AV Case Study: Macquarie University’s Michael Kirby Building
Justice Kirby liked a good dissenting opinion. But everyone agrees, Concept AV’s integration of a Q-SYS full-stack AV solution for MQU’s new law school, backed by Sennheiser microphones, is a winner.
6 July 2026
Text:/ Richard Neale
From its earliest days (founded in 1972), Macquarie Uni’s Law School has sought to express its desire to be a ‘different kind of law school’ through innovative teaching and learning practices.
The Law School’s commitment to innovation is evident in its recently-opened new home: the Michael Kirby Building – named after eminent Aussie jurist.
The 8600sqm Michael Kirby Building was constructed atop the foundations of the original Law School building. The impressive timber-constructed atrium is surrounded by the working spaces of the Law School: lecture theatres, specialist teaching and learning facilities, academic offices, the Law Commons (a place for students to study and collaborate) and the Moot Court.
The building’s planning and construction spanned the years impacted by covid-19, and this is especially evident in the audiovisual systems that are designed to accommodate on-site, remote, real-time and asynchronous participation in the school’s teaching and learning.
TAKING THE BRIEF
Sydney’s Concept AV Australia took on the challenge of installing the building’s AV systems. Customer Solutions Specialist Adrian Caltabiano was on site from day one, and explains some of the key drivers. “The design objectives for this project were strongly influenced by covid-19. Flexibility was key. The AV systems had to support traditional approaches to teaching, and also be agile and adaptable to allow students to participate remotely, in real-time and through the university’s capture and replay platform. And all of this flexibility had to be easy and intuitive for students and staff to operate.”
The university’s AV team had positive prior experience with the Q-SYS audio elements, and was keen to explore whether a Q-SYS audio/video/control solution (Q-SYS refers to this as ‘full stack AV’) would be viable for the Michael Kirby Building. After investigation, the AV design consultant endorsed Q-SYS as a robust and comprehensive platform to use in the new building, and reflected this in the AV systems design.
DAY IN COURT
Cantilevered over the building’s main entrance, the circular Moot Court appears to float above its surroundings.
The Moot Court is a space in which students engage in scenarios that closely simulate a real-world court appearance. The AV systems in the space serve a dual purpose: they provide hands-on experience of the technology that students might expect to encounter in contemporary courtrooms across Australia, and they also facilitate practice for and participation in international mooting events.
The Moot Court features Sennheiser’s TeamConnect Ceiling TCC 2 beamforming ceiling microphones to provide clean audio capture from anywhere in the room. The TCC 2 microphones use advanced algorithms to mix the sound received by 28 microphone capsules to form dynamic pickup beams that focus on and track people speaking in the court, while rejecting background and non-speech sounds.
Sennheiser Speechline Digital Wireless microphones are also available in the court, for users who prefer a hand-held or lapel mic. The Speechline Digital Wireless family is optimised for speech intelligibility for teaching and presentations. Effort required to install and maintain is minimised by Automatic Frequency Management (which scans for free channels on startup) and Automatic Interference Management (which changes channel in the event of interference).
Images of Moot Court proceedings are captured by Q-SYS PTZ cameras. Talker position data from the TeamConnect Ceiling TCC 2 microphones can be used to drive the Q-SYS Automatic Camera Preset Recall plug-in to direct the PTZ cameras to point at the active speaker.
Audio gathered by the Sennheiser microphones and video from the Q-SYS PTZ cameras are routed and managed by the building-wide Q-SYS full-stack AV platform. The complex and highly capable underlying technology in the Moot Court is controlled by a simple, customised graphical interface on a Q-SYS touch screen.
NO PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING TOO BIG
Irrefutable evidence of Macquarie Law School’s commitment to innovation is displayed in three Active Learning Studios, which support the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) pedagogical approach.
PBL encourages students to work in small groups to explore and solve complex problems. Academic staff act as facilitators rather than teachers – guiding students to uncover their own solutions.
Macquarie Law School’s Active Learning Studios house collaboration pods for multiple student groups in a large classroom. While each group works at its pod on its own solution, the centrally-located instructor can use the AV system to view any group’s progress, contribute to a group’s discussion, or share a group’s work with the rest of the class.
The complex sharing, switching and management are handled by the Q-SYS AV platform under the control of a customised (and simple) user interface presented on a Q-SYS touchscreen located on the teacher’s desk.
