SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – JANUARY 2012: When compared to its peers in other states, the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce is an especially active and involved institution. Nearly 8,000 businesses statewide hold membership and provide fully half of Utah’s 1,000,000 jobs. Its Salt Lake City headquarters is a bustling hive of activity, with multiple events, such as meetings, trainings, and seminars, scheduled every day. To accommodate a happily burgeoning request for event space, the Salt Lake Chamber worked with member business General Communications of Draper, Utah to expand and update the A/V systems in its executive conference and training rooms. With an eye toward future expansion, General Communications centered the new sound reinforcement equipment on a pair of Symetrix Solus 16 open-architecture, fixed-I/O signal processors.
“Of course, a chamber of commerce is all about helping member businesses make money, but, like every other chamber of commerce, the Salt Lake Chamber needs to use their financial resources judiciously,” said Ingolf de Jong, president of General Communications. “As a result, the budget was exceptionally tight.” The Salt Lake Chamber asked de Jong and General Communications system engineer Brandon Gramse to update the A/V system in the executive conference room, which subdivides into two separate rooms, and to add infrastructure to a larger training room that would allow it to subdivide into four smaller rooms.
“Like other clients that have existing equipment, they hoped we would be able to keep costs down by reusing the existing equipment,” explained de Jong. “However, using the existing equipment we ran into incompatibility issues. To make the Salt Lake Chamber future-proof and still stay within budget, Gramse based the design on Symetrix’ new Solus 16 processor. The Solus 16 offers powerful open-architecture DSP design within a fixed sixteen-input, eight-output frame. The fixed I/O makes the Solus 16 very affordable.
The setup itself is not unlike a small conference center, with the requisite flexibility to accommodate events of widely ranging nature and size. The systems for the executive conference room and the training rooms are entirely separate, and each gets its own Symetrix Solus 16. Two large Crestron touch panels and four smaller Crestron touch panels located in each subdivided space (six total) communicate with the Solus 16 audio processors and the Kramer VP-4x4k video matrix switchers to control audio and video source routing out to ceiling-mounted projectors and LCD displays. The executive conference room can be divided into two conference rooms, and in addition to VGA inputs each contain one owner-furnished Blu-ray player, whereas the training rooms each contain four owner-furnished Blu-ray players, one for each subdivided room. New Listen Technologies ListenPoint ceiling speakers powered by QSC amplifiers deliver clear, intelligible audio. The executive conference room takes four microphone inputs and two stereo line-level inputs, using only half of the Solus 16’s inputs. The training rooms require one stereo input per subdivision, plus two microphone inputs, for a total of ten.
“The Salt Lake Chamber wanted the new system to accommodate future conversion of adjacent office space into meeting space,” said Gramse. “The two Solus 16s have plenty of available inputs and outputs for those expansions. Although it would be simple to collapse the stereo inputs into mono inputs if they need it. In addition, the Solus 16’s open-architecture will allow us to program the requisite functionality for future systems without limitation. “Working with the people at Symetrix was a real pleasure. The sales support and the technical support are both excellent.” Chamber COO Heidi Walker stated that the chamber is extremely pleased with the system. General Communications provided excellent design, installation, and support for our facility. This system allows us to host people from around the world, effectively communicating the chamber message.
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