Looking and Seeing - The World through AV Eyes

Before my AV career I did  a few other things, including telephony and the unparalleled horrors of residential cable installations. One interesting thing about these three fields is each has lead me to a greater focus on parts of our world the rest of us take for granted and fail to notice. If you drive down a residential street with me, for example, I'll notice if services are brought in aerially or below ground, if cable and phone drops are run neatly at right angles or lazy diagonals from the pole, perhaps even if homes are being fed with fiber or copper. A closer look and I'll see if connections are properly grounded. Why? It's simply become part of my world. So to it is with AV. Sometimes as a consultant I can even see things which aren't really there. 

Earlier this year, Molly Stillman asked the following question: Does work in AV "ruin" live events for you? I've never worked in the live-event side of the industry and, for that matter, don't attend all that many live events.  What I do know how to view - and what has become part of my world - is installed AV. What's interesting is the different things that irk or interest me as I've moved from the integration to the consulting side of the world. Over a year ago when I was first seeking work with the SMW team, Tom Shen asked me a very good question: why did I think I was ready to work in consulting? This was part of my answer: a passion I have for the technology, and an eye I develop towards seeing it. If you were to walk through a hotel lobby with me, I'd very likely be able to tell you where they have video monitors, where there are speakers, and what I think they should have done as compared to what they actually did. This game of  asking myself what the designers were thinking, what they should have been thinking, and what I would do differently is one I am constantly playing in my head.

Two recent examples come to mind. One is a digital signage display at my local grocery story (the Douglaston outpost of the New York based chain Fairway). My contractor eyes see a nice Sony display surface-mounted above the deli counter, fed by a signage player of some sort. It matches the similar monitors pole-mounted near the frozen foods. My contractor eyes see that it might be mounted slightly off-true, and that someone left the protective plastic cover on the bezel. These kinds of small installation details are easy to spot anywhere.

Digital Signage in the wild. 

My consultant eyes see something different. They see that if one waits in a natural position a few feet back from the deli counter the display is too high to see without craning ones neck and that if you're actually AT the counter it is directly over your head. Given the pace of the Fairway deli counter, customers standing far enough back to view the content will almost certainly lose their place in line. The content consists of a loop of what appear to be in-house produced cooking and food videos with an overlay including the store's social media address and a few announcements. It's nicely chosen content for a grocery store, but misses an opportunity to highlight anything special in the specific area where it's placed. The consultant in my head wants to push the display back behind the deli counter, adjacent to the pricing board. This is where people will be looking anyway, greatly increasing the attention the sign is getting. As there are more than one of these in the store, content can be adjusted per location; perhaps the deli counter could show sandwich making, the creation of some of their salads and slaws, or give an idea of what we're supposed to do with that hundred dollar a pound Iberico ham I've always been tempted to try but have feared that I lack the sensitivity of palate to appreciate. As things stand, it's a reasonably clean installation with appropriate content. With a tiny bit more thought, it could be something more. And, of course, with a tiny bit more thought and a great deal of extra money the menu board could be replaced with a video wall for something truly spectacular. That's the part where my consultant-eyes see things which don't, in fact, exist. This also might, in all fairness, be a bit of overkill for store signage. 

A good value! 

I'll give you a quick preview of my second example from the wild: interactive kiosks at rail stations here in New York. In addition to form and function, those suggest another theme which I'll be exploring in a future post exclusive to ExpresSHENs, the official blog of SMW (but please remember - whether I post here or there, my opinions are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the SMW team at large).

What do I have to say about this?
Tune in next time!

For the nonce, I'll leave you with a question: with what kind of eyes do you look? And what do you see that isn't there, or that others don't?

