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City Winery Spotlights ELAN Control with AV Upgrade

City Winery venues across the United States combine a fully functioning winery with intimate concerts, food and wine classes, fine dining, and more.

City Winery venues across the United States combine a fully functioning winery with intimate concerts, food and wine classes, fine dining, and more. With more than 300 events in 2016, City Winery decided that it was time to redesign and renovate its AV technology to communicate across each venue’s many rooms. To do so, they called on Nashville-based technology integration firm, Tour Supply Inc.

“We were approached to help design a new AV system in City Winery’s Nashville location that would connect all technology through a singular interface,” said technology integrator Lance Wascom of Tour Supply. “We suggested that ELAN serve as the venue’s ‘brain,’ and built out the system from there. Following an incredibly successful installation, City Winery asked us to design expanded AV renovations for its Atlanta, New York, and Washington, DC locations.”

The systems across City Winery’s multiple locations are nearly identical. Wascom and his team installed one ELAN gMV1616 HDMI 16×16 Matrix and two ELAN gSC10 System Controllers to distribute the content and automate it. They also integrated seven ELAN gTP7 in-wall touchpanels, one ELAN KP7, and the ELAN app on employees’ phones, which enables instant control from anywhere. Now, any employee in the New York, Atlanta, Washington, DC, and Nashville locations can control the venue’s many displays, televisions, and projectors, as well as the extensive multiroom audio and integrated lighting systems. “We replicated the system across multiple locations because it works so well,” Wascom said.

Wascom and his team use one ELAN gMV1616 HDMI 16×16 Matrix with 72 audio input paths and 64 audio output paths to carry HDCP-compliant HDMI, Ethernet, serial, and IR signals over a single cable via HDBaseT. Now, City Winery can easily distribute audio and video via a Cat-5 cable and convert it into HDMI to distribute to audio and video devices throughout the facility. Since the venue often holds various events that use both professional and commercial audio simultaneously, the need to distribute multiple signal types is of the utmost importance.

“City Winery will often hold a private dinner, cooking class, and concert simultaneously, in different rooms of the same venue,” Wascom said. “Each of these events requires a unique audio and video signal. With only one ELAN gMV1616, we can distribute that content seamlessly. And through the ELAN controller, we are able to automate each device.”

City Winery’s managers and bartenders have control over the ELAN touchpanels when appropriate. The system is separated into zones by room; if a manager is overseeing a private dining event, he or she can easily control the lighting, audio, and video within that part of the facility. Or, they could simply click a “dinner party” setting and have all various commands occur simultaneously.

“We absolutely love the new system’s ease of use,” said City Winery vice president of business and venue development, Greg Kitowicz. “The instant control allows our staff to change the ambiance on the fly as needed. Particularly, having the mobile app has been a game changer for all five of our facilities. It’s very convenient.”

Additionally, 24 Lutron RadioRA2 Decora Dimmers, four Lutron RadioRA2 Dimming LED Drivers, and four Lutron RadioRA2 Wall Mount Keypads are integrated into the ELAN system to enable instant control and automation of the venue’s sophisticated lighting system. “The lighting varies significantly from room to room,” Wascom said. “We integrated stage lighting into the same system that we integrated recessed mood lighting into. We ended up with 40 dimmable loads of Lutron including PHPM power extenders, LED drivers, and 0-10V dimming modules. It was a very sophisticated system to build, but it works flawlessly.”

The venue also uses multiple displays throughout, especially in the concert venue area. To ensure that each display receives a clean signal input, Tour Supply integrated a Gefen EXT-HD-DSMP Digital Signage Media Player. Through it, they can easily distribute digital signage content to multiple displays across the venue. “This product is perfect for this application because it supports up to 1080p video HDMI,” Wascom said. “The displays can receive this high-resolution content, and we can configure it to be controlled with ELAN.”

Additionally, with stricter fire codes from the facilities management, it was necessary for ELAN to become part of the fire control system. “When an alarm event goes off, the ELAN system mutes all audio outputs, disables all TVs and projectors, retracts the screen, and turns every light on in the facility as well as sets the stage lighting to a neutral state,” Wascom said.

With so much high-end equipment working together, Wascom and his team recommended that each City Winery location back up their products with Furman power conditioning products. They integrated a Furman F1500-UPS Uninterruptible Power Supply into the AV system’s central equipment rack to ensure that the system would remain intact in the event of a power outage, and installed six Furman PST-8 Power Conditioners with Series Multi-Stage Protection Plus (SMP+) to guarantee that all the system’s AV components receive clean power. “We also utilized the BlueBOLT remote energy management to allow the F1500 to automatically power-cycle the cable modem after an outage is detected. It triggers automated events to the system based on power conditions,” he added.

Tour Supply is now working on replicating the AV renovation again, this time in City Winery’s brand new Boston location. “I highly recommend that other venues invest in a smart control solution, and ELAN in particular,” Kitowicz said. “It’s a one-stop shop for total control, enabling you and your staff to improve the customer experience. We look forward to utilizing cutting-edge control in even more locations to come.”

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