance
- Client: SOMA Eats, a cafe and bottle shop, built out through general contractor Novo Construction
- Location: Rincon Center, 121 Spear Street, San Francisco, California
- Scope: Dining room audio on six Sonance IS4 C speakers, a front-wall Samsung Frame TV, an NEC NP-PA653UL projector and 130-inch Da-Lite screen for events, and a second NEC projector for the menu
- Platform: Crestron MPC3-302-B control, Biamp Nexia PM audio processing, Lab Gruppen amplification
The situation
Rincon Center is the former Rincon Annex post office in San Francisco, a Streamline Moderne landmark on the National Register of Historic Places. SOMA Eats, a cafe and bottle shop, took a space inside it.
Novo Construction ran the buildout and brought us in for the AV. The brief covered four jobs in one open room. The dining room needed background music. The front wall needed a TV. The cafe wanted to host events, so it needed a projector, a large screen and a wireless handheld microphone. And the menu itself was to be projected rather than printed.
Staff had to run all of it from one wall panel between orders. That is the usual shape of restaurant and hospitality AV: several systems, no AV person on shift.
What made a landmark building hard to wire?
The ceiling is high. Our reflected ceiling plan puts the bottom of the beams at a little over 16 feet, and the proposal carried a scissor lift rental to reach it. Both projectors hang from that structure on Chief ceiling mounts with extension columns.
The room had little flat ceiling to work with. Speakers, the screen case and the subwoofer all had to fit into a soffit rather than an open tile grid.
The east wall had to do two jobs. It holds the Samsung Frame TV for everyday use, and it is also where the event image needed to land. There was no second wall to give the screen.
Back-of-house space was tight. Anything that did not fit in the employee room would have ended up in the dining room.
The AV was also one trade inside a general contractor's schedule. Our scope set on-site hours of 6am to 3pm and required the other trades' power and data to be finished before we arrived.
How we designed it
Our AV design and engineering team split the room into three zones in the drawings: the restaurant ceiling, the restaurant front wall and the employee room rack. Every device and cable run in the wire list is assigned to one of them.
Audio you hear but don't see
Six Sonance IS4 C Invisible Series planar speakers mount flush under the soffit, facing down into the dining room. A Sonance VP10SUB subwoofer sits in the face of the soffit. Two Sonance VP66 LCR in-wall speakers flank the front wall at 96 inches above the floor. This is Sonance architectural audio chosen to keep grilles out of the historic interior.
A Biamp Nexia PM processor handles the audio, with an event input set up in its configuration file. Two Lab Gruppen amplifiers, an E 2:2 and a LUCIA 120/2, drive the speakers. A Shure SLX24/SM58 handheld covers speeches and panels, with its antennas run out of the rack on Shure UA806 cables.
A screen that drops in front of the TV
The event screen is a Da-Lite 130-inch Tensioned Advantage Electrol, recessed in the soffit and centered on the east wall. It lowers in front of the Samsung Frame TV when there is an event and disappears when there isn't. It is a tensioned projection screen, which stays flat at that size.
An NEC NP-PA653UL laser projector with an NP40ZL lens throws onto it from a Chief RPAU mount. That setup turns the dining room into a multipurpose event space after hours.
A projected menu
Change order 1 added a second NEC NP-PA653UL with an NP40ZL lens as a projected menu board. It hangs on its own Chief RPAU mount, CMA-110 plate and CMS0203 column. Bravo Media handled the custom projection mapping. It works as a form of digital signage that needs no screen on the wall.
Switching and control
A Crestron HD-MD4X2-4K-E switcher in the rack routes sources to the event projector and the front-wall TV. Two Crestron HD-EXT3-C HDBaseT extender sets carry video from the rack to each display. A Crestron DM-TX-4K-100-C-1G-B-T wall plate takes a local HDMI input and sends it to a DM-RMC-4K-SCALER-C receiver.
A Crestron MPC3-302-B on the wall runs the room. Its backlit buttons cover cable TV, wireless presentation, HDMI and wall speakers, and its knob sets the volume. The Crestron program behind those buttons was written for this room as part of our control and DSP programming service.
The design moved between the review drawings and the final pick list. The review set showed Sonance VP62 LCR speakers and a VSUB10 subwoofer; the final pick list and wiring schematic use VP66 LCR speakers and a VP10SUB. An Atlona AT-HDDA-2 distribution amplifier in the proposal did not carry through to the pick list.