Blaming Cerebus - a look at The Order of the Stick

A bit of a departure this week as I sidestep towards an example of serial online storytelling from the world of role-playing game culture. I'll specifically be looking at Rich Burlew's online comic Order of the Stick, now in its tenth year and having just completed the antepenultimate book in its ongoing storyline. The Order of the Stick takes its title from its stick-figure artwork, artwork the characters therein sometimes seem aware in occasional cracks in the fourth wall. So yes, this post is about a stick-figure comic strip about gamers. It's also about more - OoTS has been successful for a long time, and gained a very devoted following (Burlew raised money via Kickstarter to reprint his back-catalog to reach new readers. Out of a goal of just under $60,000 he raised well over a million in what was, at the time, a Kickstarter record).

OOTS began  way back in 2003 as a somewhat one-note satire of role playing games in general and Dungeons and Dragons in particular. This came at a time when I still counted myself among role playing gamers, and the humor somewhat worked for me. Sadly (or not so sadly - I've found much else to enrich my life), I've not thrown dice with a g

Order of the Stick style fan-art
MyNameMattersNot (DeviantArt).
This is that the comic looks like

aming group in years now - likely almost as long as OoTS has been running. Why do I keep coming back for all these years, following the story of an adventure-gaming group which - at least sometimes - seems to know that they're in an adventure game? How has Burlew been so successful for so long with stick-figure artwork? Two factors: first is evolution, and the second is a successful twist of expectations.

Satire can be fun, but very quickly outstays its welcome. OoTS isn't alone in using broad satire to hook an audience into something which eventually grows more serious. Terry Pratchett's early Discworld books, to take another example, were as broad a satire on fantasy literature tropes as OoTS is about role-playing games. Comic book artist David Sims started his series Cerebus as a not too smart or clever satire of various works of fantasy literature, before moving to a not too smart but increasingly serious (and increasingly problematic) philosophical tale. I see it as the opposite of George RR Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice, which started over a decade ago as a grim and gritty take on secondary world epic fantasy and today continues as -- a grim and gritty take on secondary world epic fantasy. Keeping a consistent tone in works such as this runs the risk of creating a thing preserved in amber, unchanging as the world moves on around it. Burlew has successfully avoided that fate.

The very opening of the comic over a decade ago began in media res with a situation very familiar to gamers - a typical "dungeon crawl" in which a group of heroes were exploring an underground maze of rooms and tunnels, fighting various monsters lurking there for no apparent reason. We got jokes about the rules, about how the world subtly changed when the people playing the game switched to an updated version of the rulebook (RPG rules change from time to time; Dungeons and Dragons has gone through various incarnations, now up to the "fourth edition". The four doesn't count various in-between changes [the upgrade on OoTS was from 3rd edition to 3.5 {oh no! Nested brackets! I hope they all close correctly}] , and many groups have their own unique "house rules". Many gamers have very strong opinions on which edition is "best" [with the split usually between traditionalists who want to go one edition backward and futurists who see the latest as shiny and fun]). It's the kind of story that's fun if you're in the middle of that world, but likely wouldn't appeal much to those outside of it. It's also the kind of story which is fun for a fairly short time.

As time went on, a larger story took shape around the initial "joke" strips. There's still a great deal of humor, but the humor has become more of a vehicle for a genuine character-driven stick-figure novel. A recent story arc, for example, dealt with the party's elvish wizard Varsuvius. Ze (I'll use a non-gendered pronoun for zim; we don't know if Varsuvius is male or female) started off as a stereotype: the "blaster" wizard obsessed with gaining more and more power to smite enemies using magic energies. Somewhat early on in the story, Ze killed a young dragon in a scene which appeared inconsequential at the time. Later, we meet the dragon's parent and, to avoid having zir family slain in revenge, Varsuvius is tempted to sell zis soul to devils for more power. The resulting storyline (which I'll not further spoil) calls into question the core assumptions gaming makes about the nature of evil and the role of violence and develops V's character while remaining true to the core personality left over from the "joke a day" times. It was a surprisingly effective bit of storytelling, and a reminder that in today's increasingly accessible media environment one can find notable or interesting works in surprising places.

