Located at the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan where the towers once stood, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum (9/11 Memorial Museum) forms the centerpiece of the 9/11 Memorial. As the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks neared, the museum underwent a massive upgrade, primarily focused on strengthening the backend infrastructure, improving system reliability, and creating a more stable technology platform.
The museum lies below the plaza, with the entrance pavilion and atrium providing the transition from the city to the historic site below. Above this area is the auditorium with nearby ramps leading visitors down approximately 70 feet to the original foundation level of the World Trade Center complex. From there, visitors enter exhibition galleries where the South and North Towers once stood.
Within the South Tower footprint is the Memorial Exhibition, a space dedicated to remembering the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Feb. 26, 1993. The North Tower footprint contains the Museum's Historical Exhibition, which presents the events of 9/11, organized into three primary sections that explore the chronological timeline of the horrific events of the day, events leading up to the attacks, and the heroic rescue and recovery efforts.
According to Fernando Mora, VP of AV and multimedia for the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the original AV infrastructure was designed around traditional point-to-point architecture, using HDBaseT as the primary media transport technology. “When the museum was designed in the early 2010s, this was the correct approach at that time,” he told SCN. “It continued to serve us well for many years.”
The need to replace HDBaseT did not drive the upgrade; rather, it was the realization that AVoIP offered capabilities beyond basic video transport. “Ultimately, its distributed nature allowed us to build a master control room which became the orchestration layer for our entire venue,” he explained. “From this central location we can manage and monitor all aspects of our exhibitions systems, live production, digital signage, and UC meeting platforms utilizing live CCTV cameras, custom Q-SYS dashboard UCIs, and Symphony monitoring software.”
When Mora and his team began to consider an upgrade to the core AV infostructure in 2019, many of the AVoIP standards were still similar to each other, so there was no need to quickly jump to an upgrade. The strategy, he explained, became deliberate, to “wait for the technology and the market to mature, while watching to see which platforms emerged as the dominant players. HDBaseT was still performing very well for us, so the question became: What’s the rush?”
Another factor that influenced the upgrade was existing technology. The museum was already largely a Crestron house, which, as Mora explained, made the evolution toward Crestron NVX a logical path. “All our technicians are either programmers or DMC-E-NVX,” he said. “It allowed us to move into AV over IP while building upon technology, programming expertise, and support for this new infrastructure.”
After the 20th anniversary, Mora and his team—lead technician and in-house programmer Kelman Torres, technician Jermaine Morgan, and auditorium production technician Jose Rosa—embarked on the five-year overhaul of the museum’s infrastructure, all while the museum remained open and operational. Wheels started rolling in 2023 with the modernization of the museum's DSP infrastructure.
“We migrated from a CobraNet-based Layer 2 audio architecture to a Layer 3, IP-based Q-SYS processing platform,” Mora explained. “During the planning and development phase, I decided to expand the scope of the project to include modernization of our control system, incorporating Q-SYS Control as part of the overall deployment.”
The extensive upgrade also included a focus on AV transport to AVoIP in the exhibition areas, auditorium, digital signage, and four classrooms. For the auditorium, Mora said they created a complete end-to-end 4K production workflow. They replaced the existing Crestron DM system with an NVX AVoIP infrastructure, and installed a Christie 4K laser projector, Panasonic 4K production cameras, Vizrt TriCaster TC2 Elite switcher with 4K monitoring, and DiGiCo audio console. To support the new AVoIP environment, Mora’s team deployed a NETGEAR M4300 switch and engaged NETGEAR Professional Services to assist with its configuration.
According to Mora, AVI-SPL’s Symphony was selected for monitoring the museum’s infrastructure because the museum wanted to move beyond traditional monitoring toward a platform that gives meaningful, actionable information about the health of the museum’s AV systems and the context in which they are operating.
“For example, when the museum is open, every projector should be powered on, every media server should be in its appropriate run state, and the systems supporting our exhibitions should be operating as expected,” Mora explained. “When the museum is closed, the opposite may be true. Many of our CPU-based exhibits are intentionally shut down overnight, so an effective monitoring platform needs to understand that an offline device at 2:00 a.m. may be perfectly normal, while that same condition at 10:00 a.m. could require immediate attention.”
As 2026 began, the upgrade engulfed the museum’s collaboration and education spaces. “We upgraded all four classrooms to support Microsoft Teams Rooms using the Q-SYS UC platform, while our six corporate conference rooms were upgraded with Neat Bar Pro systems,” Mora added. “Most recently, we began replacing our legacy exhibit media players with Hive Media’s Osmia 4K players, further modernizing the content delivery side of the infrastructure.”
For the 25th anniversary, a new exhibit, In Their Honor, will debut. While that has what Mora calls a modest AV footprint, a live national primetime broadcast from Memorial Plaza featuring the Tribute in Light installation will showcase how the new infrastructure supports an event with a worldwide audience.
“On a personal level, Tribute in Light has always been my favorite part of the commemoration,” Mora said. “Seeing those two beams rise above the New York City skyline is an incredibly powerful way to close the day.”
What began in late 2023 has evolved into a roughly three-year, phased modernization of the museum’s AV ecosystem. “Rather than approaching it as a single replacement project, we deliberately addressed the infrastructure in layers—audio processing and control first, followed by AV over IP transport, collaboration spaces, and finally media playback,” Mora concluded. “That approach allowed us to modernize a large, operational facility while continuing to support the museum’s daily visitor experience and programming throughout the transition.”
