STAYING ON TOP OF IT ALL

Kevan Sproston, experienced AV specialist and Product Sales Manager for Kordz, examines the increasing demand placed on infrastructure.

Cables are not likely to be the first thing that jumps to mind when looking at a new and exciting AV project, after all it’s usually the experience we deliver to clients that as an industry we get excited about. Cabling is often the unsung hero of every professional audio-visual installation, it’s the backbone that we hang all the technology on. It goes without saying that as technology advances, the infrastructure needs to keep up, if not stay ahead of the equipment that we’re installing. In fact, the smart move in our industry has always been to install over specified infrastructure, this makes upselling existing projects a cinch. This approach is not only a great sales tool, it also helps protect the profitability of our installations. With sufficient headroom we can be confident that the equipment we installed today will still be working just the way we installed it tomorrow. After all, making a service call as result of poor infrastructure choices will result in poor client relations and poor profits to match. Right now, it’s imperative to make sure you keep on top the ever-increasing bandwidth requirements. When it comes to our immediate challenges, I see three key areas where we need to stay on top of our cable game; wireless, high-resolution video and device interoperability.

What has wireless got to do with cables you may wonder? Well, whilst wireless technology is widely promoted to consumers as liberating devices, making connectivity easier and increasing installation flexibility, there is a heavy price to pay with reliability and security. Ever increasing cyber security concerns, using wired networking solutions where appropriate is a clear winner. Hacking a wired network is far from impossible but we’re not transmitting our potentially precious data into the air on radio waves, which are in relative terms easier to intercept.

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For the sake of network reliability, a wired connection can rarely be beaten, even more so in radio congested urban locations where every ISP Wi-Fi router slogs it out in a daily battle with its neighbours. For non-critical applications WiFi is great. Of course, we can support Wi-Fi with our reliable cable infrastructure as we move into an ever-increasing world of power ethernet to support wireless access points, security cameras, door intercoms and the like. The topic of category cabling which forms much of our essential AV infrastructure is as many who have met me will know, is something very close to my heart. The topic of getting category cabling installed right and tested could easily make a whole article. I believe it’s of fundamental importance to our industry as it grows.

The strive for higher and higher video resolutions means data rates are going through the roof. To deliver 8K video were going to need to be shifting up to a massive 48Gbps. To put that number into some sort of context, the UK average broadband speed is currently around 50Mbps, to deliver full 8K video were going to be needed to push around 960 times as much data down a HDMI cable to TVs and projectors that we’re installing. With this amount of data involved, it’s instantly a higher stakes game. Pick the wrong cables and it could be a game of ‘plug and pray’. Fortunately, the HDMI organisation can help take the guess work out with Ultra High Speed cable choices and their certification scheme as highlighted with the hologram and QR code on certified cables.

KEEP TALKING

Finally, device interoperability has, and frankly always will be the bane of every AV installer’s life. There are some simple steps that will help make sure that you are giving yourself the best chance with every install. Product headroom - make sure you always install headroom with any infrastructure project, I honestly can’t stress this enough. New devices and protocols spill on to the market every day, usually tagged with the associated marketing message, bigger, faster, smarter, better. It’s an odds-on bet that the promise to do more for the user will mean that there’s more data that needs to be moved faster. Another interoperability trend to watch is the slow demise of the separate set top box. TVs are now the hub of many services with a multitude of built in apps. The TV has become slightly confused as it acts as both a source and a sink. The challenge is to get the sound out when it’s in source mode to sound bars and AV receivers to deliver an audio experience which goes well beyond the tinny built in TV speakers. It’s now the Audio Return Channel (ARC) on HDMI and now eARC (e for enhanced) that delivers the audio information. In short, the main benefit of eARC is surround sound from the TV. In many installs, built in ‘Smart’ TV apps will be used by clients for a less cluttered life so eARC will become your friend. It’s worth noting that some of the HMDI cables drop eARC support, especially over long lengths.

In conclusion, cabling infrastructure tends to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Will we see a jump to fibre optics anytime soon? Possibly at some point, there are plenty of people that have installed dark fibre into projects, it’s a gamble as the industry might not adopt that particular fibre, as we may go multimode or single mode depending on the application. There are plenty of HDMI cables right now that use optical technology to overcome distance limitations, but they’re all end to end solutions. Category cabling is certainly here to stay as it’s been so widely adopted for networks with various protocols delivering AV data or point to point solutions such as HDBaseT etc. HDBaseT 3.0 is on its way but that’s very much a story for another day.