The moral of the story? Given passion and dedication, something which at first seems silly can become something something special and interesting as it grows with you and the audience. Do you have a wild idea? If so, stick with it, and look me up again in a decade. We'll see where we're at.

On Language, Juggling, Lunchtime in the Park, AV, and Networks

Quite a few years ago I earned the CTS (Certified Technical Specialist) certification from Infocomm. 
Last year I began studying to take the ICND1 (Interconnected Network Devices) in pursuit of my first-ever Cisco certification. 
Last week I started learning to throw a juggling pattern called a 4,4,1.

What do these three seemingly disparate items have in common? At their core, they are all largely about language.

Bryant Park in Winter

We'll start with the end, at 4,4,1. It's a fairly simple trick with which I'm still trying to convince my hands to cooperate. Throw a ball straight up with the right hand, then straight up with the left hand, then zip the third ball straight across from right to left. Repeat in the other direction. Repeat in the first direction again. It looks pretty nifty, and can lead to other tricks.

Office Juggling Selfie!

The part I didn't get (aside from the accurate catching and throwing, which kept eluding me) was the name. Finally, I asked one of the more experienced of the Bryant Park Jugglers. For those of you who don't know, Bryant Park is a smallish park behind the main branch of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. It has a lawn in the summer, an ice-skating rink in the winter, a fountain, a carousel, a statue of Gertrude Stein and, of course, jugglers (and ping-pong, and even the occasional super-literate topless women).  The answer was simple: a "one" throw is that quick lateral pass, and a "2" is the ball held in hand for a beat. After that, the numbers sync up with the number of balls one would be juggling: a three is a lob from side to side as if it were part of a three ball cascade. A straight up and down toss caught by the same hand that threw it is a "four" because that's what you throw when juggling four balls. A double-height three is a five because the standard five-ball patter is like a three only higher. Etc.

Bryant Park in Summertime

Why is this exciting to me, and why is it important? For the same reason that the CTS was important, and the same reason that a basic understanding of routing and switching is important. I've described the most important part of the CTS as learning the language of AV; someone who passes might not know enough to install, test, commission, or design an AV system, but they would know enough to talk about it. Knowing the names of various connector types, what various signal formats are called, and other technical terms is the first step to being able to learn more. Before newcomers to the industry for example, can learn about various methods of EDID management and emulation they need to know what EDID is in the first place. To give instructions on wiring, testing, routing, and patching a video-edit system without the assumption that ones audience will understand the terms "SDI", "BNC", "Router", "Patch-panel", or "coax" is  an exercise in frustration; it would be like having to describe what a steering wheel, a tire, or a road is before giving someone directions to your house.

This goes a long way to explaining why I'm approaching network certifications. Not only are modern AV systems are increasingly dependent on data networks in order to function, but future AV systems might actually be components of a larger converged network. Systems being designed and installed today might use network-based protocols such as Dante or  AVB for audio transport, video streams encoded as H.264 or similar, and centralized IP-based control systems. From a system design perspective, different protocols and systems have differing network requirements as well as final AV requirements. This adds another step in evaluating varying technologies 

What was once a simple matter of needing a network port now becomes a more complicated discussion in which ports are needed on separate VLANs, in which a layer 3 switch may be required, in which certain devices need to communicate across networks, in which switches need to be configured with various services or protocols. Suddenly "give me a data port" isn't enough. 

This is different than mere jargon; the phrase "layer three switch" or "balanced audio" or "four-four-one" aren't simply fancy words: they stand for concepts that, absent the language for them, we might not even realize exist. It's important to be able to communicate network or AV requirements in a manner which is understandable and professional. It is vitally important to see these concepts in the first place and to internalize them to the point that they become part of how we think about our jobs and the world around us. For this we need to learn the language. 

I'll have more details on this later (including my impressions on some current technology on the market). For the nonce, I'll leave you to reflect on the importance of language.