Equipment by zone
| Zone | Display | Audio | Control and signal | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurant ceiling | NEC NP-PA653UL projector, Da-Lite 130-inch Tensioned Advantage Electrol screen | 6 × Sonance IS4 C, Sonance VP10SUB | Crestron HD-EXT3-C receiver at the projector | Screen recessed in the soffit |
| Restaurant front wall | Samsung UN65LS003AFXZA 65-inch Frame TV | 2 × Sonance VP66 LCR | Crestron HD-EXT3-C receiver at the TV | Screen lowers in front of the TV for events |
| Menu wall | Second NEC NP-PA653UL projector | — | — | Added by change order, projection mapping by Bravo Media |
| Wall panel location | — | — | Crestron MPC3-302-B, DM-TX-4K-100-C-1G-B-T wall plate | One panel for the whole room |
| Employee room rack | — | Biamp Nexia PM, Lab Gruppen E 2:2 and LUCIA 120/2, Shure SLX24/SM58 | Crestron HD-MD4X2-4K-E, Cisco SG110D-08HP | Middle Atlantic EWR-12-17 wall rack |
Parts list
| Function | Model | Qty |
|---|---|---|
| Dining room ceiling speakers | Sonance IS4 C | 6 |
| Front wall in-wall speakers | Sonance VP66 LCR | 2 |
| In-wall subwoofer | Sonance VP10SUB | 1 |
| Audio processor | Biamp Nexia PM | 1 |
| Amplifiers | Lab Gruppen E 2:2 and Lab Gruppen LUCIA 120/2 | 1 each |
| Wireless handheld microphone | Shure SLX24/SM58 | 1 |
| Antenna cables | Shure UA806 | 2 |
| Laser projectors (event screen and menu) | NEC NP-PA653UL with NP40ZL lens | 2 |
| Projector mounts | Chief RPAU with Chief CMA-110 ceiling plate | 2 each |
| Projector extension columns | Chief CMS0203 and Chief CMS0305 | 1 each |
| Event screen | Da-Lite 21811LS Tensioned Advantage Electrol, 130-inch | 1 |
| Front wall TV | Samsung UN65LS003AFXZA | 1 |
| TV wall mount | Chief LTM1U | 1 |
| Control processor and wall panel | Crestron MPC3-302-B | 1 |
| 4x2 HDMI switcher | Crestron HD-MD4X2-4K-E | 1 |
| HDBaseT extender sets | Crestron HD-EXT3-C-W system | 2 |
| Wall plate transmitter and receiver | Crestron DM-TX-4K-100-C-1G-B-T and DM-RMC-4K-SCALER-C | 1 each |
| PoE network switch | Cisco SG110D-08HP | 1 |
| Wall rack | Middle Atlantic EWR-12-17 | 1 |
| Rack power | Furman D10-PFP | 1 |
| Cabling | Liberty Cat6 plenum, Liberty 18/2 plenum speaker cable, Liberty 22/1P plenum control cable | 900 ft, 100 ft, 200 ft |
Network and IT
The AV runs on its own small network. A Cisco SG110D-08HP 8-port gigabit switch with PoE sits in the employee room rack, and it powers the Crestron MPC3-302-B over the same cable that carries its control traffic.
The Biamp Nexia PM, the Crestron HD-MD4X2-4K-E, the MPC3-302-B and the DM-RMC-4K-SCALER-C each have a fixed IP address, recorded on the project IP sheet. Fixed addressing means the panel finds every device the same way after a power cut.
The pick list carries 900 feet of Liberty Cat6 plenum cable for the network and HDBaseT runs, and a coax run feeds the cable TV source. Every run in the wire list carries its own number.
The rollout
Our drawings went out first as a review set, then as an issued set with a full wiring schematic. The change order for the menu projector came through during that process. The scope called for off-site staging, with programming split between our shop and the site.
On site, the work followed the scope's 6am to 3pm window inside Novo's schedule. The rack went into the employee room, the speakers and screen case into the soffit, and both projectors onto their ceiling mounts from the lift. The scope called for commissioning and end-user training before handover.
The closeout package holds manufacturer documentation for all twelve brands in the system. Our AV installation services team filed the drawings and the wire list alongside it.
Service after opening
The work did not end at opening. When one of the NEC projectors was later replaced, our technician contacted NEC technical support to ask whether the settings could be copied from one unit to the other. NEC confirmed there is no transfer function. The fix was to set the two projectors side by side and match the settings by hand.
That visit is easier with the wire list, IP sheet and drawings on file. It is also the case for a maintenance and support plan: projectors, panels and speaker levels drift out of spec when nobody is checking them.
