A well-designed boardroom AV system should be invisible. Not invisible in the sense of you can’t see the screens—it should be obvious you can see them. Rather, it should be invisible in that nobody thinks about the technology while they’re running the meeting. They think about the content, the discussion, the decisions. The moment people start fiddling with remotes, clicking the wrong HDMI input, or squinting at a screen they can’t quite see from their seat, the technology has failed its primary job: getting out of the way.
I’ve spent the better part of two decades designing boardroom AV systems for businesses in Calgary and across Alberta across Alberta, and I can tell you that most of them have AV systems that don’t work this way. They’re over-engineered in some ways, under-engineered in others, and almost universally, they’re harder to use than they need to be. The good news is that this is a solvable problem if you understand what makes a boardroom AV system actually function well in practice.
Start With How Your Team Actually Uses the Room
Before you spec a single piece of equipment, you need to understand what meetings look like in your space. This isn’t a theoretical exercise. Spend time in the room. Watch how people arrange themselves. Do they sit around a conference table facing each other? Are there people calling in remotely? How far away are people sitting from the displays? Will presenters be standing at one end of the table or walking around the room?
This matters because it drives every other decision. If your boardroom is 20 feet long and people are sitting at a table that’s 8 feet long, you need displays sized and positioned so someone sitting at the far end can see presenter details at least 6 feet away. That’s not negotiable. The industry guideline—roughly 1.5 to 2 times the seating distance—works as a starting point, but it’s meant to be a minimum, not a target.
I’ve also noticed that people in meetings do very predictable things with technology. They’ll click one button if it solves their problem. They’ll click two buttons if the first one didn’t work. Anything beyond that, and they’ll just use their laptop audio and phone into the conference bridge instead. So if your system requires three steps to start a video call, you’ve lost them, and now you have two audio systems running at once, which creates its own problems.
Why Most Calgary Boardrooms Under-Spec Their Displays
Most boardrooms under-spec their displays. Not all, but most. I see rooms with a 55-inch TV that should have an 85-inch display, or two 75-inch displays instead of one. The reasoning is usually budget or aesthetics—the smaller display looks less corporate, somehow? That’s a false economy.
Here’s the thing: if someone can’t read the Excel spreadsheet on the screen without leaning forward and squinting, your display is too small. Worse, they’ll leave the meeting not having fully understood the data because they couldn’t see it clearly. That impacts decision-making. That’s not a nice-to-have; that’s a core business problem.
For a modern boardroom, start at 75-85 inches for seating areas up to 10 people around a table. For rooms with both table seating and standing/presentation space, consider two displays, one facing the table, one facing the presenter position. For very large boardrooms or executive briefing centers, explore larger 85-98 inch displays, or if the budget allows and space permits, consider a modest LED wall or projection system.
Display Position and Mounting Height
The position matters as much as the size. Dead center on a wall is intuitive, but if your conference table is at an angle, you might want the display angled slightly to optimize viewing angles from seating positions. This is something your AV integrator should work out in 3D before installation, not discover after the fact.
And here’s a detail people miss: refresh rate and response time. Consumer displays are fine at 60Hz and 60ms response time. For content that includes live video conferencing, smooth motion, or any kind of animation, 120Hz is preferable. When someone on a video call is moving their hand to point at something, you want that motion to be smooth, not jerky. It makes a huge difference in presence and comprehension.
Audio: Where Most Boardroom AV Systems Fail
Video gets all the attention, but audio is honestly just as important in a boardroom context. If someone can’t hear the remote participant clearly, all the video quality in the world doesn’t matter. Yet regularly boardrooms have a single speaker mounted above the display, trying to serve 12 people sitting 15 feet away. That’s not going to work.
A proper boardroom audio system distributes sound. It might be ceiling speakers in zones, or it might be a combination of speakers at different locations. The goal is that everyone in the room hears video conference participants at a consistent level without having to turn their head to listen. That requires some planning and usually some acoustic treatment.
You also need to think about microphones. Open-ceiling conference rooms (increasingly common in modern offices) are terrible for audio because sound bounces everywhere. A good boundary microphone or microphone array designed for conference tables picks up voices from people around the table without picking up the HVAC noise or whoever’s keyboard clacking three cubicles over. This is non-negotiable if you’re recording meetings or streaming them to remote participants.
Most people don’t realize that professional-grade conference microphones have DSP (digital signal processing) built in. They apply noise gating, echo cancellation, and other processing in real-time to make sure your video conference sounds like you’re in the same room, not like you’re calling from inside a wind tunnel. This is why a $1,200 Shure conference microphone sounds so much better than a $40 USB mic, even if both technically pick up voice.
Control Systems That People Will Actually Use
The biggest mistake in boardroom design is over-complicated control. Install a touch panel, people don’t know what the buttons do, and suddenly your $30,000 AV system is being controlled by someone’s personal Chromecast and a Bluetooth speaker they brought from home.
The solution is radical simplification. A modern boardroom system should have: One button to start a local meeting (turn on displays, set audio levels, ready the system); One button to join a video conference (ideally this integrates with your calendar and recognizes meeting codes from your Outlook calendar); One button to present (switch input to presenter laptop/mobile, adjust displays as needed); One way to get help (phone extension or on-screen button that flags support, not a panel full of obscure options).
This is why commercial control systems from vendors like Crestron or Q-SYS exist—they handle these workflows automatically, rather than requiring the user to manually sequence ten steps. It’s not overkill; it’s the difference between a system people actually use and a system people avoid.
Video Conferencing Camera Placement
This is important: if your boardroom supports video conferencing, design it as if the remote participants are actually sitting at your table. The camera should be positioned so remote participants see faces, not the tops of heads or the ceiling. Usually this means mounting it at or slightly above human eye level, which is maybe 4-5 feet high. The display showing remote participants should be positioned near the camera, so when people are looking at the screen, they’re not turning their back on the camera. Eye contact matters even in video calls. Test the whole setup with actual people sitting in actual seats. Have someone call in from another office and check: can they see people’s faces? Can they read the whiteboard if someone uses it? Can they see the slide deck?
Many boardrooms have the camera positioned at the top of the display, which means everyone on the video call sees people looking down at their laps. It’s distracting and creates the impression that nobody’s actually paying attention. Small positioning detail; big impact on meeting quality.
Network Infrastructure Planning
All of this assumes you have the network infrastructure to support it. A single network cable to the boardroom isn’t enough anymore. Modern boardrooms need multiple gigabit connections—one for the video conferencing system, one for wireless mirroring/casting, potentially one for backup. If your network can’t sustain that, your AV system will randomly drop connections during important presentations.
This is where AV and IT teams need to collaborate from day one. The AV system doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s part of your network infrastructure, and it needs the same care and attention you’d give to any other critical business system.
Building a Boardroom That Works
At the end of the day, a well-designed boardroom AV system should pass a simple test: does it disappear during the meeting? Do people focus on the content and the discussion, not on making the technology work? Can someone who’s never used the system before walk in and start a meeting without calling for help?
If you can answer yes to those questions, the system is doing its job. All the fancy displays and processing power in the world doesn’t matter if nobody can actually use it. Build for simplicity first, capability second, and the rest will follow.
Need Help Designing Your Boardroom AV System?
At Fermi AV, we design and install boardroom AV systems for businesses across Calgary, Banff, Edmonton, and all of Alberta. Whether you’re upgrading an existing space or building out a new boardroom, we’ll design a system your team will actually use. Get a free consultation to discuss your project.