And if you happen to be in my city, drop by the park around lunchtime. You might find me there, and we just might have a ball.

Not my good set of juggling balls

The Poem Will Be Like You

Some trifles. First, a few lines of blank verse:

He swore an oath to procreate the Constitution
but spilled too soon his words
on tomorrow's barren news print
None left for fertile posterity.

Those who follow me on social media might recognize the phrase "procreate the Constitution" as an errant auto-correct from somebody else in an ill-advised political discussion last week. The missed autocorrect was, in all honesty, the most interesting part of the discussion and the kind of something with which I might do more (and more ideas are fluttering about in my head), but wanted to share this trifle as one direction in which inspiration can go; it in a way dovetails with our earlier discussion here on inspiration, and leads to a modernism.

One  interesting strain of modern literature concerns itself with what some may call the disappearance of ego, if not the author entirely. Way back in my modern poetry posts I touched on odd literary experiments by writers such as John Cage or Bart Silliman - works in which appear to be discovered or excavated as much as they are created. I would argue that authorial intent absolutely does exist on some level -  the choice to follow a certain random path is, after all, a choice - but once that choice is made the author might hand the metaphorical reigns over to ... fate? The gods? quantum uncertainty? Call it what you may, but the reigns are released, leaving what may be a thing of beauty, may be garbled nonsense, or may be a beautiful thing of garbled nonsense.

Early twentieth-century poet and performance artist Tristan Tzara took this to an interesting extreme in his instructions on "How to Make a Dadaist Poem" (the below copied from here, where I got it from educator Al Filreis):

How to Make a Dadaist Poem
(method of Tristan Tzara)

To make a Dadaist poem:

• Take a newspaper.
• Take a pair of scissors.
• Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
• Cut out the article.
• Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
• Shake it gently.
• Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
• Copy conscientiously.
• The poem will be like you.
• And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

--Tristan Tzara

The most interesting claim to me isn't the last, that you are a writer, infinitely original but the penultimate step, "The poem will be like you". This is the sort of thing which - especialy in the deeply ironic and cynical present - is easy to shrug off as satire. I see a bit more than that in the Dadaist movement, and find some value in the breaking of barriers of technique, artifice, and even authorship. Does the poem resemble the person who chose a newspaper article to slice up and shuffle? The readers who see it through the filter of their own perceptions? OR is it mere nonsense. What I do know is that many find this kind of thing quite compelling, when the Tzara piece came up in Al Filreis's Modern and Contemporary Poetry class on Coursera (one which I highly recommend) scores of students took to the forums with their "Dadaist poems" and John Cage-style "Mesostics" (one of mine I included earlier in this blog).

Below is a not-quite-successful experiment of my own in this vein; I took the swype keyboard on my phone and drew shapes across the letters, letting the software autocorrect it into words. This takes the the errant autocorrect with which we started this discussion to its absurd conclusion - what would a sentence of ALL errant autocorrects look like? 

And yes, the three small oranges and tin of sardines are to be considered part of this work. I'll leave "why" as an exercise for the reader, but it touches on the ongoing themes of modernism and inspiration. If you need a further hint, the sentence I'm scribing in the video is "I am not a painter"

Rd set xxx ttc c.f. foggy Zach uhh in go sex ad ex's ers fifth HB hubbub on ho Klink knoll tv c

