An under-utilised space has been transformed into one of the best sports bars in town, with RTI control and Sonance loudspeakers doing the heavy lifting.
WED Group has a black belt in RSL AV. Sure, it’s happy to handle most AV integration
work, but Matthew Joyce and his team have developed something like a licensed club AV cheat code.
Clubs generally have more TVs than most venues. Without proper control, those displays can be a total albatross around managers’ and staff’s necks. Often, each display needs its own corresponding IR remote controller. But if you have enough of the same TV, one remote can often start messing with another nearby TV. Regardless, you’re likely to have a shoebox full of near-identical remotes, often inside an old toilet roll to improve their ‘accuracy’. Each TV can generally tune to a variety of sources such as Foxtel, free-to-air and perhaps digital signage. But once selected, it’s another operation to select the appropriate audio for that zone. Anyway, you get the idea… it can be a horrific waste of time and patience.
THE WED METHOD
WED Group’s brainwave was to derive the audio from the TV itself (not directly from the Foxtel box, for example), so that when staff change the ‘channel’ on the main TV in the zone, the correct audio is automatically brought along.
WED Group favours RTI for control, providing staff with straightforward touch control. The displays can handle video in a standard way – often by RF modulation or via a video-over-IP system. As far as audio goes, WED Group uses the TV’s lightpipe digital audio output, which is independent of any TV volume control, and it goes into an audio extender, then over acategory cable to a receiver in the AV rack that injects analogue audio into the DSP for signal processing.
This approach makes light work of setups that feature multiple Foxtel boxes and a bunch of displays. Chatswood RSL has plenty of both, in fact, it has six Foxtel boxes.
SHOWSTOPPER
The showstopper at Chatswood RSL is a 1.5mm-pixel-pitch LED in the new Yogi’s sports bar. It’s a stunner. Immediately in front of it are two lounges for around eight patrons. Who knows how early you need to arrive, drinking lemon squash all day, to reserve those seats on State of Origin night?
