At a glance
- Client: County of San Mateo Human Services Agency, county government and human services
- Location: 1500 Fashion Island Boulevard, San Mateo, California — second floor, mid-renovation with no existing AV
- Scope: 3 conference rooms (training room, conference room, large conference room), 4 × 86-inch Avocor interactive displays, 4 AV credenzas, 3 room scheduling panels, one network switch per room; contract $177,558.63
- Platform: Q-SYS control and DSP throughout, with voice lift, Crestron AirMedia wireless presentation and Crestron room scheduling
- Timeline: Site walk 29 January 2026, proposal v6 17 March 2026, pick list revised 31 March 2026; on-site work eight to ten weeks after order, about two weeks on the floor
The situation: three rooms on a floor being rebuilt around them
The County of San Mateo's Human Services Agency occupies the second floor at 1500 Fashion Island Boulevard. We walked it with Nancy Etman and her department on Thursday 29 January 2026. The floor was mid-renovation and there was no existing AV equipment of any kind.
That is the cleanest kind of project and the least forgiving. There is nothing to work around and nothing to blame. Whatever the rooms do on the first day they open is entirely a function of what was designed for them.
Creation Networks is one of two audiovisual companies awarded work with the County under RFP 2025-RFP-00454, which is how the job came to us.
What made it hard
Three rooms, three different sizes, one control standard, and a construction programme we do not control. On-site work starts eight weeks after the order and finishes at ten weeks — a two-week window that only works if the floor is construction-clean and the other trades are done.
The rooms are large enough that ordinary conferencing audio does not carry. A person speaking at the back of a training room is not intelligible at the front without help, and the county did not want a system where people have to pass a microphone around.
ADA drove a decision that would otherwise have looked like a furniture choice. A wall-mounted 86-inch display projects more than four inches into the room, which is not acceptable in a circulation path. Putting a credenza under every display resolves the protrusion and gives the rack somewhere to live at the same time.
How we designed it: one Q-SYS standard, three room sizes
Every room gets the same control platform: a QSC Core 8 Flex doing DSP, switching logic and room control, with a QSC TSC-101-G3 touch panel and the same buttons — Computer, Laptop, Wireless Share, Camera and Settings — plus a standby button. Same layout in all three rooms. Staff who learn one room have learned all of them.
Each room has an 86-inch Avocor AVH-8620 interactive display; the large conference room has two. Under each display is an Audio Visual Furniture CR3-WM three-bay credenza holding the Core 8 Flex, a QSC SPA2-60 amplifier, a Netgear M4250 PoE+ switch, a Crestron AM-3200 AirMedia receiver, a Lightware Taurus receiver and the county's own room PC, with four quiet cooling fans and a key switch on the side of the credenza so staff can power-cycle the rack without opening it.
Voice lift is the part worth explaining. Each room has a Shure MXA920 ceiling array with a 30-foot pickup radius, and the training and standard conference rooms add a Shure ULXD wireless handheld and a WL185 lavalier. Voice lift is mild reinforcement — the room's own loudspeakers raise a talker just enough that people at the far end of the room can follow, without the system sounding amplified. Eighteen QSC AD-C4T low-profile 4.5-inch ceiling loudspeakers spread that reinforcement across the three rooms rather than concentrating it at the front, which is what keeps it from sounding like a PA.
Ceiling arrays instead of table microphones was the call, for the same reason as everywhere else in a county building: nothing on the table to knock over, unplug, or work around when the furniture moves.
We turned down pan-tilt-zoom cameras. Each room gets a QSC NC-110, a fixed-lens electronic PTZ with a 110-degree horizontal field of view. The scope of work says plainly what that buys and what it does not: the camera shows a static 110-degree section of the room, which will not get everyone in the shot but gives the far end a reasonable overview, with auto-framing tightening on the faces it can see. A mechanical PTZ would frame better and would also add a camera that needs driving, presets that need maintaining, and a control surface staff have to learn. For rooms run by whoever booked them, a camera with no moving parts and nothing to set up was the better trade.
