Powering AVL with PoE

[00:00:00] Thanks to today's episode sponsor, AC Americas. They are bringing you today's guest talking all about PoE. What is PoE? Well, it stands for Power Over Ethernet and it's now popping up in all our AVL systems. We will dive into how to harness this tech to help you save money. And of course, a huge thank you to all our loyal partners and sponsors.

[00:00:23] Shure, Resi, Digico, and Paragon 360. These companies continue to help us bring real-world insight, technology, leadership, and innovation directly to the church tech and production community. So are you ready to upgrade your knowledge? Then hang on for The Tech Arts Podcast, which starts right now. This is The Tech Arts Podcast, where we talk about tech, leadership, and all things that concern church audio, video, and lighting.

[00:00:54] Welcome to The Tech Arts Podcast and The Resi Studios. My name is DL. So glad to have you joining us today. This episode is packed with insights on the future of AVL infrastructure. Specifically, we're going to talk power over Ethernet and how this is changing networked audio, intelligent lighting, and video. Plus, why is this tech pushing the next generation of AVL systems to run on a single cable carrying both signal and power?

[00:01:22] Oh my, that would save money and simplify all of our systems. But as we struggle to learn this evolving tech, what does it actually mean for churches building or upgrading systems today? We will answer that question and more when our expert in this field joins us in just a few minutes. But right now, let's hear a word from our sponsors. Our main sponsor is Digital Great Commission Ministries.

[00:01:51] Whether you need help building a team, finding the right gear, or just better understanding the church tech world, DGCM is here for you. Because they are a 501c3 donor-sponsored organization, they come to your church for free and do an assessment of your tech, visitor engagement, and online streaming. Plus, we give away free gear. Be sure to go to audiovideolighting.com and register your email today.

[00:02:19] This will sign you up for all of the free giveaways and give you first access to everything we offer for free. If you want free resources, training, or consulting, contact Digital Great Commission Ministries today by going to audiovideolighting.com. That's audiovideolighting.com. The Tech Arts Podcast is proudly sponsored by Shure.

[00:02:47] For 100 years, Shure has delivered extraordinary sound and set the industry standard for quality and reliability. Take your audio to the next level. Visit shure.com. Today on the podcast, we're diving into the future of AVL infrastructure with someone who's right at the center of it.

[00:03:12] If you've been hearing more about networked systems, POE, which is power over Ethernet, and the shift towards smarter, more unified AVL ecosystems, this conversation is for you. Today's guest works for a company that's been leading the charge in AVL networking, especially when it comes to making complex systems simple, reliable, and built for real-world use. Please welcome to the Tech Arts Podcast, Anthony Stofflett from Luminex. Hey, Anthony.

[00:03:42] Hey, David. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. So let's talk a little bit about churches that haven't been tracking networking closely. What's the big shift happening right now with power over Ethernet? Yeah, so there's this really cool adoption phase that's really happening with POE. It's always kind of been around there, kind of silently in the background. I think we all kind of know it from like PTZ cameras and stuff like that, but as of recent, the adoption from the audio side and from the lighting side has just kind of exploded.

[00:04:11] And it's really becoming this really cool thing that we can really start to take advantage of. Well, let's take a step back here. I'm at church. I just heard David Leuschner say POE, and I heard Anthony explain POE and what's kind of happening. What is power over Ethernet?

[00:04:29] Yeah, so POE pretty much gets it to a place where all of our data that we have on a network and the power that needs to go to that device can go down a single cable, which is really fun. So we can just have like a single Ethernet cable plugged into our network switch and plugged into the device, and we can talk our Dante or our Milan or our streaming ACN or NDI, and we can power that device that it's plugged into between things. So that's kind of the little bit of a background, if you will, for POE.

[00:04:58] Well, unpack that a little bit, but simply break down what POE really unlocks for a church tech team. It's got to be simplicity more than anything, right? I mean, we don't have to worry about trying to run power and run data to something. We can run one cable and we can plug it in. It makes it really user-friendly, really easy to diagnose at that point because we're no longer having to separate two things.

[00:05:25] We can just inherently merge them together or, as we like to say on the networking side, converge them together. Well, I know I did a – it was a part of a consulting job where we had lights that we needed to put in. And so AC Americas, who you're a part of, had some lighting that they brought in. I think there were Chroma-Q lights.

