Conference room AV design and installation
A conference room is a set of decisions about sightlines, acoustics, network and control, taken in an order. LXSYS designs, installs and supports conference room AV across Southern California, to four room types and three tiers.
Conference room, meeting room, boardroom
They are the same room under three names, and which name gets used depends on what the person is doing. Meeting room is what people say inside a building. Conference room is what they type when they are specifying one. Boardroom usually means the largest, with the longest table and the people who cannot be asked to repeat themselves. The engineering is the same. The table length and the seat count change the answers.
What actually decides a conference room design
- The table. Its length sets the camera lens and the microphone count before anything else is chosen.
- The sightlines. Where people sit decides display size and mounting height, and whether one display is enough.
- The acoustics. Ceiling height, glass and hard surfaces decide whether ceiling loudspeakers will do or the room needs pendants.
- The network. Network audio and Microsoft Teams Rooms devices are endpoints on somebody's VLAN, and that conversation belongs at design time rather than at commissioning.
- Who runs it. A room the IT team will patch is specified differently from a room a receptionist will start.
The first of those is the one most often got wrong, and it is written out in full in Camera lens and table length.
The room types, and where a conference room sits
| Huddle | Two to four seats, one screen, and a bar that does camera and audio in a single device. |
|---|---|
| Boardroom | The long table. Display size and camera lens follow the table; audio needs separate microphones and loudspeakers rather than a bar. |
| Training room | Presenter and audience — two audio problems in one space: reinforcement in the room, and a clean feed to whoever is remote. |
| Lobby | Nobody sits down. Content and wayfinding on a surface large enough to read from across the floor. |
Most rooms people call conference rooms are the boardroom type at one of three tiers. Each type is written in all three, so a room is specified from a template and then adjusted instead of being designed from nothing every time.
The hardware a conference room actually uses
For the surface and the meeting platform, MAXHUB interactive displays, video bars, compute kits and touch consoles. For audio, processing and control, the Q-SYS platform: a Q-SYS Core Nano or Q-SYS Core 8 Flex processor, Q-SYS NM-T1 beamforming table microphones, Q-SYS NL-C4 ceiling or Q-SYS NL-P4 pendant loudspeakers, a Q-SYS CX-Q 2K4 network amplifier where passive loudspeakers are already in the ceiling, and a Q-SYS NC-12x80 or Q-SYS NC-20x60 camera where a bar's fixed lens cannot reach the far end of the table.
Which of those a room needs is a consequence of the five decisions above, not a starting point. A boardroom whose table is short enough for a bar does not become better by having a rack put under it.
Whether the room needs a Teams Room at all
A conference room can be a certified Microsoft Teams Room in the display, in a Windows compute kit, in an Android bar, or in nothing at all — a USB bar makes whichever laptop is in the room the room. The honest answer for a guest-heavy space is often the last one, and it is a choice about who patches the room rather than about capability.
The comparison, written out with the trade-offs rather than a table of ticks, is in Three ways to build a Teams Room.
What arrives with the room
- A site walk, and a sightline and acoustics check, before anything is specified.
- As-built documentation, asset tags and a one-page user card at handover.
- Repeat handover training for new staff through your first year.
- A named engineer per account afterwards, with response times agreed in writing.
Common questions
How long does a conference room installation take?
It depends on the room and on what is already in it. Anything we said before the site walk would be a number chosen to sound reassuring, which is why the site walk comes first.
Can we reuse the display that is already on the wall?
Often. Whether it should be reused is a sightline question — size and mounting height measured against the furthest seat — rather than a working-or-not question.
Do you install in rooms you did not design?
Yes. If what is there will not do what is being asked of it, we say so in writing before starting rather than afterwards.
Does every conference room need ceiling microphones?
No. A table short enough for a bar is better served by the bar. Ceiling and table microphones start to earn their place when the far end of the table stops being intelligible, which is a distance question and an acoustics question together.
Send us the room its size, its table and who runs it, and we will tell you what it needs.