Visionary AV over IP endpoints are a Hit at Seattle Mariners’ Spring Training Facility
Now in its 25th season, the Peoria Sports Complex is the Spring Training baseball home of the Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres, in addition to hosting Minor League and Youth League baseball games and an assortment of private and city events. Recently, the Mariners brought in systems integrators CCI Solutions of Seattle, Washington, to upgrade the AV systems in the team’s multi-purpose lunch room/meeting room, including a new video network based on Visionary Solutions PacketAV™ encoders and decoders.
“Previously, they had systems on a portable cart, which was inconvenient,” recalls CCI Solutions Project Lead and Director of Design and Engineering Todd Gathany. “They wanted a cleaner, better solution. For sources, we gave them two Visionary Solutions E4100 encoders: one for their existing Blu-ray player and one so they could bring in a laptop or whatever and plug into the network. We also provided four Visionary Solutions D4100 decoders. Three of the decoders feed the three TVs located around the room, which usually show cable TV so they can have sports on all day. The fourth is a Visionary Solutions Duet decoder serving a new Hitachi LP-WU6600 projector. The encoders and decoders support 4K video but that’s not required for this project, since the projector uses WUXGA video.”
Visionary Solutions’ PacketAV E4100 and D4100 encoders and decoders provide cinema quality, up to 4K UHD video over any industry-standard IP network, with ultra low-latency, and support power over Ethernet (PoE). They can be used on existing enterprise IP networks or on a physically separate, parallel (private) network, using the same network protocols, methods, and devices but without intermingling video traffic with data or voice.
“We’ve been developing a relationship with Visionary Solutions recently. We’re very pleased with their products, and the price point is very good.”
~ Todd Gathany, CCI Solutions Project Lead and Director of Design and Engineering
The CCI Solutions team also upgraded the lunch/meeting room’s audio, using the existing consumer loudspeakers but driving them with E-series Lab Gruppen power amplifiers. A Symetrix Radius 12×8 EX DSP manages the system, including video routing control of the PacketAV endpoints. “Audio for the video system is managed with the Radius DSP, as well,” adds Gathany. “The audio network is all Dante. A Symetrix ARC-3 wall panel provides source selection for the audio and video.” An Attero Tech unD3IO Dante-networked audio wall plate gives users two audio channels in and out of the network.
“We’ve been developing a relationship with Visionary Solutions recently,” Gathany notes. “We’re very pleased with their products, and the price point is very good. Their products fit the Seattle Mariners’ project well, and we’re increasingly using Visionary Solutions on other projects. We also use a lot of Symetrix DSPs because they’re reliable, the service is good, and again the price point works for our clientele in most cases. We use Attero Tech on a lot of projects where we need to get I/O on the network, and Attero Tech and Symetrix products work well together. All of these products have been quite reliable. This was a simple project where I wasn’t expecting any problems, and we’ve had none. Everything is working as expected.”