Hi there and thanks for joining us today
I'm your host Tasha Danner and as always I am joined by
Josh Rush, VP of Marketing at Audinate.
Our guest today is David Emmert, he's an AV design engineer at McKinstry.
Thanks for joining us today David.
My pleasure.
So David, could you give us a little background on you and your company?
Sure, I've been in commercial audio and visual systems for about 15 years
And I've worked for a couple of the major AV companies in the US.
And now I'm working for McKinstry Construction Company
which we offer a lot of different services including AV.
We're very heavily involved in the Seattle market here and have 21 offices across the US.
David do you mind diving into some of the recent projects that you've done?
Yeah the most recent was a casino expansion out in the middle of Washington.
I don't know the square footage but I think they doubled their facility size
So we were part of upgrading their existing AV as well as expanding.
So looking at the size of the building and the requirements of moving signals around
to different zones, we quickly honed in on a network audio and visual solution.
And would you in your role, were you more an AV specialist or IT specialist first?
So I come from an AV background, but I work mostly at this point with IT or IT/AV people.
And I think we're making a lot of headway outside of the convergence between the two trades.
And obviously there's a lot of network products out for AV
and this was a good chance to leverage that standard topology
and move things around the building with a lot more ease then what would have been
possible with more of a traditional point to point AV solution.
So on the casino project you were talking about how did
the IT side of things play into the process of pitching a network solution
and then actually implementing it? What was the engagement like with the IT department at the casino?
On that particular project we actually installed a separate AV network.
Staying off of the gaming networks and all of that is important for the Casino business.
So we're on an isolated network and have our own remote access into our network
without going through theirs. So in terms of coordination
We didn't do a lot with them directly, it was more talking about
how we're gonna move around the building and backbone cabling as opposed to integration.
The different project that I was working on, the last couple years up here in Seattle,
was a major corporate headquarters and that was a converged network where we did
everything on the client network across multiple v-lands and multiple systems
so that was much heavier involvement and integration of making sure your multi-cast settings are right
and segregating traffic and all of those concerns.
David what would you say is the trend that's causing so much AV equipment
into IT departments these days?
Yeah so I think there's a few factors, first off is the expectation
to move towards a more cohesive user experience.
The workforce wants to have an easy to use system which can be made up of multiple different systems from different contractors
and so it's a matter of trying to tie those in where for the end user and feels more like one system.
So I think that user experience is one thats driving interdependencies between systems
so that's pushing coordination forward.
I think, especially on the network technology it allows us to standardize
as well as future proof much more effectively then we used to.
So we can roll out an infrastructure that can live through a tenant change to a different company
or multiple life cycles within the same company.
with minimal upgrades so thats part of our planning in the design process
is what's that future proofing look like.
It's also faster to deploy then traditional wired point to point solutions,
more programming time and less physical install.
The big factor for me personally is the remote monitoring and management.
That's the part of the business we are really interested in. It falls under the current trend of IoT.
But really it's a lot of things that we've been doing bits and pieces of and it's
now being able to take that next step and bring it all under one umbrella
and have really good support models for those clients.
So why don't we shift gears a little bit and talk about Dante.
So I know you've mentioned in the Legends casino that is was primarily a Dante Network.
When did you first start using Dante? And what were some of the benefits or the reasons you switched to a networked audio system?
So I have a history with CobraNet, so I was already into audio networking as Dante came out.
And it's much easier to deploy, much more flexible in the design as well as the programming.
And so it was just a natural transition over to that.
We started fairly small with having traditional analog wiring in the rooms
and using Dante to tie multiple rooms together or send a signal across a building
to another local analog system so originally we used it as a bridge between systems
and now we're seeing the transition to Dante enabled endpoints and really making the audio
and network as opposed to just getting back and forth between various systems with that protocol.
So the products are coming on the market more and more which is great
you've got the microphones and now a couple options for speakers and obviously the control systems and DSP's
So it's really creating that environment that's flexible
So Dave it sounds like you're briefed on Dante Domain Manager, the network management solution
that we launched a few months ago. Do you mind
talking a little bit about why solutions like that are important with the future of networked AV?
I think it's super critical, all of the subsystems that we're doing
Have the remote monitoring capabilities
Whether it's digital signage or control systems or streaming video
it's having that option on the audio side kind of completes the picture
lets us really manage the system as a whole
So David I guess our last question from this end is just looking forward a little bit
So where do you see things going with the future of networked AV?
It sounds like it's a big part of what you do today but fast forwarding what does that look like in the next year or two from now?
Well in the last few years we've had the buzz about IT and AV convergence
and I think we're there. We'll still see some technology changes
but really, a lot of its now possible and it's more a matter of
learning to coordinate between the IT groups and AV groups and gain a common language
and the ability to jointly plan those systems
and the backbones for that future proofing
So I think it's really more a matter now of taking responsibility on each side of
the AV side of the house, beefing up our capabilities on network security and understanding
the other implications outside of our AV domain
that we're now stepping into on the networks. And on the IT side,
understanding the requirements of rolling out multicast and broadcast across systems
where maybe they didn't have it before and treating AV as a partner
rather then an end-user on the network.
I think understanding the bandwidth implications, the IP space planning,
the VLANs and the security and how to manage all of those as a team
is really how we move forward and make progress.
Well thank you so much for sharing and coming on the show today.
We look forward to seeing you again and have a great day.
Thank you for having me.