To round out what was a busy month in the AV event calendar, NMK Electronics hosted its annual Integrate AV event at the QE2 cruise ship now permanently docked in Dubai’s Port Rashid. With the distributor bringing so many products from its portfolio to the event, the evening felt more like a cut-down trade show than an individual event, and served to both highlight some of the newest additions to the portfolio as well as offer fresh insight into the future of the company and AV in general.

Commencing with an introduction to NMK and the company vision, business development manager Dino Drimakis set the stage for the evening demonstrations. With NMK adding brands such as Ayrton, Luminex and Mersive to its portfolio, it has been a big 12 months for the company. ‘Over the last couple of months we have built a B2B platform which has become really successful and we have had a lot of really positive feedback,’ he explained. 'Our team has also integrated a lot of lighting fixture protocols in to our portfolio, so it’s a really exciting time for us on the lighting side too.’ 

After an impressive introduction from Mr Drimakis, he handed over to Audinate’s Kieran Walsh who gave an introduction into Dante AV and discussed integrating Dante into audio and video workflows. With Dante operating solely in the audio domain up until now, the fact that video is now possible definitely piqued visitors’ interest.

Next came a demonstration from Mark Breakspear, project manager at DLC Events, who gave an insight in to his work with Shure solutions at the recent ITUPP conference, where technological advancements in the interpretation and conferencing world helped to ensure an event of this magnitude ran without a hitch. This was followed by product demonstrations taking place throughout the ship covering educational solutions, conferencing technology, theatre options and a full range of new Bose speakers. The latest projectors from Epson were showcased by Graeme Davidson, head of product marketing EMEAR, Professional Displays, while a high-top sneaker served as the projection surface to showcase Epson’s LightScene solution.

Speaking with Saad Kaleem of integration firm Specialized & Interactive Systems, he only had great things to say about the evening event: ‘It was great to see NMK bring together teams from several manufacturers in one place’, he commented. ‘I was surprised to see that they went all out and set up fully fledged demo rooms complete with projectors, speakers and hundreds of discussion units, whereas anyone else would just keep two or three units for a demo.’

Mr Kaleem was also excited at the prospect of integrating NMK products in to the existing SIS model, ‘SIS does a lot of hotels, restaurants and retail spaces in the UAE, so we expect to use the new Bose DesignMax speakers a lot in our future projects for BGM, ballroom and meeting room requirements. We are already installing Shure microphones in meeting rooms and we are looking forward to products with Dante AV as we feel this technology will dominate the industry once it goes on sale.’