Every year Systems Contractor News announces its Installs of the Year Award in November. These awards are given out to firms that go above and beyond to create ultimate user experiences. This year was challenging for integrators to work around the Covid-19 restrictions while crafting personalized experiences for their clients. CommLink Integration Corporation won the Install of the Year Award for its installation at Concepts, a luxury clothing retail store (created by Amazon). Located in Boston, Massachusetts, the new retail store combines authentic skateboarding roots with the brand's ability to convey a narrative and translate its identity through an immersive audiovisual retail experience designed and executed by the crew at CommLink Integration. Brands and products employed to help deliver the conceptual narrative at Concepts include Sonos, Sharp NEC Display Solutions, BrightSign, AVPro Edge video matrix, Symetrix audio DSP and UniFi network hardware.
[Symetrix Radius NX, Barco Clickshare Conference Now Compatible]
Concepts also uses an original custom control system, called Latitude, conceived and designed by CommLink's engineers Hunter Grayson and Tim Adams. It is based on CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript. Latitude runs on an in-house spec'd 1U micro server, which serves a custom GUI via a local-only web page, which is interfaced with iPads in the store. They selected a Symetrix Radius NX 12 X 8 DSP and xOut 12 for the system integration.
Evan Landry, CTO or CommLink Integration Corporation, said many of the reasons why they chose Symetrix as the DSP for the system were the sound quality, performance and the ease of installation. Landry said, "Two of our favorite things about Symetrix are, one, the Dante Brooklyn chip is baked-in and you get the full 64 x 64 channels; and two, the hardware reliability is top notch. By the time of the installation, we had become heavily entrenched in Symetrix DSPs, with all our engineers being Composer certified. One of the biggest points for us, aside from rock-solid reliability, was being able to remotely control any parameter simply by assigning a remote-control number."
The café has the same set-up and can be its own zone for watching the game or join with the rest of the system for regular BGM. This zone joining and dividing is accomplished by two matrices, which are switched simultaneously by the preset controller in the Latitude control system: audio by Symetrix and a video (HDBaseT) from
[Symetrix Introduces xIO Bluetooth Dante-Enabled Endpoint]
What made The Concepts store installation unique and different is that it is a multi-use space. It is a clothing and skate boutique, as well as a café, an elite sports bar and a night club. There is a DJ booth, which has its own set of XLR inputs thanks to a QSC Atterotech unDx4i. So, in essence, the audio system performs two job functions. It is required to provide even coverage for background music during the day and provide bumpin' power for the night-club scene. This presented its own set of challenges during the design), as the needs for these modes are very different.
The smaller scenes are vignettes of the audio system: the skate room has its own 86-inch display, as well as a Sonos ARC sound bar. This does double duty serving as the audio source for featured videos, as well as playing background music (BGM) during normal business hours.
