As the Boston Red Sox spend the off-season addressing its 2011 roster—enter Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez—Jerry Remy’s Sports Bar & Grill is doing the same with its electronics lineup.

The restaurant, which is located within foul ball distance from Fenway Park, opened just prior to the 2010 Major League Baseball season. Jerry Remy, the extremely popular Red Sox TV broadcast color commentator and former Sox second basemen, tells CI that he opened the restaurant with one audio/video goal: “Our big thing was that we wanted to make sure we had the best setup in the city. And wherever you sat, you had to be able to see a TV.”

Now that the restaurant has a season in the books, Remy and managing partner John O’Rourke say they’re extremely happy with the audio/video they chose.

The highlights include:

• Two 11-foot wide Spyeglass rear projection screens that use two Panasonic PT DW10000U projectors, which O’Rourke calls the “Screen Monsters”
• 20 LG 60-inch plasma TVs
• Six 23-inch LCD
• Tannoy speakers (eight V8 and eight TV12 full-range boxes complemented by 14 CVS6 in-ceiling speakers) throughout
• Universal Electronics Inc.’s Nevo control
• Symetrix Zone Mix 760 for controlling inputs including DirecTV receivers, iPod, iTunes/Pandora, Shure ULX wireless microphones, live web, radio, and TV broadcast.
• Two Lab.gruppen C 10:4X amplifiers and one Lab.gruppen C 24:8 amplifier.

“The whole thing was about $300,000,” says installer Robert Soluri, principal of Woburn, Mass.-based Custom Cable Services.

The emphasis definitely tilted toward the video side, O’Rourke says, and Remy’s priority that everybody in the bar has a good view of a TV. The tricky part for Soluri was establishing “good sight lines without just having TVs in your face,” he says. “It had to be a pleasant place to hang out.”

The “good sight lines,” by the way, apply to people walking by the restaurant on Bolyston Street, according to O’Rourke. Part of the marketing effort, he says, is to leverage the restaurant’s large open window — especially during the summer — and cause by-passers to stop and stare at the projection screens. “Those screens are our competitive advantage,” he says.

The all-in audio/video approach has worked, according to O’Rourke. “From the day we’ve opened, we’ve had the numbers rolling in. It’s absolutely packed on game days.”

O’Rourke and Soluri say only subtle changes to the existing system are planned. The most significant off-season move may involve additional space, but O’Rourke declined comment citing ongoing permit talks.

Remy, for his part, says the goal of having the best audio/video setup in Boston was met. That applies to the cities he travels to with the Red Sox, too. “I can’t think of a place I’ve been to with this kind of setup,” he says.

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About the author

Tom LeBlanc - Editor-in-Chief, CI,

Tom has been covering electronics integration for seven years. Prior to being named editor-in-chief of CI, he was senior writer and managing editor of CE Pro. Before that, he wrote for the sports department of the Boston Herald. Migrating to magazines, he was a staff editor for a golf publication and an outdoor sports publication. Follow him on Twitter @leblanctom.

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