Irish haggis educator 

slugs skid schism 

icebox Evian avian Jarvis 

David racist Koenig garlic deux finch duff 

Assad Fuchs succumb hunting visualization

 Ashburn suburbia whitewash e-book sexual Odessa 

Westbrook stump archived compact 

volcano 

vaginal January

SanDisk Serbian leak out 

stick hall Westfield catacombs prick search

 Saatchi announcing Saatchi servo insist stingy 

ssh bobbin combing/ in km in km tv cc cm 

lMcMahon mm vBulletin b.s.'m'm cub fangs 

scuffed xyz clean etc c hub b th v

Tv wry ext txt

Etc tug fact catch hubbub exec Gretchen hutch 

urged etc huff t-shirts tv t-shirts r rd c exact revved text

 Gibb dc earth ribbon textbooks dc dry exec Sgt drugs exert 

ex r Feb ten edgy f2f t tv ssh ribbon txt t-shirts Hughes Gucci

 txt bfn fig hub Inc highs had ugh th duh tv ssh raccoon high 

dc fact tax ssh Buffy by tag t.v. Essex vaccine t.v. 

I'm ilk read f2f uhh kohl circ tv

 chubby dazed junk Aziz xxx f2f Chubb hubbub

And that is that. Again, not quite successful, but read allowed there's a certain pleasure in some of the stanzas. I'll close with a thought: this could be polished and refined. TO do so would make it more readable, but blunt the element of randomness and return authorial ego to the process. Would that be a service or a disservice to the work?

Consumerization in Pro AV

The proliferation of consumer technology in profession AV has been a hot topic as of late both in the office and amongst my fellow AV bloggers. Over the past week we got commentary from Mike Brandes, Josh Srago, Mike Brandes again. It's also been a recurring topic on LinkedIn and Google+ AV professional groups.

Consumer products
sometimes look like fruit

There are some who fear that the increasing use of consumer-grade technology is hurting business, some who see the use of consumer goods as a way to reduce cost, and others who see users' increased familiarity with interactive AV technology to be an opportunity. I land largely in the last camp, but recognize value in several positions on this issue, depending on exactly which technology one is discussing.

Consumer Tech as Value-Add
In an entirely unrelated blog post on customer service, Mark Coxon related a story about a system which wouldn't perform correctly because the consumer TVs the client had purchased in lieu of commercial flatpanels couldn't handle the various  resolutions  output by users laptops. Five or so years ago this would have been a serious concern. Video switching and routing was largely based on simple transport, without scaling or any other type of signal processing or conversion. A commercial flatpanel would be able to handle whichever resolutions one gave it, have locking BNC connectors for the RGBHV, Y/V (S-video), component, and composite inputs. A comsumer flatpanel would not only handle fewer resolutions, but also have consumer oriented connectors which wouldn't always lock and would sometimes require adapters which add to signal attenuation. BNC connectors can be easily and quickly field-terminated, making it easy to pull cable through conduit and cut to length. HD15 connectors (the "VGA" connector) take at least fifteen minutes for a technician to solder, if you can find a technician who knows how to do it. In short, there were real advantages.

Today, things are different. Until 4K becomes the defacto standard (another change driven as much by the living room as the boardroom), most commercial AND consumer displays have a resolution of 1920x1080. Digital matrix switches cross-convert signals to HDMI and often scale to the native resolution of the display. Consumer or commercial, one gets the same non-locking HDMI connector which cannot be terminated in the field. If one adds the fact that the average viewer watches around  thirty hours of television per week, one finds that a high-quality consumer flatpanel is more than suitable for commercial use. Consumer displays increasingly have RS232 and IP controls, allowing as easy integration with a control system.

What does one lose? Perhaps a warranty, but some distributors are willing to provide that. 24x7 operation, but that's a requirement in relatively few situations. What does one gain? A far lower cost. For the cost of a professional display,  you can usually purchase about four consumer models. That means that one can purchasing  a consumer TV, throwing it away when it breaks, buy a new one, and still have spent half the cost of a professional model. 

Consumer Tech as a Dangerous Expectation

One of the scariest bits of tech in the pro AV world is the Apple TV. It's well-beloved by its users, but for various technical reasons (largely its device discovery protocol) is a terrible thing to put on a corporate network. The only thing worse than putting an Apple TV on your corporate network is putting two Apple TVs on the same enterprise network and trying to control which one users connect to. 

