Chattanooga Mayor's Conference Room

The Mayor's conference room at Chattanooga City Hall hosts everything from staff briefings to televised addresses, so it needed a system that presents, conferences, and broadcasts equally well, in a formal room with chandeliers and a long table where cameras and microphones could not dominate the space.

At the front of the room is a 4x4 video wall of sixteen NEC 55-inch ultra-thin-bezel, 700-nit displays, a single 220-inch diagonal image. Two 85-inch Sony commercial displays above the main entrance mirror the wall or show separate content for the far end of the table. Ten Biamp Parlé beamforming table microphones, a Biamp Tesira DSP with teleconferencing, and new ceiling speakers handle the audio, and because the room's layout does not allow voice reinforcement through the ceiling, a Williams AV infrared hearing-assist system with twelve rechargeable receivers carries every meeting's audio privately to anyone who needs it, meeting ADA requirements at the same time.

Presenters can connect wirelessly through the city's Airtame system, plug in at the table through a new floor box with HDMI and USB, or use the dedicated PC in the rack; the USB connection lets a laptop join any video-conference platform using the room's cameras and microphones. For broadcasts, a Marshall PTZ camera at the front covers the table and a second at the rear frames a speaker standing in front of the wall, with a Vaddio production system and an Extron recorder that stream to the platform of the city's choice and record locally. A static image generator gives the wall a clean backdrop during addresses, a wireless lapel microphone serves the speaker, and SDI and XLR connections at the rack and the wall let local television stations take a feed.

A Crestron control system with a 10-inch in-wall touchscreen runs it all through five presets: wireless, table, and PC presentation, and front and rear broadcast. Room power, recording, streaming, and volume stay one touch away on every page. The equipment lives in a new floor-standing rack with IP-controlled power conditioning, and the city's staff received five hours of on-site training.