Visionary has announced the PacketAV Duet Wallplate Encoder with Bluetooth (DuetE-WP-BT) as a recipient of NSCA’s seventh annual Excellence in Product Innovation awards. The Excellence in Product Innovation (EPI) awards are NOT pay-for-play awards and recognize products that have a profound impact on systems integrators. Visionary’s PacketAV Duet Wallplate Encoder with Bluetooth was honored as the overall grand prize winner for 2021.

“Congratulations to Visionary,” said Mike Abernathy, director of business resources for NSCA. “The 2021 Excellence in Product Innovation Awards were judged by NSCA’s Emerging Technologies Committee, which is focused on enabling and disruptive technologies to help build awareness within the NSCA community.”

“Visionary is honored to receive NSCA’s Excellence in Product Innovation Award for the newly-debuted PacketAV Duet Wallplate Encoder with Bluetooth,” said Scott Freshman, chief operations officer for Visionary. “As HDBaseT is being displaced by AV over IP, end users and systems integrators expect continued product form factor compatibility and availability. There are hundreds of HDBaseT wallplates from many different manufacturers. The wallplate form-factor has become indispensable in many commercial AV installations, but it has proven very difficult for manufacturers to design AV over IP wallplates to meet this accustomed demand. Mostly, it comes down to the thermal characteristics of the available AV over IP technology and limitations imposed by heat when it comes to reliable long lasting hardware designs. The AV-over-IP codecs require more power, which leads to more heat, than HDBaseT. Visionary has been able to overcome these challenges and deliver a next-generation endpoint in a form factor that our market has become accustomed to. We understand the Excellence in Product Innovation awards saw many unique, new product entries and we appreciate NSCA’s recognition of the PacketAV Duet Wallplate Encoder.”

The PacketAV Duet Wallplate Encoder is the world’s first HDMI-over-IP wall plate with built-in Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity. The wallplate Encoder provides powerful 4K UHD Video, Dante and AES67 audio embedding and de-embedding, with internal VLAN tagging capability to separate audio and video network traffic over a single Gigabit Ethernet (PoE) port. It fits conveniently into a standard two-gang U.S. or U.K. back box with no modification and can be easily mounted in a wall, tabletop, lectern or floor box. The PacketAV Duet Wallplate Encoder supports bidirectional smartphone connectivity via Bluetooth for web conference soft-codec AV integration, meanwhile eliminating the need for separate bridging hardware.