Five Room Types, One AV Standard Inside Salesforce Tower

The situation

Mubadala Investment Company is a global investor headquartered in Abu Dhabi. Its San Francisco office takes the 55th floor of Salesforce Tower at 415 Mission Street. We were the AV subcontractor on the floor's buildout, working under Skyline Construction.

The floor needed AV in five kinds of space. A board room for formal meetings and video calls. A conference room for deal work. A collaboration room for smaller sessions. A Sky Lounge large enough for all-hands meetings. Break-out areas for casual screen sharing.

An investment firm's office is not one room doing one job. The people who use a floor like this move between rooms all day. Someone who can start a call in the Board Room should be able to start one in the Collaboration Room without a lesson. The goal for this corporate office floor was one way of working in every room, with the hardware in each room sized to its job.

What made it hard

This was five room types built at once, inside a new high-rise construction schedule. Each room had a different mix of displays, microphones and sources. All of them had to behave the same way on the iPad.

The rooms are glass and hard surfaces with floor-to-ceiling windows. The Board Room hangs its ceiling microphones among pendant lights with glass shades. After occupancy, those shades turned out to be close enough to hurt microphone pickup.

Much of the room hardware was owner-furnished. Mubadala supplied the Mac Mini computers that run the calls, the iPads that run the control app, and its own conferencing codecs with their microphones. Our system had to work around equipment we did not choose.

There was no attic space to hide cable in. The audio and speaker cable went in plenum-rated jacket.

How we designed it

We started from the control layer. Every room runs the Crestron App on an owner-furnished iPad, and every room follows the same page pattern. Touch the screen to power on. Pick a source. Adjust volume and microphone mute. Press shutdown, then confirm. Our control programming carries that pattern into every room.

Board Room and Conference Room

Both rooms put two Sony displays side by side on the front wall. The sources are a table HDMI cable, an Apple TV, a Chromecast and a video call. Choosing Video Call puts the owner-furnished Mac Mini's two outputs on the two displays. From the iPad, a user can also send Mac output 1 or Mac output 2 to either screen. The Chromecast shows only on the right display.

One rule keeps audio simple. Whatever is routed to the left display is the room's active audio. That rule fits in one line of the quick reference guide.

A Vaddio ConferenceSHOT 10 PTZ camera sits centered below the displays in each video-call room. Vaddio's current range is in our Vaddio PTZ cameras collection. Users pan, tilt and zoom from the iPad. They store a preset by holding a preset button for six seconds.

Different microphones for different tables

The rooms share a control pattern, not a microphone design. The Board Room's long table is kept clear. A Biamp Tesira TCM-1 beamtracking ceiling microphone and a TCM-1EX expansion mic hang over it and feed a TesiraFORTE AVB VT4. The Mac Mini selects the TesiraFORTE as its microphone input.

The Conference Room uses two Shure MXA310W table arrays on the tabletop. They send Dante audio to a Shure ANIUSB-Matrix, which presents to the Mac Mini as a USB microphone. The Collaboration Room also uses an ANIUSB-Matrix as its microphone input.

Signal distribution and the open areas

A Crestron DMPS3-4K-100-C presentation switcher sits at the head end. A DM-RMC-4K-100-C receiver, five HD-MD-400-C-E scaling auto-switchers and an HD-MD4X1-4K-E switcher carry sources out to the displays.

The Sky Lounge is the all-hands space. A large-format display on a Chief mobile cart carries a PTZ camera on top. Two Shure ULXD2/SM58 handheld transmitters run to a Shure ULXD4D receiver in the rack. A Biamp NEXIA VC carries the all-hands audio configuration.

Ceiling audio runs from a Lab Gruppen LUCIA 120/1-70 amplifier into ten Tannoy CMS 503ICT LP ceiling speakers. Two Sonos Connect units stream music into the system. The break-out areas run Apple TV and Chromecast on their displays for casual sharing.

Our AV design and engineering team drew the full set: floor plan, room elevations, and an audio, video and control schematic for each of the four main rooms.

Equipment by room type

Parts list

What does the network need to carry?

Four Cisco SG110D-08HP eight-port gigabit PoE switches form the AV network. It carries the Dante audio between the Shure MXA310W table arrays and the ANIUSB-Matrix interfaces.

The iPads and Mac Minis sit on Mubadala's own network. The Crestron App talks to the processor across it, so control response depends on the client network's settings and ports. That is where we looked when one room's iPad control ran slow.

The pick list covers 2,100 feet of Cat6, plus 900 feet of 18/2 plenum speaker cable and 200 feet of 22/1P plenum audio cable. A Binary B-300-USB2-CATX extender carries one USB run over Cat cable.

Remote access is part of the support model. After lowering the Board Room microphones, our on-site technician tested call audio over a remote session with an engineer off site.

The rollout

We assembled and powered the head-end rack before installation. That rack holds the DMPS3-4K-100-C, the TesiraFORTE AVB VT4, the LUCIA amplifier, a PoE switch and a D10-PFP power distributor. The install ran alongside the construction work, and we issued the first as-built drawing set once it was complete.

Training was room by room. Each room got a quick reference guide that walks through its iPad pages in numbered steps. The guides also show the two Mac Mini settings to check when audio goes quiet: the Crestron HDMI device as the sound output, and the Tesira or ANIUSB-Matrix as the microphone input.

First occupancy was not the finish line. About a year after the first as-built set, we issued a check set with revised room functionals. It reflected how the rooms were actually being used. During the service visits before it, our technicians took detailed notes on every added material, because Mubadala asked for as-builts that matched the rooms.

The updated as-built set then reissued the general notes and the schematics for the Board Room, Collaboration Room, Conference Room and Sky Lounge.

Support from here

Our service log tracks visits against a block of service hours. It records eight entries across three rooms in the months after occupancy.

In the Board Room, the client reported poor call audio. One visit found the wrong HDMI output selected on the Mac Mini, which left the Tesira with no signal. On another, we discussed the glass lighting shields near the ceiling microphones. We lowered the microphones, tested over a remote session, and confirmed a significant reduction in echo. We also raised microphone output so users could run Zoom meetings comfortably.

In the Conference Room, the second MXA310W went silent. Its Dante host name had reset to the default. We set the proper name, rerouted the Dante signal and saved the configuration presets. A later code upload removed an unresponsive volume feedback bar from that room's page.

In the Collaboration Room, the iPad worked but lagged, so we took the investigation to network settings and ports. We also removed the Table source from the app so the startup page offered fewer choices.

The relationship has continued. We have since returned for a Cisco room update, a reception display and a Sky Lounge wireless microphone upgrade. That upgrade swapped the dual-channel receiver for a quad-channel one, kept the two handhelds and added two more. Our AV maintenance and support program exists for exactly this work. Rooms drift out of spec when nobody is watching them.

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.