As in the Moot Court, Sennheiser TeamConnect Ceiling TCC 2 beamforming mics capture clear audio from each pod, and a desktop charging dock holds a Sennheiser Speechline Digital Wireless microphone for the instructor to use.
SHOW COURT
The Q-SYS full stack AV platform allows audio and video content from the Moot Court or any other teaching space to be
- used within the space
- shared with other spaces
- livestreamed or recorded by the university’s EchoVideo platform
- used as inputs for Zoom meetings or webinars.
Sharing a huge volume of video-rich content might be expected to attract less-than-positive attention from the IT Manager responsible for the underlying data network. Not so in the Michael Kirby Building!
Long before installation commenced, the technical gurus from Q-SYS Australia worked with the Macquarie University network team to deploy a proof of concept demonstrating that Q-SYS Shift adaptive video codecs and Q-SYS’s approach to advanced management of multicast streams would keep the network load under control.
Real-life experience when the building filled with students and staff confirmed the proof of concept results: network traffic is not giving the network team headaches. Case dismissed.
IRON CLAD CASE
With the Q-SYS AV platform underpinning virtually all the teaching and learning at the Macquarie Law School, effective monitoring and management are essential.
The Q-SYS Reflect Plus remote monitoring and management platform has been deployed in the Michael Kirby Building to keep an eye on all of the Q-SYS products as well as products from members of the Q-SYS Partner Ecosystem.
Sennheiser is a longstanding member of the Q-SYS Partner Ecosystem, and both the TCC 2 microphones and the Speechline Digital Wireless microphones deployed throughout the building can be monitored and managed on the Q-SYS Reflect Plus platform.
By presenting real-time data about all the AV devices (endpoints and infrastructure) on one screen, Reflect Plus proves itself to be an invaluable part of the AV manager’s toolkit. Adrian from Concept AV is a fan. “Reflect Plus is a really important part of the Q-SYS solution. It provides real-time information to the AV team whenever an issue occurs. They can share information with us (the integrator) so that we are all looking at the same thing at the same time. It’s made the lives of the AV and IT teams at the university much easier.”
Key to the usefulness of Reflect Plus is its ability to allow the entire system to be monitored and managed remotely (via cloud connection) – including the ability to update Q-SYS design files and deploy firmware updates.
This advanced functionality is delivered in a way that’s sensitive to the needs of IT managers and network security staff. Nathan Ashguerra from Q-SYS Australia explains, “The entire fleet of managed native and third-party devices stay on the secure side of the firewall, with all of the management and monitoring data funnelled through each system’s Q-SYS Core – the only devices exposed to the outside world.”
UNANIMOUS VERDICT
The evidence shows that the university’s AV team enjoys the reliability and robustness of the Q-SYS full stack AV system deployed in the Michael Kirby Building. They value the high quality audio captured by the Sennheiser microphones. And they appreciate the quality-of-life improvements that accrue as Reflect Plus enables unified management and monitoring that spans all of the building’s AV components.
“The Q-SYS and Sennheiser product we used are extremely reliable and very well supported from the implementation phase and beyond,” comments Peter Attard, Senior Project Manager at Macquarie University.
The evidence also shows that the network team is pleased that its network is not over-burdened by AV traffic, and that its security sensitivities are respected by the way in which Reflect Plus enables cloud-based monitoring and management.
“Q-SYS is quite a stable system,” continues Peter. “We like the way the adaptive codec works on our network. It doesn’t use up a lot of bandwidth when idle which a lot of other products tend to. We love the fact that it’s easy to make changes with Q-SYS code, and the Reflect monitoring system is fantastic if there is something to monitor, check, or change.”
But what of the end users: Macquarie Law School’s students and staff? David Manna, Technical Officer from the Faculty of Arts (Macquarie Law School sits within the Faculty of Arts), commented that “everything’s performing really well, day in and day out. Students and staff using the rooms find the AV technology to be easy to use. They enjoy being in these spaces day after day.”
Andrew Squillacioti, Operations Manager at Concept AV, is also pleased by the positive verdict delivered by students and staff. “The Michael Kirby Building was a landmark project for Macquarie University and also for Concept AV. We’re pleased to have delivered a complex project that students and staff find easy to use. I’m proud of what our installation team achieved. And I’m confident that with technology partners like Sennheiser and Q-SYS, we can continue to deliver positive outcomes like this for Macquarie University and for our other clients.”
We rest our case.
Concept AV: conceptav.com.au
TAG (Q-SYS): tag.com.au
Sennheiser: sennheiser.com
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