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FEATURE
MAKING THE CUT: PC2 REQUIREMENTS Given the facility houses dissection and biomedical resources, it was a requirement that all AV equipment was installed to conform with Physical Containment 2 (PC2) obligations. It meant Rutledge AV was required to recess speakers into the ceiling finish, which wasn’t as easy as you may think. Given the weight of the EAW LS432i loudspeakers, Rutledge had to devise a way to permanently mount them to the slab before the ceiling was installed but then also slightly change the locations of the speakers to locate them within precise, laser cut holes. Project Manager, Nick Ryder: “Ultimately we designed
a track-type grid to mount the speakers onto, which gave us the ability to move the speakers in any location on the horizontal plane and finely tune their locations to achieve a precise fit into cut-outs after the ceiling tiles were installed. “To meet PC2 requirements we had to invisibly caulk the edges of the speakers to ensure containment between the laboratory and the ceiling space was maintained. Around 450 of these speakers needed to be installed in this manner.” Phew.
of Crestron’s NVX [video-over-IP system] but we had to ask ourselves: ‘what’s the benefit of using NVX over DigitalMedia?’ DM is uncompressed and it has less latency, so why send video all the way up to a centralised IT room to be compressed and sent right back again when we don’t have to? “We’ve also noticed that something like 80 percent of installations with video-over-IP end up putting their own AV network in any way, because it doesn’t work on the infrastructure network. From our point of view, if we can’t put it on the infrastructure network why would we put a whole other network in? Meanwhile, Crestron DM is simple and easy to manage.” Just about every floor has two main NEC 98inch displays per zone. Each zone has a teacher’s touchdown point – not a lectern but a landing zone for the teacher’s PC and materials. The touchdown point has a Crestron wall panel for system control. There are four sources: the teacher’s laptop, the house PC, the Teq AV IT wireless presenter, and a Sony PTZ camera if the teacher wishes to use the big screens to show the room something interesting, like a skin lesion. HOT BUTTON ISSUE
Each student station has its own AV system. A Crestron keypad allows the students to select a source, such as the station’s own NUC PC, student laptop, or the wireless presenter (to share the content of an iPad etc). Upon start-up, the student’s station display will mirror the teacher’s source selection. “Not so long ago, university AV systems did their best to avoid any student control. The fear was, the students would do something disastrous, inappropriate or nefarious. Things have changed with the move to student-led learning – it’s about engaging students and, let’s face it, they’re over 18 and if they’re going to mess up, it’s better they do it at uni rather than their workplace down the track. “The more the students are engaged, the more they’re invested in their own learning – they’re
The plan shows the arrangement of the student stations into four zones. (Top) Shure UHF wireless is used by the lecturers.
not just passive participants, they’re active participants. And we know that engaged students turn up to lectures; when they turn up to lectures they get better results; and when they score better results they don’t drop out. “That’s what motivates myself and my team. We know that with good AV design we can influence retention rates and help students to learn. “This is more than a job. We can talk about speech intelligibility in abstracted terms but to me that connection with the academic in the classroom clearly flows through to better outcomes; the sort of results we actually care about… students learning, graduating and changing the world.”
CONTACTS Peter Maclean: peter.maclean@monash.edu Rutledge Engineering (Integrator): rutledgeav.com.au Marshall Day (Acoustic Consultant): (03) 9416 1855 or au.marshallday.com WSP (AV Consultant): wsp.com PAVT (EAW, Powersoft): (03) 9264 8000 or pavt.com.au Multiplex (Builder): (03) 9353 3500 or multiplex.global Crestron: crestron.com.au Sony Professional: pro.sony Jands (Shure Wireless): (02) 9582 0909 or jands.com.au