Equipment by room type
| Room type | Count | Display | Sources | Camera | Audio | Control | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Training room | 1 | Avocor AVH-8620, 86-inch 4K interactive | County PC; HDMI and USB-C at the credenza via Lightware Taurus; Crestron AM-3200-WF AirMedia | QSC NC-110 ePTZ, 110° fixed field of view, auto-framing | Shure MXA920W-S ceiling array (30 ft radius); Shure ULXD handheld and WL185 lavalier for voice lift; QSC AD-C4T-LPZB ceiling loudspeakers; QSC SPA2-60 | QSC Core 8 Flex; QSC TSC-101-G3; Extron OCS 100C occupancy sensor; Furman RS-2 key switch | CR3-WM credenza resolves the ADA protrusion and houses the rack |
| Conference room | 1 | Avocor AVH-8620, 86-inch 4K interactive | County PC; HDMI and USB-C at the credenza; Crestron AM-3200-WF AirMedia | QSC NC-110 ePTZ with auto-framing | Shure MXA920W-S ceiling array; voice lift; QSC AD-C4T-LPZB ceiling loudspeakers; QSC SPA2-60 | QSC Core 8 Flex; QSC TSC-101-G3; occupancy sensor; Furman RS-2 | Same panel layout as the other two rooms |
| Large conference room | 1 | 2 × Avocor AVH-8620, 86-inch 4K interactive | County PC; HDMI and USB-C at the credenza; Crestron AM-3200-WF AirMedia | QSC NC-110 ePTZ | Shure MXA920W-S ceiling array (30 ft radius); QSC AD-C4T-LPZB ceiling loudspeakers; QSC SPA2-60 | QSC Core 8 Flex; QSC TSC-101-G3; occupancy sensor; Furman RS-2 | Two credenzas; Lightware UCX-4x3-HC40 matrix switching |
| Room scheduling | 3 | — | — | — | — | Crestron TSS-1070-B-S, 10.1-inch, on angled multisurface mounts | One at each door; needs internet for calendar access; no programming required |
| Network | 3 | — | — | — | — | — | Netgear M4250 (GSM4230PX-100NAS), 24 × 1G PoE+ 480W, one per room |
Network and IT
Each room gets its own Netgear M4250 PoE+ switch in its own credenza. That is a deliberate choice on a county floor: the AV in each room is self-contained, one room's fault stays in that room, and the county's IT only has to hand us one uplink per room rather than a port count.
PoE carries the ceiling microphone arrays, the ePTZ cameras, the touch panels and the occupancy sensors. The 480W budget on each switch covers a room comfortably, which matters because a Shure MXA920 and a camera are not small PoE loads.
Two devices per room need to reach the internet by design and were flagged as such in the scope: the Crestron scheduling panel for calendar access, and AirMedia for wireless presentation. Everything else can sit on an AV segment with no route out.
How the work is sequenced
The system is staged off site first — racked, configured and tested in the shop before delivery. On-site work is scheduled to start eight weeks after the order and finish at ten weeks, about two weeks on the floor, and only after the other trades are complete and the rooms are construction-clean.
Training is two one-hour sessions on the same day. With one panel layout across three rooms, that is enough. The county then has a seven-day grace period to use the rooms and report anything wrong, fixed at no cost, with closeout documentation to follow.
Support from here
One year of CreationCare on-site service is included in this contract — not sold afterwards, built in. That matters on a floor that opened with no AV history: the first year is when a new room's real faults surface, and it is the year a county is least equipped to diagnose them.
Alongside it sits a one-year workmanship warranty covering installation, programming source code, and the labour for any materials warranty claim during the term. Materials follow each manufacturer's policy. Where a CreationCare agreement is in force it supersedes the warranty documents.
CreationCare covers remote troubleshooting with the room's own documentation in front of the technician, on-site dispatch when remote will not resolve it, RMA handling, firmware guidance and scheduled maintenance sweeps, with response and on-site clocks published per priority level. Optional monitoring puts a collection appliance on the county network and raises an incident before anyone phones it in.
Three identical rooms drift in three different ways. A firmware update lands on one Core and not the others, one occupancy sensor gets painted over, one scheduling panel loses its calendar credential. Identical rooms only stay identical if somebody compares them on a schedule.
Frequently Asked Questions — Q-SYS Conference Rooms, Voice Lift and County AV Standards
Answers to the questions county IT, facilities and procurement teams ask most often about Q-SYS conference rooms, voice lift and standardizing AV across sites. Last updated: September 2026.
What is voice lift, and does our conference room need it?
Voice lift is mild reinforcement of the people already in the room, played back through that room's own ceiling loudspeakers, so a talker at the back stays intelligible at the front. It should not sound amplified. You need it when the room is large enough that people start repeating themselves.
In these three San Mateo County rooms the reinforcement is spread across 18 QSC AD-C4T low-profile ceiling loudspeakers rather than concentrated at the front, which is what keeps it from sounding like a PA system. The acoustic and audio tuning is where a voice lift system is won or lost.
How do you set up microphones for voice lift in a large conference room?
Coverage first, gain second. A Shure MXA920 ceiling array with a 30-foot pickup radius covers the seating area of each of these rooms from the grid, so every seat is on-microphone without anything on the table. Wireless handhelds and a WL185 lavalier are added where a presenter moves.
The gain structure is then set so reinforcement stops well below the point where the loudspeakers feed back into the array — that tuning is done in the QSC Core 8 Flex, on site, with the furniture in its final position. See the ceiling and wireless microphones we specify.
Why use a ceiling microphone array instead of microphones on the table?
Nothing on the table gets knocked over, unplugged, or worked around when the furniture moves. In a county building where rooms get reconfigured constantly, a ceiling array keeps the same coverage pattern regardless of how the tables end up, and there is no cable running across a work surface.
The trade is cost and ceiling access. A single MXA920 costs more than four table microphones and needs a clear grid tile plus a PoE+ drop, which is why it goes in the design at the start rather than as a change order.
Why choose a fixed ePTZ camera over a mechanical pan-tilt-zoom camera?
