Meeting Room & Events AV in restricted times

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This year the situation we find ourselves in is unprecedented.  We at CGA know that as a result, Hospitality venues have very little budget at present, so we thought that some ideas and tips on how to make the best of your current AV may be helpful. 

As the Covid situation changes, we all know that Government advice is constantly changing and varies throughout the UK.  Currently the general guidelines reflect the need for gatherings in small groups, (rule of six), no shouting or singing, and keeping your distance.  These rules pose challenges when it comes to delivering quality face to face meetings or important conference calls, but with carefully planned technology and AV, these difficulties are not insurmountable.

Facilitating better calls

Are your clients currently making business calls from their spare room, kitchen or lounge?  Do they feel their home is not delivering the correct ambience for meetings, or do they find themselves not in a ‘business state of mind,’ (as they still have their slippers on!)  Coming to your venue could help them to get into work mode, focus better and present the best version of themselves.  Wearing their business attire and presenting themselves in a meeting room that sounds great and has a better camera than their laptop, could increase their productivity.

All the design elements you have invested in; great decor, soft carpets, comfortable chairs and quality AV can come together to create an optimum environment for a video call.  The presence of soft furnishings helps to eliminate echo and reverberations, often too prevalent in kitchens and modern minimalist homes, which detract from the quality of sound in virtual meetings.

Ensuring delegates can be heard

To effectively get your message across in a room of socially distanced delegates, you need what is called a "Sound reinforcement system."  This is best done with multiple ceiling speakers spread through a room, as each speaker gently reinforces the sound of the delegate speaking and saves them from shouting, delivering even sound throughout a room without the aggression and front of room energy generated from a PA system. Many of your function rooms will already have ceiling speakers for background music, and with care, these can be retasked without decoration, to make a vocal reinforcement system to help your delegates deliver safe and effective presentations.

Delivering Hybrid meetings

Even if we are only allowed to have a small number of delegates in our rooms and they have to be socially distanced, it is still possible to enable them to successfully meet with distanced colleagues via a ‘call’ if you get the AV in the meeting room right.  Current AV allows your existing radio microphones to be linked to a call, or for a dedicated ceiling microphone to be deployed to cover a whole room to more effectively bring together delegates who are both at the meeting in person with those dialling in remotely.

Enabling large scale virtual events

Although it is no longer possible to gather everyone together into one room for key presentations in an old-style company conference, did you know that your lectern or radio mics can be linked to a ‘call’ with an HD camera to make a live stream to remote delegates, at the same time as presenting in your function room?  A small group of individuals can reveal the big-ticket items and key corporate messages to everyone in the company, without geographical bias, from your venue.

Whatever type of meeting you are facilitating, we are here to help.  If you would like to find out how your current AV system can be modified to address the issues we face in these current times, please give us a call, we’d be happy to help.

CGA Integration … Making hospitality sound great!

CGA Integration Working Arrangements during the Covid-19 Pandemic

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In these unprecedented times we hope that you, your family and your teams are all safe.  I am pleased to say that all of us here at CGA Integration are currently fit and well.

CGA Integration is still operating during this Covid-19 Pandemic.  We have adapted our working practices to comply with Government requirements and are able to be on site with appropriate PPE and social distancing in place.

We are now working with our customers both to carry out on site installations and to plan how systems might need to be put in place or adapted after the country emerges from lockdown. 

If you have any AV requirements or want to discuss how your current provision may need to be adapted moving forward, please do not hesitate to call or email.

Trusting you are well and looking forward to working with you again when we can.

Chris Gunton

Managing Director
CGA Integration Ltd

CGA Integration … Making hospitality sound great!

Delivering truly integrated control

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Walls covered in knobs and buttons, we’ve all seen them and not only do they look unsightly but does anyone really know what they all do?!  How with so many controls and variables can you offer any level of consistent guest experience?  When you spend so much time and money on brand experience and getting the look and ambience of a room just right, the last thing you want is for that to be blighted with a visual cacophony of controls which are not aligned to offer a consistent guest experience.

So, how can you get rid of that unsightly wall and keep the control panels to a minimum whilst still maintaining maximum flexibility for your staff and guests? And equally importantly how do you know who to call if the touch panel you have installed doesn’t make all elements of your room respond?

Firstly identify what you want to integrate
Be clear about what ‘elements’ of the room you want to control from your panel, this may include: Lights, Sound, Video, Projection, Air conditioning (A/C), Blinds & curtains, Room combining or Staff calling, but it's by no means an exhaustive list.

Secondly brief suppliers collectively
Once you’ve identified what you want to control from the panel you need to ensure that your suppliers of all of the different elements work together collectively to make it happen.  The best approach is to brief them together to aid discussion and iron out any potential conflicts with proposed solutions; they will all want to have their control visible in the room but this is not necessary.

Finding a master control that has a two-way protocol with other systems will ensure that the touch panel is always showing the status of the subsystem and not just sending commands and hoping for the best!  If you identify some common protocols then one system can offer a touch screen to control all of the other elements.

CGA Integration already offers integrated control systems and we’d be happy to talk to you about what would work best for your requirements. 

Designing a system that is integrated yet discrete
From experience, insist that each system can run stand-alone as well as part of the integrated system.  This has two benefits; not only does it act as a means to identify who you need to call if a specific element isn’t working, but if the master control interface fails you always have a method of control.  To achieve this it will mean putting individual element control panels somewhere out of sight, often in a service cupboard.  But, as a result, if for example the main touch panel will not control the lights but the lights can be operated from the panel in the service cupboard, then you know that you have a control system issue and not a light system failure and you are not plunged into darkness as the lights can still be operated stand-alone.

The result will leave you with individual systems for added control but only one visible control panel on the wall.  This one panel will allow you to set up the whole room, possibly from presets and you will not be left with a wall full of knobs and buttons that staff need three years service to fully understand!

In fact, often these systems offer advanced functionality.  Once you have an integrated control system in place then you may be able to further enhance an area’s function through alternative control screens or wireless iPad control for floor managers, which improves the management of your room set-up without any further unsightly controls.

Further benefits of integrated control systems
As well as controlling all chosen elements of a room from one panel, the additional benefit of integrated control systems is often network and remote support.  When CGA install an integrated control system, the main processor reports to us remotely and tells us how all the different elements of a system are performing.  In turn we can enable email alerts to engineers or the venue to automatically inform them of any errors. It really does work.  In a CGA installation a few years ago the hotel engineering team were amazed when they started getting fault emails about their air conditioners!  As a result they were able to identify the problem and fix it in a timely way with minimal disruption.

In a CGA installed integrated control system, our team here at CGA can also see the status of all the connected systems.  So if something is not working as it should be and you call us out of hours, we can very quickly connect into your system and send commands to different elements in the system to try to fix things remotely.  If this is unsuccessful,  we are able to determine what the issue is before we make a site visit, making the path to a solution much faster for all concerned and managing the carbon footprint of excessive site visits to diagnose the problem.

CGA Integration … Making hospitality sound great!