Why most boardrooms fail
The typical meeting room is specified by whoever happens to be fitting out the building — an electrical contractor, a furniture supplier, sometimes an IT department working from a budget line rather than a brief. A screen goes on the wall, a soundbar or speakerphone goes on the table, and a few HDMI leads get left coiled up for whoever needs them. It works, in the sense that a call eventually connects. It doesn't work in the sense that matters: nobody in the room can hear clearly, remote participants get a washed-out picture of a whiteboard nobody thought to angle a camera toward, and every meeting starts with five minutes of someone fiddling with cables.
A well-designed boardroom starts from a different question: how is this room actually used? A twelve-seat boardroom used mainly for board meetings with the odd international dial-in needs a different specification to a six-person huddle room used for back-to-back video calls all day. Getting that brief right before any hardware is chosen is what separates a system that gets used properly from one that gets quietly worked around.
Video conferencing: cameras, microphones and speakers
Video conferencing quality comes down to three things working together — camera, microphone and speaker — and all three need to be matched to the room, not bought as a single bundled soundbar because it was the easiest option.
For camera coverage, we specify units with genuine auto-framing: the camera intelligently frames whoever is speaking, or the whole table, rather than leaving remote participants staring at an empty chair while everyone else huddles at one end. For microphone pickup, ceiling or table-mounted arrays with proper beamforming pick up every voice in the room evenly, rather than favouring whoever happens to be sitting closest to a single desktop puck. Speaker placement matters just as much as microphone placement — audio needs to be intelligible from every seat, not just the one nearest the screen.
We work with Crestron and Barco for the conferencing and presentation layer, alongside AudioControl for amplification where a room needs proper distributed sound rather than a single soundbar. The combination of good hardware, correctly positioned, is what makes the difference between a call people dread and one nobody thinks twice about.
Wireless presentation and one-touch joining
The single biggest source of friction in most meeting rooms is getting content onto the screen. Hunting for the right cable, downloading a dongle driver, or waiting for someone to find the right adapter wastes real time in every single meeting, every single day.
Barco's ClickShare wireless presentation systems solve this properly — a single button press shares a laptop screen with no cable, no app installation, no fuss, and it works identically whether the laptop is Windows, Mac or a tablet. Paired with a Crestron control system, we set rooms up so that joining a scheduled video call is genuinely one touch: walk in, tap the panel, you're live. No hunting for meeting IDs, no remembering which app the client uses this week.
Acoustics: the part nobody budgets for
A boardroom with a glass wall, a hard floor and a bare ceiling will sound poor no matter how good the microphones are. Hard, parallel surfaces create reflections and reverberation that make speech harder to understand — both in the room and, worse, for anyone dialling in remotely, where a poor acoustic environment gets picked up by the microphone and transmitted to every other participant.
Simple acoustic treatment — ceiling rafts, fabric wall panels, acoustic plaster, or even well-placed soft furnishings — makes a disproportionate difference to how a room sounds and how well conferencing microphones perform. We factor acoustic treatment into every commercial AV specification, because no amount of hardware compensates for a room that's fighting against it.
Lighting, control and the environment
Video conferencing cameras need consistent, even light to produce a good image — overhead downlights that leave faces in shadow, or a bright window behind the seating position, will undermine even the best camera. We integrate KNX or Lutron lighting control with preset scenes for presentation mode, video call mode and general meeting use, so the room automatically sets itself up correctly rather than relying on someone remembering to adjust the blinds.
A single Crestron touch panel typically ties the whole room together — lighting scenes, blinds, screen power, audio volume and the conferencing platform itself, all from one interface. The result is a room that behaves consistently every time it's used, regardless of who's running the meeting.
Networking: the infrastructure nobody sees
None of the above works reliably without solid network infrastructure behind it. Video conferencing is genuinely demanding of bandwidth and, more importantly, of stability — a network that's fine for email and web browsing can still produce a laggy, dropping video call under load. We specify Ruckus wireless access points and Araknis or Alta Labs networking equipment for commercial installations, with dedicated VLANs to keep AV traffic separate from general office traffic. It's invisible when it's working properly, which is exactly the point.
On future-proofing: we always design commercial AV systems with headroom — enough cabling infrastructure, PoE capacity and control system scalability that adding a second screen, upgrading a camera, or extending the system to another room doesn't mean ripping out what's already there.
What does a proper boardroom system cost?
A well-specified system for a mid-sized boardroom — 4K display or dual-screen setup, ceiling microphone array, PTZ or auto-framing camera, Barco ClickShare, Crestron control and basic acoustic treatment — typically starts from around £15,000–£25,000 installed, depending on room size and existing infrastructure. Larger boardrooms, multi-room deployments, or more extensive acoustic works will increase that. As with any commercial project, we survey the room, understand how it's actually used, and provide a fixed-price proposal before committing to anything.
If you'd like to see this equipment working rather than read about it, our showroom in Maidenhead has a live demonstration of Crestron control, Barco wireless presentation and conferencing audio set up exactly as it would be in a client's boardroom — genuinely the best way to judge how a system feels to use day to day.
Thinking About Upgrading Your Meeting Rooms?
Get in touch or come and see the equipment for yourself at our Maidenhead showroom. We'll give you an honest view of what your rooms need — no hard sell.