The challenge is that there's not really an "enterprise Apple TV" available at this point, and if there were it would still post challenges about levels of network access and security. These aren't insurmountable challenges, but at the very least require serious thought and attention. This is drifting towards another topic, but that's a reason I'm persuing Cisco certifications now that I've achieved my CTS-D. At the very least, a basic understanding of networks is required to navigate this kind of issue.

The other big pitfall we see is in touchpanels. Ten inch touchpanels from Crestron, AMX, and Extron have MSRPs ranging from $2400 to $5000 dollars. On the positive side, the dedicated touchpanels have wired connectivity (as opposed to wifi only), hard buttons, and some other nice features. On the negative side, most lack the graphical processing power of an iPad or similar and don't scroll as smoothly (the new AMX panels does very well here, but at the highest cost. I've not seen the very newest Crestron or Extron panels yet, but their current models still lag a bit in graphical performance), at a cost of between five and ten iPads. It's becoming increasingly challenging to sell the idea of a dedicated touchpanel as worth the effort when what the user sees isn't any better than consumer products at a fraction of the cost. As a user, it's a question worth asking. As a designer, it's also an option at the very least worth exploring. Does a professional touchpanel have enough increased utility to justify a doubling of cost? That's a very project-specific question, but I'll say that I don't consider the answer to always be an unequivocal "yes".

Consumer Tech as an Opportunity

The best thing about this - where is is an opportunity - is that the initial explanatory part of our job is largely done before we open the conversation. Gone are the days in which we need to explain the concept of a touch-screen operated control system; enough people control their home entertainment with Android or iOS devices that the concept is, at least, familiar. Likewise, personal use of Skype, Apple Facetime, Google Hangouts and the like needn't be a replacement for enterprise videoconference solutions; at the least it can be a conversation starter. At most... these types of solutions CAN fit into a larger ecosystem. Why not have larger specialty spaces with appliance-based Codecs, pan/tilt/zoom robotic cameras, DSPs, and installed mics alongside smaller "huddle" spaces with stationary cameras to support Lync or some other desktop solution? 

Our value add as professionals is not, in my estimation, steering clients away from consumer solutions and towards "professional" ones. It's a matter of helping them navigate a world in which the lines between consumer and professional gear are increasingly blurred. The target shouldn't be "commercial" or "consumer" but "appropriate".

Therein lies our challenge - and our opportunity. 

A Visit with Primeview (and others!)

Today marked the official grand opening of Primeview's New York showroom. Primeview, for those not familiar with them, are a manufacturer of commercial flatpanel displays, focusing on video-walls, digital signage, and interactive applications. For their demo space they partnered with several of the manufacturers with whom they work on projects: Haivision, Vista Systems, TVOne, Bouncepad, and Key Digital. Having their partners share the stage provides a measure of context for the technology by showing at least on example of what they think you can actually do with it.

The space itself was a tiny three-room postage-stamp kind of place on the eighth floor of a conveniently located Midtown office building. The small space has a clean, semi-industrial look with an open ceiling (all painted black) and clean white walls on which, of course, a ton of video monitors hang for our perusal. A few of my impressions as I walked through the space:

Haivision Demo and LCD wall

The first demo I saw was Haivision, which was streaming content to a 2x2 LCD wall. The nifty thing about this demo is that the same content (via Haivision's KulaByte transcoder, if my memory serves me correctly) was being streamed wirelessly to an iPad. You can't see it from the still photos, but the mobile content lagged by less than a half second. This is obviously not a solution for live annotation, but for quite a few other applications its performance is more than sufficient. Encoding is h.264; I didn't think to ask if H.265 is on the roadmap now that 4K content is becoming more common.

