Extron Brand Guidelines: Andrew Edwards’s 1983 Pro AV Maker in Anaheim

A gap between computers and projectors.

Extron is a privately held American maker of professional audiovisual equipment, based in Anaheim, California. It was founded in 1983 by Andrew Edwards, who, the trade magazine SCN reported in its 2015 Hall of Fame profile, had worked in the industry since the mid-1960s and was working for an importer of Barco projectors when he saw a gap: IBM computers sent out their graphics in a form that projectors, built for analog input, could not take directly. Extron’s first product, the RGB 100, was an interface to bridge that gap, and the Orange County Business Journal wrote in 2010 that the earliest products converted computer signals for video projectors.

The company started in Garden Grove, in Orange County, both the Business Journal and SCN say, spent a few years in Santa Fe Springs, and settled in Anaheim in 1995, in a 65,000-square-foot building. In 2010 the Business Journal reported plans for a new headquarters of about 200,000 square feet to hold engineering, product development, sales, marketing, inventory and administration; English Wikipedia says the six-storey building opened in 2012. Its ground floor was planned as a restaurant and concert venue, the Business Journal reported, and SCN later described The Ranch Restaurant and Saloon inside the headquarters, with a sound system Edwards said he had installed himself, Extron speakers among the equipment.

Edwards described Extron to SCN as engineering-driven rather than sales-led, and said he personally guarantees its products. English Wikipedia now lists Andrew C. Edwards as chairman and Brian Taraci as chief executive, and notes that the company, once styled Extron Electronics, now goes simply by Extron.

Switchers, processors and control.

The Orange County Business Journal counted about 900 products in 2010, among them devices that carry signals from computers to video projectors, switchers, amplifiers and signal processors, sold mainly through resellers who install presentation systems for government, businesses and schools; some, it said, go into video production, broadcasting, videoconferencing and home theatres.

The range widened in steps. English Wikipedia describes video and computer interfacing, switching and signal distribution for displays and projectors, and says the company entered control systems in 2004 — processors, button panels, touch panels and software — and lecture capture in 2014, with a recorder called the SMP 351. Products pictured there include the DMP 128 digital matrix processor and the MLC 226 IP MediaLink controller. In 2010, the encyclopedia says, Extron bought the products division of Electrosonic. By March 2012 the Business Journal listed control systems, computer-video interfaces, amplifiers, speakers, fibre-optic equipment, signal processors, streaming products and classroom sound systems, still about 900 products in all.

Where it is made is documented in the trade and business press. In 2010 the Business Journal described an Extron factory near the Orange Freeway that assembles electronics onto printed circuit boards, tests them and packages finished products, with about 1,000 workers in Orange County and further sites in the Netherlands, Singapore, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and North Carolina. By 2015 Edwards told SCN that he held about 750,000 square feet in the Anaheim area, leased or owned, and had built a large facility in Raleigh, North Carolina. The Business Journal had already described that building in March 2012: four storeys and about 146,000 square feet on a seven-acre campus, with an 8,000-square-foot training and demonstration space and expanded sales, manufacturing and research areas. The same report said the new Anaheim headquarters, about 198,000 square feet and completed in late 2011, housed administrative and sales staff and manufacturing, and served as the company’s hub for support and training in the Americas.

The room behind the meeting.

Conference-room and pro AV makers sell a room more than a gadget. Their catalogues and websites tend to show the same scene: a meeting table, a large display on the wall, a slim video bar mounted under the screen, microphones set into the ceiling, and a small touch panel on the table that starts the call, dims the lights and switches the source. The equipment that makes the room work is usually out of sight, in a rack in a cupboard or above the ceiling tiles.

That hidden layer is where much of the industry’s engineering sits: control processors, signal switchers and extenders, amplifiers and digital signal processors that shape the audio of a room. These are boxes with plain faceplates and model numbers rather than consumer-style names, and their brands live on the label, the rack ear and the software screen an installer sees when setting up a system.

Most of these products do not reach buyers off a shelf. They are specified and wired in by systems integrators and installers working for companies, universities, schools and public bodies, and many makers run their own training and certification programmes for those partners. The trade gathers at fairs such as InfoComm in the United States and Integrated Systems Europe (ISE), where new panels, cameras and processors are shown on stands built to look like finished meeting rooms.

For a design guide, the category shows identity working at two scales: a calm, uncluttered room for the people who use it, and a dense, technical system of labels, connectors and part numbers for the people who build it. The makers in this guide are set out with what can be checked about who founded them, who owns them and where their products are made.

Offices, training rooms and installers.

Extron reaches its buyers through a network rather than shops. SCN counted more than 30 sales offices worldwide in 2015, with main offices in the Netherlands, Dubai, India, Singapore, China, Japan and the United States, and English Wikipedia describes more than 30 offices along with regional training and demonstration facilities. In March 2012 the Orange County Business Journal reported training and demonstration centres in Dallas, New York and Toronto, newly opened offices in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Washington, D.C., more than 2,000 employees worldwide, and 425 people hired during 2011. Both Business Journal reports describe the company as privately held, and the 2012 article called Andrew Edwards its owner; it also described the 20,000-square-foot restaurant on the ground floor of the headquarters, with a wine cellar and live country music.

English Wikipedia describes Extron today as privately held and based in Anaheim; over four decades its range has run from a single interface product to switching, signal processing, control and lecture capture.

For a design guide, Extron shows a brand built on the equipment in the rack rather than the screen in front of the room — the faceplates, panels and processors that installers specify. Compare Crestron, the New Jersey control maker, and Biamp. For this guide we use a steel blue, a charcoal and a signal teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Extron’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.