Frequently Asked Questions — Restaurant AV Installation in a Historic Building
Answers to the questions restaurant owners, operators and general contractors ask most often about sound, video and control in a cafe or restaurant.
Can a restaurant in a historic building have a sound system without visible speakers?
Yes. At SOMA Eats in San Francisco's Rincon Center, a National Register landmark, we mounted six Sonance IS4 C Invisible Series planar speakers flush under the dining room soffit, set a Sonance VP10SUB subwoofer into the soffit face and placed two VP66 LCR speakers in the front wall.
The speakers sit in the finish rather than on it. The room gets full-range sound without speaker boxes or round grilles competing with the architecture.
How do you fit a TV and a large projection screen on the same restaurant wall?
At SOMA Eats, the Da-Lite 130-inch Tensioned Advantage Electrol screen is recessed in the soffit above the east wall and lowers directly in front of the Samsung Frame 65-inch TV, so the wall shows the TV day to day and becomes a full event screen when needed.
The screen case sits inside the soffit, so nothing hangs below the ceiling line when it is up. An NEC NP-PA653UL laser projector on a Chief mount lights it.
What does a cafe sound system need to handle events as well as background music?
SOMA Eats runs both on one system: a Biamp Nexia PM processor with an event input in its configuration, Lab Gruppen E 2:2 and LUCIA 120/2 amplifiers, and a Shure SLX24/SM58 wireless handheld microphone, so the same ceiling speakers play music by day and carry speech at events.
The wireless receiver sits in the rack. Its antennas run out on Shure UA806 cables for better reception in the dining room.
How many speakers does a small restaurant dining room need?
SOMA Eats uses nine speakers in one open dining room: six Sonance IS4 C speakers under the soffit for even coverage, two Sonance VP66 LCR in-wall speakers flanking the front-wall TV, and one Sonance VP10SUB subwoofer for low end.
The right count depends on ceiling height, seating layout and how loud events need to get. Our drawings place each speaker by zone before any cable is pulled.
Can a projector work as a restaurant digital menu board?
Yes. A change order at SOMA Eats added a second NEC NP-PA653UL laser projector with an NP40ZL lens, hung on a Chief RPAU mount, to project the menu, with custom projection mapping by Bravo Media fitting the image to the menu wall.
A projected menu needs no display on the wall. The content can change without reprinting boards.
How is video switched between a restaurant TV and an event projector?
At SOMA Eats, a Crestron HD-MD4X2-4K-E 4x2 switcher in the employee room rack routes sources to both displays, and two Crestron HD-EXT3-C HDBaseT extender sets carry video over Cat6 to the ceiling projector and the front-wall Samsung Frame TV.
A wall-plate DM-TX-4K-100-C-1G-B-T adds a local HDMI input for a presenter's laptop.
How do restaurant staff run the AV without technical training?
SOMA Eats staff use one Crestron MPC3-302-B wall panel with backlit one-touch buttons for cable TV, wireless presentation, HDMI and wall speakers, plus a volume knob, so switching from lunch service to an evening event takes a few button presses.
The panel is powered over the network cable from a PoE switch in the rack. No remote controls are left lying around the dining room.
Where should the AV rack go in a small restaurant?
At SOMA Eats, all the head-end equipment lives in a Middle Atlantic EWR-12-17 12-space wall rack in the employee room, including the Biamp Nexia PM, both Lab Gruppen amplifiers, the Crestron switcher, the Shure receiver and the Cisco PoE switch.
Keeping the rack out of the dining room frees guest space. It also keeps equipment away from customers and spills.
What happens when a restaurant projector has to be replaced?
When one of the NEC projectors at SOMA Eats was replaced, NEC technical support confirmed that settings cannot be transferred between two units, so our technician set the new and existing projectors side by side and matched the settings by hand to keep the images consistent.
Having the wire list and drawings on file meant the visit targeted the projector alone. There was no full-system diagnosis.
What documentation should a restaurant keep after an AV installation?
SOMA Eats has a closeout package with manufacturer documentation for all twelve brands in the system, from Biamp to Sonance, plus our drawings, a numbered wire list and an IP sheet listing the fixed addresses of the processor, switcher, panel and receiver.
Those records are what make a service call quick. Any technician can find a cable or device without opening the ceiling to trace it.
Technology partners on this project
Creation Networks, Inc. — nationwide commercial AV integrator, CTS-D certified, based in Concord, CA and Incline Village, NV. Design, engineering, programming, installation, and support from a single point of contact. Call 888-230-3661 or email sales@creationnetworks.net.
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