Four Things You Need to Get Right Before Designing a Meeting Room AV System
- Chris Gore
- 2 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Four things you need to get right before designing a meeting room AV system. Most projects skip at least one of them. That is why they fail.
Chris Gore | Updated 2026
Most meeting room AV projects go wrong before a single piece of hardware is ordered. Not because the technology is bad. Because nobody worked through four basic things before deciding what to buy. The design phase. The technology selection. The IT integration. And the monitoring. Miss any one of them and the project delivers a room that looks fine from the outside and fails the moment someone presses start.
This is the framework SPOR Group uses on every project. It is not complicated. But the number of AV installations that skip one or more of these steps, and the number of clients who call us in afterwards to fix someone else's car crash, is consistent enough that it is worth writing down.
The Problem With Most Meeting Room AV Projects
A design company recently specified fabric ceiling panels directly over the microphone positions in a meeting room. Nobody on the AV side had been consulted during the design phase. The fabric went in. The microphones went in underneath it. The room sounded terrible. Entirely avoidable. The clue is in the name — audio visual. The acoustic properties of the space are not a detail. They are fundamental to whether the audio actually works.
This happens because the four things below are not being done in order, or in some cases not being done at all.
Thing One: Build the Design Before You Touch the Technology
When a client hands over a floor plan and asks for an AV price, nine times out of ten that floor plan contains no information about how the room will actually be used. No platform. No user profile. No acoustic context. No indication of whether people need to read individual cells in an Excel spreadsheet from the far end of the table or whether the room is used for pitch decks where colour contrast matters more than resolution.
The design phase is where you answer four questions before touching a spec sheet.
What do people need to be able to see?
Display type, size and position. Projector, LCD or LED. Single or dual display. The display specification should be driven by what people need to read and from how far away. A room where people share spreadsheets needs a display large enough for someone at the far end of the table to read individual cells. A room used for pitch decks has different requirements.
What microphones does the room need?
Table microphones, ceiling arrays or lapel mics each have different use cases and limitations. The choice depends on how the room is used, how many people it holds and what the acoustic properties of the space are. Glass walls, marble tables and solid flooring produce a very different acoustic environment from a carpeted room with fabric partitions. Specifying ceiling microphones into a fully reverberant space without acoustic treatment is a common and expensive mistake.
What speakers does the room need?
A soundbar at the front of a twenty-two-person meeting room cannot project clearly to the far end of the table. Ceiling speakers distributed throughout the room are the right answer for larger spaces. The speaker specification follows from the room dimensions and the number of people, not from what comes in the box with the video bar.
How will people control the room?
Walking in and plugging in a laptop. Pressing a button on a wall panel. Touching a tablet on the table. The control method determines the user experience for everyone who uses the room every day. It needs to be specified during the design phase, not added as an afterthought after everything else has been installed.
Thing Two: Select the Technology After the Design — Not Before
The design phase produces a functionality brief. What the room needs to do. What platform it runs on. What the acoustic constraints are. What the control requirements are. The technology selection answers one question: what hardware delivers that functionality at the available budget?
A quick rule of thumb for any fit-out or refurbishment project: take ten percent of the total project budget and assign it to AV. That budget then narrows the technology choice. High budget and a requirement for enterprise-grade performance — you are looking at Cisco. Tight budget but needing full video conferencing functionality — you are looking at Yealink. Mid-range with a Microsoft 365 estate — Logitech or Neat.
The technology is the answer to two questions: what does the room need and what is the budget? Those two things decide the manufacturer. Not the other way around. Use the AV pricing estimator to get a realistic budget figure before any supplier conversation.
Thing Three: AV Integration Is Not Optional
Hanging hardware on a wall is not AV integration. It is the part that most people who say they can do AV skip entirely. SPOR Group gets called in regularly to audit rooms where another company did the project. The pattern is consistent: screens on walls, cameras on walls, no coordination with the IT infrastructure, no network configuration, no testing. The client moves into a shiny new office and the AV is a car crash.
Three weeks ago we were asked to audit exactly this. A client was refusing to sign off the final invoice because the AV was not working. The technology the other company had deployed was not even that bad. It was the way it had been installed. Nothing was talking to anything else. No network coordination. No infrastructure integration. We went in, made the connections that should have been made during the project, and got the system working.
IT and AV are not the same thing, but they are closely related. Bandwidth requirements.
Network security policies. Device authentication. VLAN configuration. All of this needs to be confirmed with the client's IT team during the project planning phase. If nobody has had that conversation before day one of the fit-out, the person on the far end of the first Teams call is going to be pixelated. The audio is going to be terrible. And it is entirely avoidable. Read what is an AV integrator and what do they actually do for the full picture on what integration actually means.
Thing Four: Proactively Monitor Every Device From Day One
The most important thing for keeping a meeting room estate working reliably over time is not the hardware. It is the monitoring. Every device, every camera, every microphone, every display, every room booking panel — all of it watched in real time so that faults are caught before they affect meetings rather than during them.
Twelve people sat around a boardroom table on a Monday morning. Someone presses start. The camera does not work. That is reactive management. The head is on fire. People are scrambling for another room. New invites are going out to the far end participants. The meeting has already failed before it started.
SPORTrack monitors every device across every SPOR Group deployment globally. A camera goes offline in Paris on Thursday. The helpdesk receives a notification. A call goes to the client. If it cannot be fixed remotely, someone is on site the next business day. The room is back online five days before the board meeting that would have exposed the fault. The board never knows anything was wrong. That is what proactive monitoring looks like in practice.
SPOR Group applies all four of these things on every project. Design before technology. Technology matched to the brief and budget. Full IT and AV integration. And SPORTrack monitoring from day one. If you are ready to start planning a project, use the AV brief generator to produce a structured brief.
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