[00:05:47] And essentially, they were POE power over Ethernet to power up those lights and control them through the data perspective as well. So they were looking to hire an electrician to come in and put in a bunch of power. And it was going to cost them a pretty good chunk of change. But instead, all they had to do is a switch with POE on it. And it revolutionized the whole lighting conversation for them and saved them a ton of money.

[00:06:16] So let's talk a little bit more about lighting fixtures and how POE is really helping churches in the way that I described. Yeah. So actually, come to think of it, I'm being lit right now by POE fixtures while actually doing this. So I'm actually using the Chroma-Q2 Inspires as a key light even for this. And then, of course, I have to have an extra one that's just sitting on my desk between things. And this is the cool part. It is a Cat5 cable, as we all have just simply plugged into the back of the unit.

[00:06:46] And we can get into full color and control and data. But I think for me on the networking side, and me as like a troubleshooting kind of a person and has to maintain things a lot, the really cool thing that I get out of something like this is the data behind it. So I can actually track how much power this is pulling on a network switch. I can actually see error codes, and I can monitor it remotely. If I've got something that's up in a ceiling like house lights where it's kind of hard to get to a lot of times, I don't have to worry about trying to find, oh, which breaker is that?

[00:07:16] Oh, no, it's plugged into this port on my network switch that's giving me an error. And I can just go and turn POE off on that port and turn it back on just like I would a breaker. But I've got all that data that kind of goes with it, which is really cool. Now, are we just talking house lights and architectural lights or is stage lighting getting into this world a little bit? Stage lighting has started to get into it a little bit. It's not going to be anything that's like high powered, right? So like panel over here on my right side, definitely not going to be going POE between things.

[00:07:43] But on little devices and little doodads, think about like lobby sconces and classroom lights, maybe some like underbooth scenarios, drum enclosures, little devices like that, a lot more in the film market. They're definitely coming out quite a bit between things. But large format, high output, something you'd want to, you know, put 30 feet in the air and, you know, have some like stage effects and moving lights. That stuff's not there. However, there's still an adoption there for it as well.

[00:08:12] So as networking has been growing, these fixtures have started to move away from like five pin DMX control and going directly into networking control. And so we're actually seeing some of these lighting fixtures integrate POE into their fixtures to actually power the networking device that's inside separately from the fixture behind things. So if the fixture loses power, you don't lose everything that's daisy chained after it because POE is powering that actual networking chip on the inside.

[00:08:41] So lighting is probably the main place I've seen POE used. But if I'm sitting there listening to this podcast, where does POE lighting actually make more sense than traditional power? Like what, you know, if there was like a, you know, a fall over of, oh, I should go POE or, oh, I should go traditional power. When does it make more sense? Yeah, so it's kind of a hard.

[00:09:04] That's the question that everybody kind of goes through when it comes to this is, you know, sometimes for like new builds and new installations, when we have the ability right off the bat to just say, hey, let's, we can run power. We can run data. The EC is already there. The general contractor is already there. It's very cost effective for them just to do it because they're on site amongst it all. Now, where we're seeing it be adopted a little bit more is a lot of the retrofit scenarios, you know?

[00:09:27] So it's the kind of that same scenario you were just talking about as you were consulting, but somebody needs to add something into an existing building where where's the breaker panel? Now we got to run conduit. Might have to drill through a wall. It might not be as clean as we want it to be. Where inside of a low volt scenario, like we're getting with Cat5 and with PoE, we don't need to hire special contractors. We can actually get almost our team of volunteers to run, you know, category cable through a ceiling and get to where we needed to go behind it.

[00:09:55] So it's kind of a both and scenario. We're seeing some like gallery productions, if you will, for, you know, inside of museums and stuff where they're really taking advantage of PoE just because they have exhibits that change all the time. And so it's really easy for them just to put a bunch of RJ45 up in the ceiling and all over the walls. And as a painting comes down or as an exhibit gets changed out, they can move a fixture without having to worry about where are we getting power?

[00:10:22] Where are we getting data and managing and cleanliness of all that cable dressing, if you will. Well, I started researching the audio side of this and my mind, mind blown, right? I started to see all of the features and all the different things you can do with PoE. If you talk about loudspeakers, brands like DMB U-Series or Genelec are coming out with PoE speakers. So what does this mean for the industry?

