Xantech's A/V Control Technology Used for Tour Center at Harley-Davidson Vehicle Operations Plant

The recently completed movie theater located within the brand new Vaughn L. Beals Tour Center at the Harley-Davidson Vehicle Operations plant in York, Pennsylvania, includes A/V control products from Xantech, a leader in the field of audio/video remote control and distribution for 40 years. SDK Electronics of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, outfitted the theater, where visitors begin the one-hour factory tour, installing a Xantech CSPLCD39G 3.9-inch Smartpad LCD Graphic Touchpanel and a WIC1200 Web Intelligent Controller to manage the presentation’s audio, video and lighting.

The Smartpad LCD Graphic Touchpanel and the WIC1200 in combination offer fully automated control of the movie presentation, which takes visitors through the famed motorcycle manufacturer’s history. The film starts with a single touch of the Xantech Touchpanel, explains Scott Koons, owner of SDK Electronics. “The system sits in idle mode until the tour guides bring the visitors in. They touch one button on the screen that says ‘play’ and the movie starts to run. The WIC box gets a signal, tells a Crestron lighting controller to dim the lights, and turns on an audio sense to the Blu-ray Disc player. As soon as it senses that audio is no longer present – in other words, the player is in full stop – it tells the Crestron to relight the room.”

The system is also programmed with an alternate mode for employee meetings. “When they hold a meeting in the theater they can touch a button that says ‘presentation’ and it will switch over to a presentation mode,” says Koons.

The Xantech products offered an affordable control solution for automating the theater’s A/V system, according to Koons. Although the system is relatively simple, the controller does need to support some specific interface capabilities. “I needed to have some way to automatically turn on the lights. The WIC1200 gave me the ability to do two-way communications as well as system status sensing.” A more complex and more costly unit was just not necessary, he adds: “It would have been overkill to spend that kind of money on a competing product for what little I needed to do, especially since the WIC box does everything I needed it to do for this system.”

The Xantech Touchpanel interfaces directly with the theater’s JVC projector. “The only codes we send to the projector are on, off and source select, so we use those straight out of the keypad because I don’t need any sense on that,” explains Koons, adding, “The only thing I need to send to the Lexicon DC2 processor is power on and source select.”

The rest of the theater’s audio system, which includes EAW loudspeakers in a 7.1 configuration with Crest amplification, is initiated through the use of a Surge X power sequencer.  A 159-inch 16:9 HDTV format Da-Lite fixed wall screen completes the A/V presentation setup.

Koons also installed a Xantech CSPLCD64G 6.4-inch Smartpad LCD Graphic Touchpanel in the employee cafeteria at the new plant. “They can hold 450-person meetings there. It has four screens, four projectors, a scaler and an SPLCD64 controlling it, along with a couple of relay packs and a 1x8 RS232 router.” 

The Harley-Davidson Vehicle Operations plant, established in York in 1973, assembles the company’s Soft Tail, Touring and Tri-Glide models. Following the demolition of 42 separate buildings and a year of construction, a brand new, robot-assisted manufacturing plant opened on the site on August 1, 2011, that combines all of its manufacturing lines and warehousing in one 600,000-square-foot facility. Over eight thousand tourists have reportedly visited the new Vaughn L. Beals Tour Center and toured the new factory in its first two months of operation.

For more information, please visit www.xantechcommercial.com.