Because nobody drives the camera. Each room here uses a QSC NC-110, a fixed-lens electronic PTZ with a 110-degree horizontal field of view and auto-framing. The scope says plainly what that buys: a static 110-degree section of the room, which will not get everyone in shot but gives the far end a usable overview.
A mechanical PTZ frames better and adds a camera that needs driving, presets that need maintaining, and a control surface staff have to learn. For rooms run by whoever booked them, no moving parts and nothing to set up was the better trade.
Why does every display sit on a credenza instead of being wall-mounted?
ADA. A wall-mounted 86-inch display projects more than four inches into the room, which is not acceptable in a circulation path. An Audio Visual Furniture CR3-WM three-bay credenza under each display resolves the protrusion and gives the rack somewhere to live at the same time.
It also puts a key switch on the side of the credenza so staff can power-cycle the rack without opening it, and four quiet cooling fans where a wall cavity would have had none.
Can one AV design be standardized across several county buildings?
That is what this is. The same QSC Core 8 Flex design file, the same TSC-101-G3 touch panel and the same five buttons — Computer, Laptop, Wireless Share, Camera, Settings — run all three rooms, and the same standard runs at the county's WIC clinic across town. One spares pool, one firmware baseline, one set of instructions.
See the same standard in a single room at the county WIC clinic conference room, and our wider government AV solutions.
Can we reuse an existing room PC or display in a new conference room?
Often yes. The county supplied the room PCs on this project and we integrated them into the credenzas. The condition on owner-furnished equipment is always the same: it has to be on site and tested working before installation starts, or it becomes the reason the room misses its date.
An existing display can usually stay. Check the protrusion first — a wall-mounted large-format panel that sticks more than four inches into a circulation path is an ADA problem before it is an AV one.
Which AV devices in a conference room actually need internet access?
Two per room here, and both were flagged in the scope: the Crestron TSS-1070 scheduling panel, which needs calendar access, and the Crestron AM-3200 AirMedia receiver for wireless presentation. Everything else — processor, amplifier, camera, microphone array, displays — can sit on an AV segment with no route out.
Saying that in writing before the review starts is the single fastest way to shorten it.
Why put a separate network switch in every room instead of one for the floor?
Fault isolation and a simpler handover. Each room here has its own Netgear M4250 (GSM4230PX-100NAS) — 24 ports of 1G PoE+ with a 480W budget — in its own credenza. One room's fault stays in that room, and the county's IT hands us one uplink per room rather than a port count.
The PoE budget matters more than it looks. A Shure MXA920, an ePTZ camera, a touch panel and an occupancy sensor are not small loads, and 480W covers a room comfortably.
What does a government or county security review of AV equipment involve?
Typically five things: which VLAN each device sits on, which devices need to reach the internet and why, how they authenticate, what firmware version is approved, and who holds admin credentials after handover. None of it is AV work and all of it blocks AV commissioning.
We answer it as a device-by-device list at design stage rather than during the install week. Our AV design and integration scope includes producing that list.
What does a three-room county conference floor cost?
This contract came to $177,558.63, including sales tax and a one-year workmanship warranty. It covers four 86-inch interactive displays, three Q-SYS rooms with voice lift, three scheduling panels, per-room network switches, four credenzas and a year of on-site service.
Displays, credenzas and the audio system carry most of that. The control platform is the part that costs the least and determines the most.
How long is a conference room out of service during an AV installation?
These rooms had no service to lose — the floor was mid-renovation with no existing AV of any kind. The contract puts on-site work starting eight weeks after order and finishing at ten, so roughly two weeks on the floor, with racks staged, configured and tested off site first.
On a floor already in use, that off-site staging is what keeps the occupied-room downtime to days rather than weeks.
What happens when one of these AV products is discontinued?
Every product in these rooms will be discontinued eventually. What keeps the replacement cheap is the closeout package: as-built drawings, the Q-SYS design file, an equipment list, and serial numbers and MAC addresses for every networked device. Without it, a swap becomes a redesign.
Three matched rooms help too — you replace one box three times instead of designing three rooms once. Browse current commercial interactive displays for what we specify today.
What should I ask before hiring a commercial AV integrator?
Four questions: who holds the CTS-D on your project, what the closeout package contains, what happens in year two, and which parts of the network scope are excluded. The last one causes more delays than any equipment decision. Creation Networks has answered all four the same way since 2006.
If you have a floor in renovation and empty rooms on the drawings, we will walk it and tell you what each room needs before the ceilings close. Book a site walk or room assessment, or call 1.888.230.3661.
Q-SYS • VOICE LIFT • COUNTY STANDARDIZATION
Let's Talk About Standardizing Your Rooms
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Technology partners on this project
Related reading: the same Q-SYS standard at the county's WIC clinic conference room, two more San Mateo County rooms with Q-SYS control and scheduling, our government AV solutions and training room AV standards, and the acoustic and audio tuning work behind voice lift.
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 since 2006. Call 888-230-3661 or email sales@creationnetworks.net.