[00:10:48] Yeah, so I had the absolute pleasure of being at ISE this year when DMB released the U-Series to the public and got to have some really great conversations with a lot of their engineers that were there. And some of the stuff they're doing inside the U-Series is really advanced and really cool, to say the least. So much so even getting into power sharing from a primary and a secondary data stream,

[00:11:14] pulling PoE from both of those streams and merging them together into the unit to actually get greater SPL out of those speakers between things. And so they are right on the cusp and right at the really the pinnacle of innovation with the U-Series right now, which is really cool. We've seen some other audio companies that have definitely adopted PoE for sure. I know Genelec has been the one that's had it the longest amongst it all, but it's mainly on the Dante side of things.

[00:11:42] With DMB and with the audio market that's really been evolving and adapting into AVB Milan more than anything, DMB was the first one so far to actually release a Milan-certified PoE-powered speaker behind things. Yeah, it was very interesting just looking at that online. I can't wait to actually put one in my hands and listen to it. But amplifiers, I think this kind of falls into your background a little bit. You've done some research on this.

[00:12:08] Talk a little bit about amplifiers and how the PoE is really changing how those are used. Yeah, so we love the inbuilt solutions, right? So we love the DMB U-Series. We love the Genelec, you know, PoE Power. We just plug a cable into it and we don't have to worry about it. But sometimes they don't have the right formats of speakers for what we're looking at behind things. You know, sometimes we just need to put, you know, two speakers next to a TV inside of a classroom and we want them to be, you know, more like a column speaker, something we can hide a little bit more. And so we've got a couple of other companies out there.

[00:12:36] The one that's really close to us over at AC is a company called Inasonics. And they make a PoE-powered amplifier that's actually no bigger than like a mouse pad. And it's VESA mountable, a lot of really quick solutions to where it's take the pre-packaged solution of a complete speaker and just give you the amplifier and let you put any speaker you want onto the sides of it. Now, of course, when we're talking about PoE and audio, you know, power is always the thing, right? We need more power. We need it to be louder behind things.

[00:13:05] These, again, much like on the lighting side, they're falling into these like small format rooms between things. So a lot of colleges have adopted classrooms, breakout spaces where conference rooms can be a lot smaller, a lot more intimate behind things. You're not going to say that anytime in the near future, we're going to see PoE-powered line arrays. That would be awesome. I'd love for us to get there. But there's definitely a place much like with lighting where the high output devices just need that power that,

[00:13:33] you know, network infrastructure and tiny little large A45 cables are just not meant to meet that solution behind things. Well, I want to talk a little bit about the network switches. But before I get into that, let's talk Milan and AVB a little bit. How does this tie into the PoE conversation? Yeah, so a lot of Milan is kind of like building upon Dante, if you will. Separate protocols. I know there's some people out there that definitely know the differences between things.

[00:13:59] But Dante really set up this stream, if you will, for AVB Milan to be as successful as it is. Milan just brings this extra level of timing into our audio systems between it. And so having timing, having redundancy inside of our systems is just so incredibly important amongst them. And so using PoE, we can get that power redundancy with the data stream that kind of goes with it between it all.

[00:14:25] So where we can have primary and secondary and actually have redundant power going to those devices while maintaining this incredibly reliable and accurate clocking between Milan and between it. Well, all I hear is really Dante, Dante, Dante. But isn't Milan AVB, isn't that the certified? Isn't that the direction everything's going? It seems so. That one's another hot topic, believe it or not, between it. Dante definitely is widely available, right?

[00:14:54] I mean, we've got Dante stage boxes, the amount of PoE-powered Dante devices is out the door between it all. And so AVB's kind of been this new one. Now, where the really big difference is between Dante and AVB and kind of moving away from that PoE topic is when we're looking at line arrays as the prime example, right? Dante has quite a bit of jitter to it, right? You know, when we're configuring stuff inside a Dante controller, we've got to do that five millisecond delay or that 15 millisecond delay between devices.

