Quick Answer: Restrepo Innovations designed and built the Chatham Asset Management office in NJ. The headline is a custom Crestron trade-desk audio solution that lets any of 30 traders listen to any of 6 wall-mounted TVs independently, by speaker or headphone, controlled from a Crestron remote, touchscreen, or iPhone. The full scope: 16 NVX displays across the trading floor, three Crestron conference rooms with full DSP and cameras running Microsoft Teams Rooms, 12 Hikvision cameras, two access-controlled doors, an isolated Araknis AV network, a gym, and the structured cabling and main AV rack built from the studs. The principal of Chatham has been a Restrepo client for over 12 years. We still service it.
Most office case studies on integrator websites are surface deep. A boardroom photo, a logo, a vendor list. This one is the opposite. We designed and built the Chatham Asset Management office in NJ from the structured cabling up. Here is what we put in, why we built it the way we built it, and what makes the trade-desk audio solution something most integrators do not bother to engineer properly.
Chatham Asset Management is a NJ-based credit fund. The office runs a 30-seat trading floor, three conference rooms, an executive perimeter, an IT room, and a gym. The standard for the room is whether a trader at any seat can do their job without thinking about the AV system. That is the only metric that matters on a trading floor.
The Headline: Any of 6 TVs to Any of 30 Seats, Speaker or Headphone
The trade-desk audio problem is one most integrators get wrong. A trading floor has six TVs on the wall (in this case CNBC, Bloomberg, and four other market feeds). Thirty traders sit at the long custom desk. Each trader watches whichever feed matters to their book at that moment. The audio problem is that each trader needs a different channel of audio, and no two traders need the same one.
The two common solutions both fail. Pipe one TV's audio through the ceiling speakers and the whole floor hears the same channel, which means no one can listen to their own book. Put little speakers under every TV and the room becomes a noise pit, which means no one can hear anything. Neither is acceptable on a credit fund trading floor.
The third option is the one we engineered. Every one of the 30 trading seats has a small speaker at the position and a headphone jack at the position. Every seat can independently select which of the 6 TVs to listen to, and whether to listen through the local speaker or through headphones. One trader picks Bloomberg through headphones for a Fed announcement. The trader next to him picks CNBC through the desk speaker for background. The trader three seats down picks the same Bloomberg feed but routes it to the local speaker because she wants her neighbor to hear the same call. None of them step on each other.
The control surface for each trader is whichever they prefer in the moment. A Crestron handheld remote at the desk. A Crestron touchscreen mounted to the desk. An iPhone or iPad running the Crestron mobile app. Three control paths to the same source selection, all live, all synced.
This works because the whole video and audio system runs on a Crestron NVX backbone, not on a HDMI matrix switcher and a separate audio matrix. NVX moves the video as IP packets, decodes the audio at each endpoint, and lets the Crestron control system route any audio stream to any seat independently of any video stream. One system, one network, one control philosophy.
The Full Office: 16 NVX Displays Across Trading Floor, Conference Rooms, and Gym
The 6 trading-floor TVs are part of a 16-display NVX network that covers the whole office. The three conference rooms each have a display on the NVX backbone, which means a market feed from the trading floor can be pulled into a conference room mid-meeting, or a presentation from a laptop in the boardroom can be pushed to a TV on the trading floor if the head of trading needs every seat to see it at once. Any source to any display, anywhere on the floor.
The gym at the back of the office has two more NVX TVs and ceiling speakers, with a Crestron remote that lets users pick the source and the audio independently, the same way the trading floor does. One control philosophy across the whole office. A trader who walks back to the gym between market open and market close uses the same interaction pattern they use at their desk.
Three Crestron Conference Rooms, All Microsoft Teams Rooms
The office has a large boardroom, a mid-size conference room, and a huddle room. Every room is full Crestron: Crestron DSP, Crestron cameras, Crestron control, single front-of-room display. Every room runs Microsoft Teams Rooms as the primary video conferencing platform with Zoom interop for the cases where a counterparty insists on Zoom.
The decision to standardize on full Crestron in every room instead of a Crestron Flex bar or a third-party DSP is deliberate. One stack means one support model, one training, one fleet. When the IT director at Chatham picks up the phone six months from now because the boardroom camera is acting up, the answer is the same as it was when the huddle room had the same issue last quarter. That consistency is what makes the system serviceable at the speed a credit fund operates.
Cameras, Access Control, and the Isolated AV Network
The office is covered by 12 Hikvision cameras. Two doors are on access control: the main entrance to the office and the door to the server room. That is the right security posture for a credit fund of this size. The front door keeps the public out. The server room door keeps everyone except IT and us out of the rack. Tiered by definition, not over-engineered.
The whole AV side of the network runs on Araknis switches, isolated from Chatham's corporate IT network. This matters more than it sounds. When AV traffic and corporate traffic share a switch, every AV problem becomes an IT ticket and every IT change request becomes a risk to the trading floor. By running our own Araknis backbone for the NVX video, the Crestron control system, and the cameras, we removed that interlock entirely. Chatham's IT team never has to troubleshoot AV problems on their switches. We never have to coordinate with their change-management process to push a Crestron firmware update. Two networks, two responsibilities, one clean handoff at the demarc.