Spyder. Also bouncepad

Their larger wall was operated by a Vista Spyder and had, among other sources, a Christie Brio. I sadly didn't have time for the Brio demo, but there is one sitting on my office desk awaiting integration with our very own system. More on that, perhaps, in another few weeks. The one thing the Spyder demo did illustrate is the importance of high-quality content on large-format displays. One source was some PC video at a not-very high resolution interlaced format. On a smallish PC monitor or mobile device it would probably look terrific. On a 2x2 video wall made up of 55" flatpanels? Lets just say that large format, high resolution displays will show blemishes and artifacts at their very worst. There's an important lesson there about operating a wall and, as AV professionals, setting expectations.

All of the walls aside from the Sypder demo (the Haivision 2x2, the 1x3 portrait wall, the interactive 1x3 portrait) were run off of a TVOne Coriomaster video wall processor with HDBaseT output cards. HDBaseT receivers are a combination of Magenta Research and Primeview panels with integrated HDBaseT receivers. Two of these had "daisy-chain" capability with an HDBaseT output mirroring the HDBaseT input. This is a terrific solution for corridor signage, to give one example. Also nice for a demo room in which the same content is being mirrored on various displays. The Coriomaster is very flexible in being able to support portrait, landscape, and any orientation in between. It's not the same as a Spyder (lacking, amongst other things, the front-panel buttons, some advanced features and flexibility, and a certain reputation for reliability), but still an interesting product.

Demo of Anacore Collaborative
Software

After I chatted with some of the other technology parthers, Chanan Averbuch of Primeview treated me to the grand tour. One thing I appreciate about Primeview is the level of enthusiasm their team has about the company and the technology. They're excited about plasma, excited about the quality and feature sets of their displays (4K. Integrated HDBaseT. Near-seamless bezel-free walls). He also took me through a nice demo of the Anacore collaborative software. It handles collaborative tasks (whiteboarding, annotation, etc) with a nice, slick interface which also allows very easy archiving and sharing of markups.

The final partner I met was Bouncepad - makers of nice custom-labelled iPad mounts. This is quickly becoming another crowded corner of the industry, but theirs did have a very nice, clean look. 

Aside from the aforementioned partner demos, some things stood out to me:

Still a work in progress. But nice gear!

1) The combination of landscape- and portrait-mounted plasmas. They looked very nice in any orientation.

2) Highlighting technology partners definitely makes it a different experience than a single-manufacturer room with displays would have given. At the risk of being buzz-wordy, this felt like a presentation of solutions as opposed to products. 

2) The Anacore collaborative software running on the 1x3 wall in the front room is interesting. This is another section of the market with quite a few players, but it's always interesting to see the strengths and weaknesses of a new solution. This kind of collaboration is certainly a wave of the future. 

3) A fairly wide variety of monitors are displayed, including plasmas and LCDs. Did you notice the color being a bit different in one panel on the Haivision demo? That wasn't my camera; the wall contains different LCD panels so you can compare the brighter version to the slightly less bright version with better color reproduction. 

The room itself is very slightly a work in progress; the rack cabling can stand re-dressing, and some nearby construction knocked some of their video walls out of true. Once it's readjusted just a bit, this will be a very interesting and nice demo area for us in the AV world here in New York. 

Why no product reviews? On Shootouts and Demos, with an apology to Extron

About what do AV designers talk? Design certainly, in all of its forms. Past projects and wish lists. Perhaps most of all, we talk about technology. For all of our talk on these things, there are relatively few actual product reviews or comparisons. I'll talk about products here, but stop short of a formal endorsement or non-endorsement. Why is this, and what are the perils of doing so? I can illustrate with two examples and an apology.

First, Infocomm 2013. AV_Phenom Mark Coxon saw the dizzying array of HDMI over structured cable extension systems and decided that an old-fashioned "Shoot out" was in order - he'd take a selection and compare for the benefit of the rest of it in the industry. Right away he ran into problems.