[00:15:24] Well, for those of us that have ever had to time align a line array between things to make sure our shading is correct and we're not getting some wonkiness between our boxes, that extra little bit of jitter that Dante has inside of it makes that incredibly hard to diagnose because it's a constantly changing variable behind it. To where AVB, because it locks back to a central grandmaster clock, if you will, or that marching band director between it, every single audio signal,

[00:15:53] every single time is within nanoseconds of each other behind it. So when we are time aligning and we're looking at line arrays, that is where AVB really shines more than anything else. And none of this would be possible without a switch. So let's talk a little bit about Luminex and what role do your switches play in this ecosystem? Yeah, so Luminex, of course, has always been on the forefront when it comes to AV Milan.

[00:16:18] Everything that they have done so far in the past five to six years have been a lot of involvement, if you will, on the development of the protocols and the certifications that go along with it, if you will. So definitely the industry leader when it comes to that. When it comes to PoE and it comes to Luminex, it's kind of the same conversation all the way around, which is how much information can we give to you guys and how easy can we make it to monitor things? So I was mentioning with house lights between things that are PoE powered,

[00:16:45] knowing that there's an error that's going on or a house light that drops out, we give that to you inside of software and you can actually lay that out and just see, oh, red line, red box, hey, something's disconnected behind it. We can get into the switches inside of the software and go, hey, how much power am I actually pulling out of my network switch and where is that power going behind it all? Same thing, even as we're looking to integrate that in with Dante between it or even with video encode and decode devices over where is our latency, how many switch hops do we have?

[00:17:15] I mean, the goal behind Luminex is just to make it as clear and as simple as humanly possible through software. Well, what's interesting about Luminex is they have a really cool GUI that you can go in and kind of modify things and see the errors on the GUI. I just haven't seen it that much because most of the time, Luminex just doesn't fail. So it's what I really like about it. Dante out of the box works. The switch that you're putting in with Luminex just out of the box works.

[00:17:43] And every now and then I've had to get in there and configure, but generally it just works. Talk a little bit about that and why your switches are so AV entertainment ready. So Luminex kind of strives to be on this place of designed by technicians for technicians, right? So even when it comes with me, when it comes to the support team over at Luminex, even for me to be coming on staff as a brand manager with AC for Luminex, I had to get interviewed by Luminex.

[00:18:13] And so all of us are ex-technicians in some way, shape or form behind it. The other part about that is Luminex doesn't do prepacket solutions, right? And so everything from board level all the way to the metal case that it presides inside of is designed and made by Luminex for Luminex right up the street from their actual HQ in Belgium behind it all, which is really fun. And then when it comes to that factory out of the box configuration, a lot of that goes down to the Luminex R&D guys.

[00:18:42] And even the CEO, who is still very relevant as a part of Luminex behind it, is involved with the protocol developers themselves. And so rather than Luminex looking at this as a manufactured solution, if you will, so manufacturing it for this manufacturer, this manufacturer, and enabling those presets, they go back to the, hey, what protocols are you actually using? Oh, you're using Dante. Oh, you're using AVB. Oh, you're using Streamy ACN. Well, great. We're involved with ESTA behind things.

[00:19:11] And so we can monitor streaming ACN. We're involved with Artistic License when it comes to Artnet. We're involved with Audinate when it comes to Dante. We're involved with, of course, the AVB group when it comes to Milan. And so they're able to take all these different protocols, know exactly how they work, and find, if you will, that secret sauce of saying, hey, this is what we can configure in a network switch to make all of these things that inherently are kind of complicated just work together directly out of the box. You guys do such a great job with that.

[00:19:41] I tell people all the time, the IT guy is going to come in and say Cisco, or he's going to give you a major brand name. The AV guy is going to come in, or gal is going to come in and say Luminex. And the reason why is it just works. They understand the tech world, how we operate, the redundancy, have to be up all the time, the volunteers, ease of operation. They get all of that, and they put it all into their products. But Anthony, a lot of people are sitting there thinking,

[00:20:10] you're just representing a manufacturer. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you've really worked with and helped churches in the past to get to the next level and not just representing Luminex. Yeah. So the Luminex brand manager job actually found me because I was a Luminex power user. It's kind of how that came down. I kept breaking their stuff all the time. And so they were just like, hey, how do we get them to stop breaking your stuff? Well, you're making the brain manager. Little do they know I break it a little bit more sometimes. But that's a part of the testing. That's a part of the fun, right?

