Two Rentable VIP Suites With Beamtracking Audio and BYOD Video: Pleasanton, California

The situation

Pivot Sports Bar in Pleasanton rents out two private suites. One is themed around football and one around basketball, and both are sold to the same kind of customer: a group that wants somewhere good to watch a game, and a business that wants somewhere good to run a meeting. Those two jobs pull a room in different directions, and the AV is what decides whether it can do both.

The suites were the last phase of a larger fit-out. Creation Networks had already put displays through the main dining room, built the equipment closet that feeds them and kitted out the Top Golf suite. The VIP suites came afterwards, as a deliberately separate design with a deliberately separate brief: not more television screens, but two full conference rooms that happen to sit inside a sports bar.

The scope of work put it plainly: two separate, identical rentable spaces, each supporting client presentations, bring-your-own-device video conferencing and dedicated cable television. Identical matters more than it sounds — a guest who books one suite this month and the other next month should not have to learn a second room.

What made it hard

The first problem is that the two rooms are not the same shape. They are identical in equipment and identical in how they behave, but one is longer and narrower than the other, and the seating is arranged differently in each. Delivering an identical experience across two different volumes means the loudspeaker layout and the microphone coverage have to be designed per room while the control, the sources and the user interface stay the same.

The second is the ceiling. Part of each suite sits under a decorative slatted timber raft, and the rest is hard lid. There is very little of the room where you can simply cut a hole and drop something in. Microphone coverage was scoped for the conference table rather than for the whole room for exactly that reason, and it was flagged as a constraint at the kickoff meeting rather than discovered during rough-in.

The third is the one nobody puts on a drawing. These are rentable rooms. Whoever walks in has never seen the system, has no support number and is not going to read anything. Every decision below — one touch screen, one cable to the table, the cable box controlled by the same panel as everything else — comes back to that.

And the fourth was furniture. The conference tables were still being changed while the fit-out was running, and the table is where the bring-your-own-device connection has to land. That sequencing question stayed open through the install and had to be worked around rather than solved.

How we designed it

Each suite is built around a single large picture. A Sharp NEC PN-ME982, a 98 inch commercial 4K panel, is mounted to the front wall on a Chief XTM1U extra-large micro-adjust tilt mount with a Chief FCAV1U pull-out accessory behind it. The pull-out is not a detail to skip: a 98 inch panel that cannot be drawn off the wall means the equipment behind it is unserviceable, and on a rentable room that is a future call-out waiting to happen. Both suites got a dual-stud structural mount rather than a single-stud fixing, because the panel is heavy and the wall is drywall over framing.

Video moves over the network rather than over point-to-point cable. Each suite has a pair of Crestron DM-NVX-360 endpoints — one encoding, one decoding — on the same NVX fabric that already carries the dining room and the Top Golf suite. That choice buys two things. Each suite can be given its own dedicated cable television feed, with its own receiver in the rack rather than a box sitting in the room; and if the venue ever wants a game from one suite mirrored to a bar screen, the routing already exists.

The cable box is where most rooms like this fall apart, because a set-top box normally comes with its own remote and its own frustrated guest. Here a Crestron CEN-IO-COM-102 wired Ethernet module gives the control system two serial ports into the receiver, so channel and transport control land on the same panel as everything else. There is one Crestron TS-1070-B-S 10.1 inch touch screen on the table in each suite, and that is the whole user interface.

Bring-your-own-device is a single cable. A Lightware Taurus TPX transmitter at the conference table takes HDMI or USB-C and carries video, audio and USB peripherals over one shielded Category 6A run to a matching receiver behind the display. A guest plugs a laptop into a USB-C cable and gets the room — the big screen, the microphones, the camera and the speakers — with no dongle, no app and no account. That is the only workflow a rentable suite can reasonably support.

The audio is where the two-jobs problem gets solved. Each suite has a Biamp Parle TCM-1 beamtracking pendant microphone and a TCM-1EX expansion pendant hung over the table on adjustable suspension cables, feeding a Biamp Tesira EX-UBT expander that handles the USB and Bluetooth path back into the existing house Tesira processing. Beamtracking rather than a fixed array, because the people talking in a suite move between the table and the sofas and nobody is going to hold a microphone.

Playback is four JBL Control 26CT ceiling loudspeakers per suite laid out as a balanced grid, plus one JBL Control 19CST ceiling subwoofer. The subwoofer is there for the television, not for conferencing. A crowd noise bed with no low end sounds like a laptop, and a suite that sounds like a laptop is not worth renting.

The camera is a PTZ unit in each suite, positioned centre of the seating layout on the axis of the room. Camera placement was one of the open questions at the design kickoff and it was settled on site rather than from a drawing, which is the honest way to place a camera in a room with a mixed table-and-lounge layout.

Everything above lands back in the central AV closet: speaker home runs to the amplifiers, shielded microphone cable to the DSP, all suite video onto the existing NVX network. Our design and integration team reused the house DSP and video network rather than building the suites as islands, so the venue has one system to support rather than three.

Equipment

Quantities below are per suite; both suites carry an identical bill of materials.

For a similar room the relevant categories are commercial displays, microphones, commercial loudspeakers, video distribution and room control.

The rollout

The suites were built in three days on site by a crew of three, working from six in the morning so the rooms were finished and clear before the venue opened.

• 2 July. Both suites and the equipment closet. Mounts set, structural fixings in, cable pulled and dressed back to the rack.
• 7 July. Displays and endpoints hung. Two microphones installed in the NFL Suite and one in the NBA Suite. Loudspeakers cut in and toned through in both rooms.
• 8 July. The fourth microphone installed, rooms dressed, suites reported complete other than the table-side termination — which had to wait on the client changing the conference tables.

That caveat is worth being straight about. The bring-your-own-device connection has to land in the furniture, and the furniture was still moving. The right call is to terminate to the floor box, prove the room end to end, and finish the table plate against the table that is actually going to be there.

The fault that was not a fault

Five days after the rooms were finished, one of the 98 inch displays started showing a Help Error (0). That looks exactly like a panel failure, and on a brand new display it is the sort of thing that starts a warranty replacement conversation.

It was raised with Sharp the next morning as a manufacturer ticket. Sharp came back with the answer that the error was coming from the control code, not from the panel — the display was reporting a condition it was being put into rather than a condition it was in. Our engineer went to site the same day, corrected the code, and the issue was closed.

The reason to tell that story is that it is the argument for having the integrator own both the hardware and the control programming. A venue holding a manufacturer warranty on its own would have spent a fortnight arranging a swap for a display that was working perfectly. One day of diagnosis by the people who wrote the program cost nothing and fixed it.

Support from here

The installation carries a Creation Networks workmanship guarantee against defects in our own work, and within that period manufacturer claims are brokered through us rather than left with the venue to chase — which is precisely what happened with the Sharp ticket above. Manufacturer warranties on a system like this typically run one to five years depending on the product.

Service requests open as a ticket in the support portal before anyone is dispatched, and every visit closes with an electronic report back through the same portal, so a room with a recurring problem has a record rather than a memory. Our maintenance and support programmes add scheduled visits and remote monitoring on top of that for venues that would rather not find out about a fault from a guest.

One caveat that applies to any room built on a control program: firmware or software changes made by others, without agreement, will void the workmanship cover. On a rentable suite that mostly means keeping the touch panel configuration and the display settings under the same change control as the rest of the system. It is an easy rule to keep and an expensive one to discover.