1. Acquiring Appropriate Gear
Manufacturers pretty much universally outwardly agreed that this was a great idea. When it came time to actually get sample products, roadblocks appeared. Their trade-show demos were strapped down to permanent displays. They were missing power supplies. They didn't know if they had the latest firmware updates. Some of these might have been legitimate issues. Some might have been a lack of comfort with the risk of taking part in a showdown under conditions they couldn't control. For whatever reason, it's something manufacturers aren't quite comfortable with. 

 

2. Creating a Fair Test
If you read the original post from last year,  you'll see that at the first try none of the extenders worked. At all. Blank screens all around. Removing the extension system and running sources directly to the display, of course, resulted in a perfectly clear picture. Every element of the test had been proven good except the extension system. Which means that the extenders were bad. Right?

Not right. Replacing an active HDMI cable with a .99cent special made everything work. So the problem is the active HDMI cable. Right?

Not right. Months later I saw the same problem - an active cable not working on the back end of an extender. Replacing it with a seemingly identical cable made the problem go away. What the issue appears to have been is a defective cable. Not quite so defective as to give no picture, but marginal enough to fail with some equipment.

Notes on Digital Video

Side note on digital video: as I'm sure you're aware, a digital signal is just a string of ones and zeros. One way to measure the integrity of such  signal would be with an oscilloscope. Ideally, ones should be very high, zeroes very low, with a clear sharp transition between. This is called an "eye pattern". As the signal attenuates and picks up noise the "eye" will flatten and become less sharply defined. Different receivers have different "eye masks" - their tolerance for imperfect signals. The problem with this kind of test is that, absent some rather costly and complex test equipment, it is impossible to determine where the signal is degrading, how, and to what extent. We're left with the binary "it works/it doesn't work". Which leads to the final issue:

3. They all work
Coxon's result was something I could have told him before he started: all of the extenders were able to pass video.  After all, for a manufacturer to sell a product which simple doesn't do what it is advertised as doing would be rather shocking and result in a short life for that manufacturer. Yes, there are secondary tests he could have performed but didn't. Unplug and reconnect the video source to measure sync time. Unplug and reconnect the power to compare startup time. The larger point is that these kinds of devices have become somewhat commoditized; not only do many have the same function, but they also have similar form-factor and, under the hood, use the same chipsets. It's ultimately a comparison of apples to very slightly different apples.

Are there manufacturers with product lines and ecosystems better suited for one application or another? Yes. Are there some which offer better reliability and better customer service? Also yes. I'm not quite ready to say that digital switching and transport is a pure commodity in which any device is equivalent to any other. What I AM saying is that they're close enough that, absent a great deal of time and equipment, it's quite challenging to make meaningful performance comparisons. 

Which brings me back to the beginning, in which I owe somebody an apology.

Some demo gear. I love demo gear!

A few months ago in my visit to Extron post I commented that their XTP switcher changed sources slowly, especially when switching between unprotected and HDCP protected content. This is true; it was unacceptably slow and much more so than other, similar products. So, when one of my colleagues (SMW senior consultant Joe Gaffney) received some Extron demo gear and saw that it switched very slowly I found myself unsurprised.  Fortunately, this was a test in the comfort of our office and Mr. Gaffney is quite diligent about getting things right. After watching the indicator lights on the front of the unit and making several calls to Extron, he determined that there's a setting to drop the HDCP handshake when non-HDCP sources are selected. If this setting is turned off, it has to initiate a new three-way handshake every time a protected source is selected. Hence the long wait time. Turning it off made the unit behave much more reasonably.

Is this what happened with the XTP demo at Extron's demo facility? Without an actual XTP matrix I can't say for certain, but I must admit that it's a possibility. While a manufacturer always should be sure their demo is configured to show the product in its best light, we need to remember not to take first impressions at face value. 

The moral of the story? Sometimes we all get things wrong. Evaluating products is hard. It's OK to make judgments, but make them carefully and be open to the possibility of revisiting them.

Those morals are a bit more universal than the world of AV, aren't they? Perhaps therein lies another lesson.