Client: Hilton Hotel Barbados
Industry: Luxury Hospitality / Events & Conferencing

Challenge:
To deliver a complete AV upgrade across nine event spaces and an executive boardroom — creating a fully networked, flexible environment where any combination of rooms can share audio and video seamlessly, while remaining simple enough for hotel staff to operate confidently for any event configuration.

Solution:
A Dante-networked audio ecosystem built on Biamp Tesira, with Blustream AV-over-IP video distribution, Biamp TEC-X 1000 room control touchscreens, Sennheiser wireless microphone systems, Alfatron UC-1 wireless collaboration, and Bluesound multi-channel music streaming — all running over the hotel’s existing network infrastructure. The executive boardroom received a dedicated, simplified AV setup centred around a Biamp Tesira Forte X and PTZOptics auto-framing camera for seamless video conferencing.

The Challenge: Nine Rooms, Endless Configurations

The Hilton’s event spaces are used for everything from intimate breakout sessions to large-scale banquets and conferences. Their existing AV infrastructure couldn’t support the flexibility their clients expected. The brief covered nine distinct spaces across four venue areas:

• Ballroom 1, 2 & 3 — operable as three individual rooms, in two configurations, or combined as a single large ballroom
• Garrison Room 1, 2 & 3 — same full flexibility as the ballrooms: separate, paired, or combined
• Peninsula 1 & 2 — operable independently or as a single combined space
• Hibiscus — a standalone room operating independently

Core requirements across all nine spaces:

• Seamless Room Combining: Any room or group of rooms needed to share audio and video instantly — without requiring technical reconfiguration of physical connections.
• Simple Staff Control: Hotel staff, not dedicated AV technicians, would be operating these systems day to day. The interface needed to be intuitive enough to manage any room combination with minimal training.
• Flexible Microphone Provision: Wireless microphone systems for presentations, speeches, and events — with both XLR inputs for professional audio feeds and outputs for press connections.
• Wireless Content Sharing: Presenters and event organisers needed to share content from laptops and devices without hunting for cables or adapters.
• Music Distribution: Background music distributed across all spaces, independently controllable per zone.
• Boardroom Simplicity: The executive boardroom needed a clean, capable upgrade — without the complexity of the event spaces. Video conferencing, wireless sharing, and quality audio, kept straightforward.

Our Solution: A Networked AV Environment Built for Hospitality

Audio Distribution & Room Combining — Biamp Tesira & Dante

The audio backbone across all nine event spaces is a Biamp Tesira platform running over Dante — using the hotel’s existing network infrastructure as the transport layer. This approach eliminates the need for dedicated point-to-point audio cabling between rooms and gives the system the flexibility to route any audio source to any destination across the entire venue in real time.

Every room is equipped with a Biamp TEC-X 1000 touchscreen controller — a purpose-built interface for audio control that allows staff to manage volume, sources, and critically, the grouping and ungrouping of rooms. Combining the Ballroom into a single space, or splitting the Garrison Rooms for simultaneous breakout sessions, is handled directly from the panel on the wall — no technical knowledge required.

Background Music — Bluesound B400S

Background music across the venue is provided by a Bluesound B400S four-channel streaming player, connected directly to the Biamp Tesira system. Four independent music streams can run simultaneously, with each room or zone independently selecting which stream to play — giving the hotel complete flexibility to set the right atmosphere in each space regardless of what’s happening elsewhere in the venue.

Wireless Microphones & XLR Infrastructure — Shure & Dante Wall Plates

For event audio, the hotel has four Shure BLX24R SM58 wireless handheld microphone systems — reliable, excellent-sounding, and well-suited to the range of events the Hilton hosts.

Each room is also fitted with a 2×2 Dante wall plate providing two XLR inputs and two XLR outputs directly on the wall. The inputs allow any XLR microphone or audio source to be connected and routed through the Dante network, while the outputs serve as press feeds — giving broadcast teams a clean audio tap without any additional infrastructure.

Speaker Systems

Speaker selection was tailored to the acoustic demands of each space:

• Ballroom 1, 2 & 3 — Biamp 10″ high-power ceiling speakers paired with subwoofers, providing the headroom and low-end extension needed for large-scale events, live speeches, and high-energy functions
• Garrison Rooms, Peninsula 1 & 2, Hibiscus — Sonance ceiling speakers delivering clean, even coverage suited to conferencing, presentations, and background music in mid-sized spaces

Video Distribution — Blustream AV-over-IP & HDMI Wall Plates

Video is distributed across all rooms using Blustream’s AV-over-IP system, with HDMI wall plates at presentation points in each room acting as transmitters. Any source connected at a wall plate — a laptop, a presentation PC, a camera feed — can be routed to any display in any room across the venue.

