Spanning 13 floors and more than 75 meeting rooms in the heart of Sydney CBD, the 180 George Street facility is a lesson in scaling AV infrastructure across a global standard without losing sight of the people who use it every day.
The space at 180 George Street in Sydney is a 13-floor tenancy running from Level 39 to Level 53 that stands as one of the most effectively fitted out, corporate AV deployments.
The project was delivered by Diversified and the scale of the installation alone gives some sense of the client’s ambition. Across the building there are more than 75 meeting rooms, over 100 Q-SYS NV encoders and decoders, approximately 500 background music speakers, a 110-seat auditorium, divisible training rooms, and an innovation centre occupying its own dedicated floor.
Every room, every floor, and every system is tied together by consistent global standards and keeping all of it running day-to-day is the job of Dipen Patel, resident technician at Diversified, and stationed on site at the facility.
A Google house, with caveats
180 Geroge Street runs on the full Google Workspace suite. In the context of corporate AV deployments across the Asia Pacific region, where Office 365 is the near-universal default, this is unusual and the choice of platform influences every aspect of the technology deployment.
Patel expands: “The client uses Google, and Google and Microsoft don’t really work together. But in today’s corporate workplace you cannot completely tie yourself to one platform. Which is why while Google is the most widely used platform, we went down the BYOD route and use Zoom PCs to support a wide range of communication and collaboration options.”
The primary conferencing platform throughout the building is Google Meet, delivered via dedicated Chromebox for Meeting (CFM) units. Each Chromebox acts as the room’s intelligence. It handles the meeting interface, manages the camera and microphone inputs, and drives the displays. The simplicity of the platform is, according to Patel, one of its genuine advantages: “Having had the opportunity to experience working with Microsoft Teams, I can honestly say Google Meet is much simpler. It’s far less complex and much easier to join. Even when users visit the George Street office, they pick it up very quickly.”
The reality of operating in a customer-facing environment demands flexibility. An update has added native Zoom support directly to the Chromebox platform which has had an impact on the spaces at 180 George Street. The boardroom now operates as a ‘Meet platform with Zoom home screen’. In effect, users can join a Zoom meeting directly from the Google interface without switching devices.
Microsoft Teams proved a harder integration challenge and was ultimately handled differently. Patel states: “We tried to integrate Teams as well, but it’s very complex. Teams has its own licensing and everything works differently.”
The solution to this challenge was pragmatic. From Level 39 to 49, one room per floor was upgraded to support Microsoft Teams natively, using a Logitech Rally Bar. Patel notes: “If people need a Teams room, they know to book that specific room on their floor. Since only about 10% of meetings use Teams, one room per floor is sufficient.”
The infrastructure backbone
Q-SYS NV is the company’s selected AV-over-IP platform. With more than 100 NV units distributed across the building, it is the backbone of the entire deployment.
The decision to use Q-SYS NV was not accidental. Patel says: “The client maintains global standards across its offices. In this building, we were already using Q-SYS Cores throughout, so NV became a natural extension.”
In the boardroom alone, a single Q-SYS Core manages amplifiers, speakers, routing, and signal distribution. Google Meet connects via an encoder, which connects to a decoder, which then feeds into the switching system. In total, 14 table inputs for presentation are routed through the same system, all running under the table.
The NV infrastructure also enables one of the building’s more impressive operational capabilities in the shape of overflow management for the auditorium.
The auditorium itself holds 110 people, including the balcony. For events of up to 200 attendees, training rooms are brought into the fold via AV over IP, extending the auditorium experience across the building. Patel notes: “That’s where having NVs throughout the building really pays off.”
Monitoring is handled through Q-SYS Reflect, supplemented by platform-specific management tools such as Google Admin for the Chromebox estate, the Logitech management portal for the Rally Bar rooms, and the Zoom device management portal for the Zoom PCs.
In practice, multiple windows stay open simultaneously for monitoring. Patel says: “Each tool serves a specific purpose. If everything looks fine in one, we don’t need to open the other windows.” The most common day-to-day fault is an NV unit freezing following a network change, typically resolved remotely by identifying the affected unit in Reflect, retrieving its IP address, and rebooting it.
Building for audio equity
The boardroom’s audio design is aimed to ensure no one in the room, wherever they are sitting, should be harder to hear than anyone else. To that end, the space runs a dual microphone system. Shure MXA920 ceiling microphones supplemented by Shure table microphones are used for audio pickup, alongside a dual speaker system comprising ceiling speakers and Q-SYS speaker arrays at the front of the room.