[00:20:39] But realistically, where this came from is I was a house of worship tech. That was my nine to five. Everybody has to put quotations around nine to five when it comes to church work. That was my nine to five. I did that for roughly about 10 years. Inside of that 10 years, also did a lot of consulting and design builds for a lot of churches inside of the Southeast Corridor or the U.S. between things while being on for my main church inside of that process. While doing that as well, big lighting designer onto the side, did a lot of festivals, did

[00:21:09] a lot of tours, did a lot of cruise ships behind it. And so as I was also managing my own church, managing other people's networks were, it was time consuming. And it wasn't until I was actually doing a project for my home church that I was introduced to the Luminex brand, if you will. And then as soon as I was introduced and I did the testing that I wanted to do as an end user at that time, I knew that this was going to be the only direction that I would go for the foreseeable future.

[00:21:36] And there was even a lot of those other previous installs, if you will, where I went back and said, hey, guys, we might want to look at an upgrade here. And here's why behind it. And they've all been rock solid. And then now being the brand manager, I had access to a lot of really fun materials in between things. So one of Luminex's very first network switches that was released back in 2007 was the Ether Switch 8. Very uncommon, not a lot of them out there behind it.

[00:22:04] But we've got about two or three of them that are still working inside of the US. About eight months ago or so, we had somebody, one of those guys reach out and say, hey, my power supply, it kind of kicked the dust finally. You know, it's time for a replacement and could still get the power supply from Luminex, still swapped it out. And it is still kicking and going behind it all. So just kind of a wide range of background, if you will. Yeah, it's awesome. Sounds like the tech support and support level of Luminex is pretty, pretty amazing as well,

[00:22:32] which I hear that throughout the industry. But let's jump back into the POE discussion. You know, I'm a tech guy or gal and I'm at a church and I'm asking myself, well, how does this really change my system design? Talk about that a little bit. You know, if you're going to incorporate POE, how does it change your system design? Yeah. So, I mean, in my mind, I was actually, I was talking to our audio market manager about this yesterday as we were kind of talking about this podcast a little bit.

[00:22:59] And we started throwing around these different scenarios of like, hey, how does this really benefit us in a lot of ways? The very first thing that came to mind for both of us was drum carts, drum risers behind things. It's something that not a lot of people talk about, but every drum set needs a stage box. Every drum set's got eight, 12, 16 microphones on it. They've got an iPad for control. They got to have comms in there. They got to have in-ears for Dante between it all.

[00:23:28] And imagine the scenario where we could actually just drop a network switch that's POE powered and power everything on that drum cart. And the only cable we need to run to it is a single Cat5 cable, which is crazy behind it. In lighting systems, and this is where it hits home for me, distribution of networking behind it. I no longer need to worry about running a bunch of copper everywhere. I can just drop a node inside of a truss and I can just plug it in with POE and I don't

[00:23:56] have to worry about trying to daisy chain off of a fixture or run anything else. I can just run a cable and plug it in and call it a day. Well, that drum cage has lights in it. Yeah. So you can run all of that off of POE as well. And it's, you know, Cat5 is just so widely available, right? I mean, I don't think there's a lot of people even on this podcast that at some point in time have not terminated their own RJ45 cable end at this point. It's kind of like a rite of passage as a technician of, yeah, we can all terminate a Cat5 cable.

[00:24:24] But I mean, even as we're looking at things, I'm looking at my desk right now, which just has a multitude of everything onto it. I have an AVB USB device, POE powered, also charges my laptop at the same time. So if I've got to go in and do a system diagnostic for audio, I can just pull this guy out, plug it into the AVB network. It charges my laptop and we're good to go. We've all definitely used one of these guys behind things. We all love the Dante AVIOs.

[00:24:50] Imagine, you know, having to put up something inside of a lobby where we don't have audio signal, but we've got an Ethernet port that we might be able to steal from the IT guys inside of a patch pay, inside of our CMRs between things. But we don't talk about that. But we can get Dante out there behind it. Same thing with in-ears. I can drop one of these guys and go to a POE amp behind it. And then there's the really nerdy ones of little boxes like this, which doesn't look all that impressive, but it's a laptop charger of all things.