This means a presenter in Ballroom 1 can have their content simultaneously shown in Garrison Room 2 and Peninsula 1 for overflow audiences, or each room can display entirely independent content for parallel events — all managed through the Blustream system without touching a single cable.

Wireless Content Sharing — Alfatron UC-1

Every room is equipped with an Alfatron UC-1 wireless collaboration device and its USB-C dongle, allowing presenters to share content from any laptop wirelessly — plug in the dongle, tap the button, and your screen is on the display. No app, no network login, no fumbling with cables during a live event. Clean, fast, and reliable.

Executive Boardroom — Simplified, Capable & Conference-Ready

The boardroom brief was deliberately different: capable and professional, but without the complexity of the event spaces. The client wanted something their team could use confidently for day-to-day meetings and video calls.

The boardroom setup includes:

• PTZOptics auto-framing PTZ camera — automatically tracks and frames participants without requiring a dedicated camera operator
• Biamp tabletop microphones — clean, professional audio capture for in-room participants
• Alfatron UC-1 with USB-C dongle — wireless content sharing and the primary connection point for Zoom, tying the camera and microphone into a single, simple conferencing experience
• Biamp Tesira Forte X — serves as the audio system and the conferencing host, handling echo cancellation and audio processing for video calls
• Alfatron auto switcher with HDBaseT extender — manages HDMI sources from desk cutout ports and extends the signal cleanly to the display
• Sonos Beam soundbar — chosen specifically to meet the client’s policy against surface-mounted speakers, delivering clear, quality room audio without any wall fixings

The UC-1 acts as the connective thread of the room — the dongle plugs into a laptop for wireless sharing, while the UC-1 itself bridges the Biamp audio system and PTZOptics camera into a single Zoom-ready setup. Simple for the user, technically solid underneath.

Key Learnings & Our Commitment to Excellence

1. Using Existing Infrastructure Intelligently
Running the entire Dante audio network over the hotel’s existing network — rather than pulling dedicated AV cabling — required careful VLAN planning and close coordination with the hotel’s IT team. Getting this right from the start was essential to the system’s reliability and is a model we now apply across all large hospitality deployments.

2. Speaker Specification Must Match the Space
A single speaker type across nine rooms of varying size and function would have been a compromise everywhere. Specifying Biamp high-power speakers with subwoofers for the ballrooms, and Sonance ceiling speakers for the mid-sized rooms, means every space sounds appropriate for what it’s being used for.

3. Simplicity is a Design Decision
The boardroom brief — capable but not complex — required as much thought as the event spaces. Choosing the UC-1 as the central connection point for Zoom, camera, and wireless sharing meant the client’s team got everything they needed from one familiar interaction. Restraint in design is often harder than adding more.

4. Constraints Drive Better Solutions
The client’s policy against surface-mounted speakers in the boardroom led us to the Sonos Beam — a solution that actually suits the space well and required no compromise on audio quality. Working within client constraints often produces more considered outcomes than an open brief.

5. Flexibility Requires Rigorous Testing
With nine rooms capable of combining in multiple configurations, every possible grouping scenario had to be tested — not just the obvious ones. Room combining that works perfectly in a controlled setup can behave unexpectedly in a live event if edge cases haven’t been accounted for. We tested them all.

Results: A Venue Ready for Any Event, Any Configuration

The client is impressed with the outcome and excited to offer these capabilities to their guests and event clients. In practical terms:

• Nine event spaces fully networked for audio and video sharing — operable in any combination from a wall-mounted touchscreen, with no technical reconfiguration required.
• Four channels of independently controllable background music distributed across all zones via Bluesound B400S, integrated into the Biamp Tesira backbone.
• Shure wireless microphone systems and Dante XLR wall plates in every room, with press output capability built in as standard.
• Blustream AV-over-IP video distribution allowing any source to appear on any screen across the entire venue — simultaneously if needed.
• Wireless content sharing via Alfatron UC-1 in every room — plug in, press a button, present.
• Speaker systems specified individually for each space — high-power Biamp with subwoofers in the ballrooms, Sonance ceiling speakers throughout the remaining rooms.
• A clean, capable executive boardroom with auto-framing video conferencing, wireless sharing, and a Sonos Beam soundbar — fully Zoom-ready without surface-mounted hardware.