Cable and Rack: Built From the Studs
Restrepo pulled the structured cabling and built the main AV rack on this project. That detail matters because most integrators show up at trim and inherit somebody else's rough-in. When you inherit cable, you inherit cable problems. When you pull your own cable, you can guarantee what is at the end of every run, what is labeled, and what the bend radius looks like behind every wall plate.
Same with the rack. The Chatham main AV rack was built from empty up by our team. Every NVX transmitter and receiver is labeled and patched cleanly. Every Crestron processor and DSP is on UPS and on managed power. The cable management is dressed. The IT director at Chatham can open the rack at any hour and see what is in it without a flashlight and a prayer.
The Relationship Behind the Build
The principal of Chatham Asset Management has been a Restrepo Innovations client for over 12 years. His Maplewood NJ residence was the first project Restrepo ever did. He gave us a 300,000 dollar full-Crestron home as our first job, and that project won the Crestron Global Home Technology Award for 2018-2019. We have worked with him continuously since. We handle his residential properties. We designed and built the Chatham office. We still service all of it today.
That is the long version of why this case study matters. The short version is that a sophisticated client who could hire any integrator on the East Coast has chosen Restrepo Innovations for over a decade across his homes and his offices. That is the trust signal. We do not need to invent one.
“Chatham is the longest client relationship in the company. It started with one home in Maplewood, the project that won us the Crestron Global Home Technology Award, and it grew into a multi-property, multi-office relationship that is still active today. The trade-desk audio solution we built for the office is the kind of work we get to do when a client trusts you for that long. They will let you engineer the right answer instead of the easy one.” __EMDASH_PROTECT_0__
What This Case Study Is and Is Not
This is a commercial AV case study. It describes the actual scope at the Chatham Asset Management office: the design, the equipment, the network architecture, the control philosophy, and the long-term service relationship. The hero image at the top of this page is editorial. Photography of the actual Chatham trading floor is withheld for client security and privacy. The scope, the equipment, and the relationship are accurate.
For commercial owners, COOs, IT directors, and facility managers reading this: Restrepo Innovations designs and builds office AV systems where the room has to work on Monday morning. Trading floors, executive suites, multi-tenant corporate floors, conferencing fleets, and the network infrastructure underneath all of it. Call 201.405.2022 if you have an office build, an office refresh, or a problem on a trading floor that nobody seems to be able to solve cleanly.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the Chatham Asset Management trade-desk audio solution actually do?
Each of the 30 trading seats can independently select which of the 6 wall-mounted TVs to listen to, and whether to hear that audio through a small speaker at the seat or through headphones. The selection at one seat does not affect any other seat. Control is from a Crestron handheld remote, a Crestron touchscreen at the desk, or the Crestron app on an iPhone or iPad. The whole thing runs on a Crestron NVX backbone, not on a separate audio matrix.
Why did Restrepo choose NVX over a traditional HDMI matrix switcher?
NVX runs over standard IP networking, which means video and audio are decoded at each endpoint and routed by software rather than by a fixed-port switcher. That gave us the ability to send any of the 6 TV sources to any of the 30 trading seats and to all 16 displays across the office, and to scale the system without buying a larger matrix every time the floor grew. It also let us keep the AV network on Araknis switches, isolated from Chatham's corporate IT network.
Why are the conference rooms full Crestron instead of a Crestron Flex bar?
Full Crestron DSP and full Crestron cameras give the rooms a native Microsoft Teams Rooms experience with audio and video quality that a Flex bar cannot match in a boardroom this size. The bigger reason is consistency. Three rooms on the same stack means one support model, one training set, and one fleet to maintain. When something goes wrong in any of the three rooms, the answer is the same.
Why is the AV network on a separate Araknis switch fleet?
So AV problems do not become IT tickets and IT changes do not become trading-floor risks. AV traffic runs on the Araknis switches we specified and maintain. Chatham's corporate IT runs on Chatham's switches. Two networks, two responsibilities, one clean handoff at the demarc. That is the right architecture for any office where AV uptime is non-negotiable.
Did Restrepo do the structured cabling and the rack build, or just the AV?
Restrepo pulled the structured cabling and built the main AV rack from empty up. That is the difference between an integrator who shows up at trim with a bag of parts and an integrator who owns the infrastructure from the studs. It is also why the system works as cleanly as it does. We did not inherit anyone else's shortcuts.
Is the relationship between Restrepo and Chatham still active?
Yes. Restrepo Innovations still services the Chatham Asset Management office and the principal's residential properties. The relationship is over 12 years old and current.
Can Restrepo build something like this for our office?
Yes. The Chatham buildout is representative of what Restrepo Innovations does in the commercial division: trading floors, executive offices, multi-tenant corporate floors, conferencing fleets, video distribution at scale, and the network infrastructure underneath all of it. We serve NJ, NY, and CT. Call 201.405.2022 or email office@restrepoinnovations.com to schedule a consultation.
Related reading: How Much Does a Professional Conference Room AV System Cost in New Jersey?; Team Electric Corp.: The Woman-Owned NYC Electrical Contractor Wiring Manhattan's Landmarks; Commercial AV Services; Network Infrastructure for AV.
