Crestron NVX and Q-SYS form the backbone of a multi-year AV infrastructure overhaul completed at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York ahead of last week’s 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, moving the venue from a point-to-point HDBaseT architecture to an AVoIP system.
Fernando Mora, VP of AV and multimedia for the museum, said the original infrastructure, designed in the early 2010s, had continued to serve the venue well – the upgrade was driven by AVoIP’s distributed capabilities rather than any failure of HDBaseT itself. “Ultimately, its distributed nature allowed us to build a master control room which became the orchestration layer for our entire venue,” he said.
The project began in 2023 with a migration from a CobraNet-based Layer 2 audio architecture to a Layer 3, IP-based Q-SYS processing platform, with Q-SYS Control incorporated during planning. The team then replaced the museum’s existing Crestron DM system with NVX AVoIP infrastructure across the exhibition areas, auditorium, digital signage and four classrooms.
For the auditorium, this included an end-to-end 4K production workflow comprising a Christie 4K laser projector, Panasonic 4K production cameras, a Vizrt TriCaster TC2 Elite switcher with 4K monitoring and a DiGiCo audio console, supported by a NETGEAR M4300 switch configured with assistance from NETGEAR Professional Services.
Mora said Crestron NVX was a logical extension of the museum’s existing Crestron infrastructure and technician expertise. He added: “All our technicians are either programmers or DMC-E-NVX. It allowed us to move into AV over IP while building upon technology, programming expertise, and support for this new infrastructure.”
AVI-SPL’s Symphony was selected for system monitoring to provide context-aware status information, since a device that is offline may be normal at certain times of day and abnormal at others depending on the museum’s operating hours.
As the upgrade extended into the museum’s collaboration and education spaces in 2026, four classrooms were upgraded to support Microsoft Teams Rooms using the Q-SYS UC platform, while six corporate conference rooms received Neat Bar Pro systems. Mora added that the team has also begun replacing legacy exhibit media players with Hive Media’s Osmia 4K players to modernise content delivery.
For the 25th anniversary, the infrastructure will support a new exhibit, In Their Honor, alongside a live national primetime broadcast from Memorial Plaza featuring the Tribute in Light installation.
Mora said the project was deliberately phased in layers – audio processing and control, then AVoIP transport, then collaboration spaces, then media playback – allowing modernisation of a large, operational facility while continuing to support daily visitor programming throughout.
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