[00:25:19] So always handy to have one of these in my backpack no matter where I'm at because my phone dies. It happens and we don't like our phones dying and being able just to have a POE powered device because network switches are everywhere. Just plug it in and charge the device for a bit and see how it goes. It's a practical application for a church that's building or renovating today. What should they do differently because of POE? So I feel like I say this all the time when somebody asks me this question and realistically

[00:25:46] it just comes to run category cable everywhere. Wherever you think you might put something in the future and now in whatever, you can never run enough RJ45 and category cable anywhere. And if you're not going to run that, then run Fiverr at that point. The amount of our protocols, the amount of devices that are out there that can convert

[00:26:10] and use and all these other things between a simple RJ45 and a Fiverr cable are just limitless that really just save not only for what you're trying to do now, but what you're going to try to do in 15 and 20 years in the future at this point. So that'd be my thing. POE even aside, that would be the thing. Category cable and Fiverr just everywhere and anywhere. Well, I was going to ask you, what's a simple starting point? What's step one? Sounds like cat five, cat six.

[00:26:39] But give them step two. What's step two when it comes to POE switches? I'm generally building a new building. What should I do? Yeah. So I think step two is really the second part of the POE equation, which is the network switches. You've got to have a device that you trust behind it. You know, I think you really do have to have that industry leader inside of it. Just like when we're looking at cameras or video switchers or even audio consoles, you

[00:27:07] know, there are definitely some of those brands that will trust a little bit more than others behind it all. And so I think as the basis of POE after that layer one, as we like to call it on the networking side, so the physical cable, we're going to get into the network switch control because that is where everything has to come from. When we start saying, hey, my lighting fixtures and my audio speakers and my TVs are all POE powered, where's the power coming from? The network switch.

[00:27:36] And so that is really the second layer behind all of this, which is getting a trusted brand network switch inside of that. I have a couple more questions for you. You know, when I look at the switch and I see POE, POE plus, POE plus, plus, kind of explain the differences between that. Yeah. So unfortunately, when it comes down to it, and I have to go through this when I do trainings with Luminex behind it, is there are three different standards when it comes to POE. And the first one, very unfortunately, is called POE.

[00:28:04] So we say POE rather generically behind everything of like, oh, this is POE powered or that's POE powered. But it's just telling us that it can be powered over Ethernet, not what does it need to be powered behind it all. So that's where those three standards really come in. To really say them kind of shortly behind it, POE has a max wattage draw of 15.4 watts. So the device here that plugs into the network switch can only pull 15.4 watts.

[00:28:32] That second one is POE plus, which is a max wattage draw of 30 watts behind it. And then your third one is going to be your POE plus plus, which is good up to 90 watts of power. Now, the really big misconception around all of this is that's true power amongst it. No data calculations, no power calculations, no 80% overhead. That's built into the POE standard, which is really cool because when the network switch

[00:29:01] says, hey, I can output 500 watts of POE, I can output 500 watts of POE, not 480 watts or 420 watts of POE. And everything is defined by that end device behind it. So it's all kind of baked in, makes it nice and simple behind it. Well, with the Luminex switch, what happens when I plug too many POE devices in? Yeah. So if you have all of your wattage that's being used, all that budget that's being used and you plug in another device, well, it just won't turn on. That's the easy part about it.

[00:29:29] Now for things, and this is where it gets a little complicated, right? We're talking about lighting fixtures. You know, generic physics and common sense kind of makes sense. The, when the fixture turns off, it draws less power. When the fixture turns on, it draws more power. So if you've got your house light system as the prime example where the house lights are turned off and then you go to plug in another device, hey, guess what? It's going to reallocate that power to that device and go from there. Now on the Luminex side, we get this, we know that this is a problem.

[00:29:58] And so there's actually two different things that we can do to help you out with that. The first one, and this is my personal recommendation behind it. If you're going to be doing something that's a POE speaker or a PTZ camera or a lighting fixture, do that power calculation on your switch, make sure that it's there. And then I physically turn POE off on all the ports that I'm not using. That way I don't have somebody that just comes in with a lighting node and plugs it in and reallocates that power away from something that I want it to be.

[00:30:25] The second way that we can help with that is per port POE priorities, because that's just so much fun to say behind it. We actually give you three levels per port between a critical... There's a lot of P's, by the way. I know, right? POE. Is it POE per port priority? Yep. Per port POE priorities. It's a tongue twister. I say it a lot. It's so much fun to say. But yeah, critical, high, and low, right?

