Commercial
Commercial Boardroom AV: The Questions to Ask Before You Commit to a Spec
March 5, 2026 · 6 min read
A boardroom that doesn't work consistently is one of the most visible failures in a commercial environment. It's the room where clients see your operation. It's where presentations happen at the start of important meetings. When the system behaves unpredictably — the input doesn't switch, the call audio cuts out, the display can't be seen from the far end of the table — the problem is visible to everyone in the room.
Most of these failures are preventable. They're almost always specification failures, not equipment failures.
Display sizing and placement
The single most common visual problem in boardrooms is a display that's too small. The standard formula is one horizontal display width per foot of viewing distance: a viewer 10 feet from the screen needs a display at least 10 inches wide. In a 30-foot room, that's a minimum 30-inch display width — roughly 100 inches diagonal for a 16:9 panel.
Most commercial boardrooms use displays that are too small for the room by this metric, which means attendees at the far end of the table can't comfortably read normal presentation text.
Placement matters as much as size. A display mounted too high creates neck strain for extended meetings. Side walls work better than end walls in very long, narrow rooms where viewers are at extreme off-axis angles. Two smaller displays positioned down the room often serve attendees better than one large display at the end.
Audio: the half that's almost always wrong
Audio is where most boardroom specifications fail. The problem is usually one or more of:
Under-powered or incorrectly placed ceiling speakers. A room with four ceiling speakers for a 1,000 sq ft space and no acoustic treatment will have intelligibility problems. Ceiling speakers have wide dispersion — they fill a volume of space with sound, which also means that sound reflects off hard surfaces and arrives at the listener's ear multiple times from different angles. In a room with a glass wall, a stone floor, and a reflective ceiling, this creates echo and reduced speech intelligibility.
Conference microphones positioned for meetings that don't happen. A single boundary microphone in the centre of a 24-person boardroom table does not pick up the person at the far end of the table intelligibly. Distributed tabletop microphones, ceiling array microphones, or a combination of both — appropriate for the specific room geometry — are the correct answer.
Video conferencing audio not separated from room audio. A room where the video conferencing codec and the local room audio share the same output path often produces echo, audio ducking problems, and unpredictable behaviour when both are active simultaneously. The signal routing needs to be designed, not assumed.
Video conferencing integration
The platform question — Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, or a proprietary codec — should be answered before the system is specified, because different platforms have different requirements for hardware integration.
Regardless of platform, the fundamentals are the same: the camera covers the entire meeting space (not just the people sitting nearest the display), the microphone system picks up all participants intelligibly, and the audio from remote participants plays back through the room speakers at a consistent level.
PTZ cameras — pan-tilt-zoom — with auto-tracking are increasingly common in boardroom specifications. They track the active speaker automatically, eliminating the need for someone to operate the camera during a meeting. Whether this is appropriate depends on the room geometry and the meeting style.
Wireless presentation
Laptops connecting to boardroom displays via cable create a mess that clients notice. Wireless presentation systems — Barco ClickShare, Crestron AirMedia, or equivalent — allow any laptop to present without cables and without installing software in many cases.
The specification question here is whether the system needs to support guests presenting on their own devices. If so, the system needs to work without requiring a corporate network login or software installation. If it's internal-only, more options are available.
Control
The room should have one way to control it. Not a separate remote for the display, a laptop-based interface for the conferencing codec, and a building management system for the lighting. One touchscreen or keypad that puts the room into meeting mode — displays on, camera active, audio routing set, lights adjusted — and returns everything to a standby state when the meeting ends.
This requires a control system (Crestron, QSC, or equivalent) that holds the programming and provides the interface. It's not expensive relative to the display and audio equipment, and it's what makes the difference between a room that needs someone to manage it and one that works for everyone.
The question to ask any AV company before signing
Ask them to walk you through what happens when a presentation starts from cold — from the moment someone enters the room and presses the first button to the moment they're displaying their content with the conferencing system active. Every step. If the answer involves someone in IT being called, a second remote control, or a step that the presenter has to know in advance, the specification isn't finished.
If you have a commercial AV project in progress or in planning, get in touch. We work from drawings, coordinate with the fit-out team, and commission fully before handover.