GateWay Community College (GCC) in Phoenix, Arizona, with its approximately 13,000 students, is part of the largest community college district in the United States. The college added 23 new classrooms, a PC networking lab, vocational skills labs, two conference rooms, and a tri-divisible multi-purpose room. They also remodeled the Mariscopa Skill Center, a vocational school and division of GCC.
The new 125,000 square-foot Integrated Education Building has 15 dual-screen classrooms, a single-screen art studio and a three-screen multi-purpose room with a seating capacity of over 200 seats.
Challenge
GateWay Community College wanted a state-of-the-art AV system and IT classrooms to complement their new Integrated Education Building and remodeled Maricopa Skill Center. The system needed to allow students and faculty access to digital AV and HDCP content in a simple-to-use configuration.
They wanted an intuitive model that would be identical in all rooms to reduce the frequency of troubleshooting by technical support staff. They also needed to integrate digital and analog devices in the classrooms and reduce the size and cost of lectern-to-projector cabling.
Solution
The GateWay AV team selected a slim lectern to house the core of the classroom system: the Kramer VP-729 ProScale® digital scaler/switcher and Kramer TP-573 and TP-574 DGKat™ twisted pair transmitters/receivers for HDMI, bidirectional RS-232 and IR signals.
The VP-729 sits at the heart of the conference rooms. They added videoconferencing equipment and a 60- or 70-inch display. The multi-purpose rooms follow the same configuration and include a Kramer VS-66HDCPxl 6x6 DVI Matrix switcher, TP-581T/582R HDBaseT twisted pair transmitters/receivers, and FC-46xl audio de-embedders.
"After comparing the features, complexity and pricing of a variety of products, we decided to use Kramer as a core infrastructure in designing our standardized classroom because it met our needs to handle both HDMI and HDCP," said Senadz Lubovac, Coordinator of Audiovisual Information Technology at GateWay Community College.
Results
"This design with the VP-729 scaler/switcher as the backbone enables us to display any analog or digital AV device on the screens with easy interface control," said Lubovac. "In addition, Kramer's pricing made a real difference," he added.