Part of my job entails the design and support of the audiovisual systems in 7 conference rooms in Charlottesville (as well as some support for those at other sites). Our rooms are used by a combination of internal staff and external visitors, so they have to “just work”. To that end, I’m always looking for reliable, flexible and inexpensive equipment to support our conference rooms. VGA is still a must-have, but we’re starting to see visitors with consumer-grade laptops who only have HDMI outputs. I’ve been using Extron’s DTP T UWP 232 D wall plate with excellent results, but for my latest room refit, I decided to try Atlona’s input wall plate, mostly based on my desire to try Atlona’s new AT-UHD-CLSO-824 8×2 matrix switcher.
I received the Atlona input plate yesterday and decided to look at it a bit today. I haven’t received the switcher yet (B&H doesn’t stock it so it’s drop-shipped from Atlona) so I asked myself – “Will this work with my Extron equipment?”
Sadly, the answer appears to be “No”. I connected the HDVS-TX-WP to an Extron MPS-602 switcher with “DTP” inputs and…. nothing. I have to say I’m disappointed. Even my Monoprice HDBaseT extender is compatible with the Extron gear? What gives?
And there are further disappointments with the rest of the unit. The USB service port is hidden inside the chassis, which requires removing a total of 11 screws! Or, at least, it should have been 11 — my unit was actually missing an internal screw:
Note the missing screw at the bottom-right. 🙁
So what else is worth noting about the AT-HDVS-TX-WP? Well, it has no support for a local power supply, meaning it must be powered by the HDBaseT receiver. Perhaps it’s the remote-power implementation that makes it incompatible with my Extron switcher — the world will never know. Also, there’s no (official) way to program or configure the unit without it being connected to a receiver that has the ability to send RS232 commands over the HDBaseT. I notice that it has an internal 5-pin connector that resembles a TTL serial port — I’ll have to see what my bus pirate thinks of that port later.
Anyway, once my Atlona matrix shows up I’ll get a chance to see how it functions. The config software seems to have the ability to disable HDCP on the HDMI input as well as set the EDID properly. We shall see.
To be continued…
Note: This review is to confirm interoperability only and does not represent an endorsement of any products or services by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