The ceiling microphones alone proved insufficient for the customer floor. Patel elaborates: “When requests came in from quieter-voiced participants who weren’t being picked up well enough for remote participants dialling in, we added the table mics.”
The audio routing is zoned so that someone speaking on one side of the table is heard both on the other side of the room and by participants joining remotely. Voice lift technology captures audio from a given zone and distributes it both online and to the front of the room. Both microphone systems run simultaneously.
Patel adds: “It’s about achieving complete audio equity. Whoever you are and wherever you’re sitting, you’ll be heard and seen properly.” Audio distribution across the wider building runs via QSC DSP infrastructure, with approximately 500 background music speakers spread across all 13 floors.
Spaces designed around use
The 180 George Street spaces have been designed to have technology serve the users. For example, camera tracking was trialled during setup, with zones configured for board meetings, but the results were unsatisfactory.
Patel details: “There was a noticeable lag of a second or two when someone stopped talking and someone else started in a different part of the room. The client team decided they preferred static cameras.”
Equity was maintained with astute choices. A curved table design compensates for the static cameras as people seated on the sides of the table remain naturally within the camera’s field of view without requiring any active tracking.
Similar attention to detail can be seen with the display selected. The LED videowall, comprising tiles from PCB, selected in part because of the importance of local support infrastructure in the Australian market, serves as the primary display in the boardroom, driven by the Q-SYS NV routing system. A Q-SYS wall panel running on a dedicated iPad provides a backup control interface over Ethernet in case the primary system encounters a fault.
Away from the boardroom, the employee floors take a deliberately simpler approach. Huddle rooms seat five people, with a Chromebox under the table, a Samsung display, camera, microphone, speaker, and a Logitech tablet as a touch interface for room booking and meeting join. The intelligence lives entirely in the Chromebox and the tablet is a convenience layer.
Google Jamboards, positioned consistently on the same spot on every floor, provide collaborative whiteboarding with a dual-camera setup that includes active speaker tracking which the team was more comfortable deploying in smaller, more predictable spaces.
Auditorium and training rooms
For larger gatherings, the 180 George Street facility features an auditorium capable of hosting 110 people and training rooms that are both divisible and globally standardised.
Starting with the training rooms, these use Panasonic projectors, a global standard for these spaces. The training rooms are equipped with a partition sensor that automatically reconfigures the room’s AV system when the dividing door is opened or closed.
When split, each room has its own Shure wireless microphone coverage, using a mix of SLXD and MXW units. A mobile 85-in Samsung display on a cart, known internally as the ‘Rolling Thunder’, provides additional flexibility for overflow areas during large events.
The auditorium has its own dedicated specialist team for production events, with the on-site Diversified technician handling setup and technical checks but stepping back once the event is under way. For connectivity and backup, an AJA Kumo routing solution sits in the rack room infrastructure alongside the Chromebox units, NV encoders and decoders, and Zoom PCs. Cisco switches handle primary AV network switching, a departure from the Netgear switches deployed on employee floor areas.
Digital signage across the building is managed via BrightSign players connected through the NV network to a virtual BrightSign server. Content is controlled by the client’s global team.
Keeping it running
A deployment of this scale and with so many moving parts requires management, anticipation, and rapid response to keep everything running smoothly.
Diversified is actively involved in ensuring this outcome. Spare Chromeboxes, preconfigured, powered on, and continuously receiving updates, are a critical step to ensuring that if a room unit fails it can be swapped out without delay. Any Chromebox that has been offline for a period needs approximately 24 hours to catch up on updates before it is ready to deploy.
The Zoom PCs on the customer floor are being retained even now that Chromeboxes support native Zoom, serving as a deliberate redundancy layer. Full Zoom licences are maintained across the estate for the same reason. Patel notes: “If you have a critical customer meeting running over, you don’t want it cut off and have to reconnect. It doesn’t look professional.”
The building also runs on its own ticketing system, which includes AI agent capabilities and provides global visibility across offices in Sydney, Hyderabad, San Francisco, and beyond.
The 180 George Street spaces demonstrate how scale and thoughtfulness can exist and amplify the intended outcomes. When technology and intention work in tandem, the winners are the users.