Founded in 1990, The Berkeley Partnership is an independent management consultancy with bases in London and New York. Working with clients that include FTSE100 multinationals, household names, and public sector organisations across a range of industries, The Berkeley Partnership assists with the strategic development and transformation of businesses, helping them to achieve their most ambitious goals. Last year, amid a period of sustained growth, the Partnership moved its UK office to new premises in Farringdon Street, London. Whilst maintaining the welcoming, inclusive and creative environment with which its clients were familiar, the new location provided more space and improved facilities. Communication is key to every aspect of the company’s business and Berkeley, in its new setting, wished to ensure that the best possible technology was deployed at Farringdon Street to support its operations.
Contact Us"We designed a system based on a Biamp solution - our previous experience was that the products were excellent - and spoke to technical consultant Adam Brown from the POLAR Integrated Solutions team, to ensure that our plan best fitted the application."
Leading AV installer MVS Audio Visual was engaged to supply a number of requirements, one of which was a system to provide full microphone coverage across a number of meeting and conference spaces to meet Berkeley’s UC needs.
The first area to be considered comprised two rooms, each separately accommodating 8-10 people, which could be opened out into a single space. A further 2 rooms, each accommodating 12 people, could, as well as being opened out into a single space, be extended by means of a glass folding wall to create a ‘town hall’ space for the offices.
MVS consulted with Adam Brown of POLAR’s Integrated Solutions Team over the design. The nature of the spaces to be covered pointed to Biamp’s TCM-1 Beam-Tracking ceiling arrays as the best choice. Where many competitor products have fixed pickup beams, the TCM-1 actively searches for and gain-corrects participants in a given space. In divisible spaces such as these, whilst the positioning and configurations of furniture frequently change, the TCM-1 needs no extra programming or presets - it just works.
In the smaller of the divisible rooms 1 x TCM-1 and 1 x TCM EX Expansion microphones covered the space and since each of the microphones only uses a single channel of AEC, it was possible to use the smallest Biamp DSP in the shape of the TesiraForte VT4 AVB to cover this area. In the larger divisible room, 2 x TCM-1 and 2 x TCM-1 EX covered the space. In this area, the larger TesiraForte CI AVB unit covered not only the room(s) but the adjacent ‘town hall’ space for the addition of further radio microphones and a background music system. Since each of the TesiraForte devices has a single USB connection for UC platforms, the team utilised 2 of Biamp’s new EX-UBT (Bluetooth and USB audio expander) which add remote USB connections for multiple devices to the same DSP.
For 6 remaining small meeting or huddle rooms designed for groups of 2-6 people, which required simplicity of use whilst maintaining audio quality, POLAR supplied Yamaha Revolabs FLX UC 500 USB Conference Phones, providing a simple USB connection to a table-top unit, with great microphone and speaker clarity for UC calls.
Alistair Maher, Business Development Manager at MVS commented:
“In the process of moving to new offices, The Berkeley Partnership took the opportunity to review its AV provision. The company was not satisfied with its existing setup, which failed to fully meet its requirements and was also considered unnecessarily complicated. MVS won the tender for the job, one of the key aspects of which, was to design a system for full microphone coverage to best suit the company’s UC needs. We designed a system based on a Biamp solution - our previous experience was that the products were excellent - and spoke to technical consultant Adam Brown from the POLAR Integrated Solutions team, to ensure that our plan best fitted the application. As always, the POLAR team was very helpful - they were present at the first product demonstrations to the client and as well as supplying the kit and consulting over the design, were always on hand if any further technical advice was needed. The client is very happy with the results, which fully met the brief within prescribed budgets.”
Adam Brown, Business Development Manager at POLAR Integrated Solutions added:
“It was a pleasure to work with MVS on another project. The Biamp products selected really come into their own on a job like this. The practical advantages of the TCM-1 in this kind of flexible environment are clear and to complete a system like this with so little DSP is truly astonishing.”