San Jose’s Casino M8trix is the area’s premier entertainment destination where families, colleagues and friends gather to eat, drink, watch sports games and play 24 hours a day. The 35,000 square feet facility boasts table games, live action poker, California card games, restaurants, bars and seven VIP lounges for guests to plug and play with personal and permanent entertainment systems while enjoying picturesque views of San Jose and Silicon Valley.

Casino M8trix’s luxurious VIP lounges host wedding receptions, birthday parties, anniversaries, corporate events and other private gatherings. Each lounge has a 55-inch plasma screen TV where guests can watch sports or movies, play video games, sing karaoke or share media from a personal computer. These video monitors are complemented by JBL in-ceiling and monitor speakers to make social gatherings more enjoyable for all.

Accommodating BYOD

In today’s bring-your-own-device era, Casino M8trix is expected to accommodate a diverse selection of personal electronics in both analog and digital formats brought in by customers for use in the VIP lounges. But Casino M8trix was trying to work with its legacy closed-source system with no HDMI inputs, making it difficult to adjust to the increasing number of digital outputs on guests’ personal devices. The facility was stuck figuring out how to serve the needs for digital compatibility with an aging analog system.

Daniel Weissman, the systems administrator for Casino M8trix, had grown accustomed to late-night calls from colleagues trying to help guests get the system to work with their gear. As part of a plan to replace the dated entertainment infrastructure, Casino M8trix realized its need for a new architecture with digital as well as analog inputs and simple, automatic control features. Casino M8trix also wanted identical hardware in every room and was keen on acquiring technology that was user-friendly, fool-proof and reliable.

HDVS-150 Series Keeps it Simple

After consulting System Designer Jesse Portillo of Dream Digital in Pleasanton, Casino M8trix chose to install the Atlona AT-HDVS-150-TX, a 2×1 in-wall switcher with HDMI and VGA wall-plate inputs, HDBaseT™ output and automatic display control, to be used in conjunction with the company’s AT-HDVS-150-RX receiver/scaler. Casino M8trix’s goal was to create an experience in each of its VIP lounges for guests to enjoy their time plugging and playing, not plugging and plodding.

“Our installer recommended the Atlona components cautioning that it wasn’t the cheapest option, but he assured us that once it was installed and working, we wouldn’t have any problems with it and it wouldn’t require a control system to run it,” said Weissman. “The product lived up to its billing and turned out to be very good quality as well. It’s not a plastic wall plate where someone is going to snap off the HDMI jack after a few beers.”

This was Weissman’s first experience working with Portillo and Dream Digital. In his 15-plus year career, Portillo learned that one of the greatest values of Atlona products is being able to trust they will work reliably, every day, regardless of who might be using them or what they connected to the system.

“I discovered Atlona doing research on different matrix switchers for some commercial installations,” said Portillo. “After a couple successful projects, I started recommending using Atlona for their product reliability and great integrator support.”

Since the installation months ago, Portillo has not had to service the hardware and the facility has been able to train people internally to direct guests on how to use the systems. With the help of Atlona, Casino M8trix has been able to adapt to the digital era, continue to support analog inputs and eliminate complicated source switches for its guests. It could be said that Casino M8trix and its guests were dealt a winning hand.