[00:30:51] Now, where this also comes into play is for power supply redundancy, right? So let's say we've got double power supplies inside of our network switch, and we lose a leg of power because inevitably happens some car hits a street pole. It happens, right? When it comes down to that per port POE priorities, we can just say, hey, these house lights are over a staircase. These cannot turn off kind of a thing. So we're going to make those a critical level. So it's going to automatically load shed from those lower priorities

[00:31:18] before it gets to that critical level to make sure that the devices that need to stay on will stay on. It sounds like there's tons of flexibility and maybe some confusion there. If I'm sitting here saying, hey, I need some help, how does Luminex, how does AC Americas, how do you guys help with this? Yeah, so reach out. We've got a lot of people out there. We partner with a lot of the well-known integrators out there behind it all, and we definitely partner with them as they are all discovering the uses of POE all the way through it, right?

[00:31:47] The cool thing with being in AC is we have a lot of brands that are being on the forefront and really the founders of the different uses behind this. And so when we look at ChromaQ with the 2 Inspire, industry changing behind it. And so we really did have to go through with a lot of people and do that training and do that help with design in some aspects behind it all. Not saying we're a design company. We're still just a distribution behind it all. We love to partner with engineers and with designers to help them understand the product

[00:32:13] and give those recommendations and really share the information of what we're seeing happen nationwide instead of just everybody kind of, you know, Facebook, Reddit, or finding whatever they can online behind it. Know this though, Luminex and AC Americas, you can get somebody on the phone and talk to them and kind of figure out your situation, and they'll get you steered to the right person. But Anthony, I've asked you a lot of questions today. Is there anything you want to leave our audience with when it comes to POE? When it comes to POE, it's just simple.

[00:32:42] That's really, I think, the thing to remember behind it. It really is here to help us. It is this emerging trend that's definitely there. It's something that I think in the next two to three years, we're going to start seeing it expand and expand. And I think there's a lot of scenarios that POE is really going to be used for. So just keep your eye out and just keep watching it behind it. And let's see how it goes. This is fun. Yeah, if you use it correctly, it will save you money. It will save you headaches. And it will give you more control over your equipment.

[00:33:12] It's really a good way to go. We talked about it earlier on the lighting side with electricians and things of that nature. Conference rooms, a lot of the small stuff that you do throughout your building that would traditionally require power or different hookups and different infrastructures. POE is now answering that and is coming to the forefront of what we need to make our designs, our AVL designs more simple.

[00:33:39] So, Anthony, this has been a very valuable conversation. If someone needs to get in touch with Luminex or AC Americas to start understanding your products, how do they go about doing that? Yeah, so website's the best way, right? So AC Americas.com, you'll see all of our brands. You can see a contact us over there. If you want to see some of these fixtures or actually get some demos on them, that's a really great place to fill out the form. If you want to send a direct email, it's just North America at AC Americas.com behind it. You guys are at all the trade shows, right? All of them.

[00:34:10] All of them. All of them. Yeah, you're like, that's my whole life. But NAB, LDI, all the different trade shows that you may go to or be a part of throughout the U.S., Luminex is there. AC Americas is there. So for more information on Luminex, go to AC Americas.com. They will bring your lighting, audio, and video goals to life. Find out more at AC Americas.com.

[00:34:37] Anthony, thanks for joining us today on the Tech Arts Podcast. Your insights and knowledge has been very helpful. Awesome. Thank you so much, David. It's always a pleasure. Well, that wraps things up for today's episode. I can't wait to talk to you on the next Tech Arts Podcast. Until then, I'm David Loishner signing off by wishing you a great day and praying God blesses every moment of your week. See you soon. You have been listening to the Tech Arts Podcast, presented by Digital Great Commission Ministries.

[00:35:05] DGCM is a 501c3 nonprofit that was started to help churches with all things technical. Whether you need help building a team, finding the right gear, or just a better understanding of the church tech world, DGCM is here for you. Find out more about our free on-site visits, reports, and consulting by going to audiovideolighting.com. Digital Great Commission Ministries will help you run your church service like a pro. Find out more at audiovideolighting.com.