Portman Dentex ConnectEd Event, The Alex Hotel, Dublin

17 Jun

When PortmanDentex — one of Europe's largest private dental groups — hosted its Connected Event at Alex Hotel Dublin, AXL was appointed to deliver the full corporate conference AV across a two-day build, including a 7m x 2m LED video wall, multi-channel microphone infrastructure, professional staging, lighting and full presenter support.

PortmanDentex supports over 370 practices across the UK and Ireland, with more than 2,400 clinicians and 4,500 practice colleagues caring for around 1.5 million patients. The group runs a series of network gatherings throughout the year, and the Dublin Connected Event brought senior practice and clinical leaders from across the Irish network together in a single room — a curated audience of under 100 delegates for a focused, multi-session corporate conference.

For AXL, the booking was also a meaningful one in our wider work across the Irish market — delivering at the production standard a group of PortmanDentex's scale expects, in central Dublin, with everything specified, built and operated by our own team.

The Brief

PortmanDentex's events sit at a recognisable corporate standard — clear staging, broadcast-quality audio, professional presenter support, and visual production that holds up against the calibre of clinicians in the room. The brief came in three parts:

Anchor the room with a substantial LED video wall as the brand centrepiece
Build a microphone infrastructure flexible enough to support multiple presenters, panel formats and lectern-led segments
Deliver everything as a single multi-day install with no compromise on finish

Our Solution

LED Video Wall — The Brand Centrepiece

The room was anchored by a 7m x 2m LED video wall at 2.9mm pixel pitch, built from Gloshine DN 2.9 panels and processed through a Novastar VX600 controller. At that width, the wall has enough real estate to run split-screen content layouts — speaker visuals, brand graphics and supporting media side-by-side — without anything competing for the audience's attention.

Content was routed through a PIxelhue vision mixer, fed by a dedicated Windows presentation laptop and a secondary feed laptop, giving the operator control over every transition and the headroom to switch sources cleanly mid-session.

The wall was built on a Revostage base of five 2m x 1m decks at 300mm height, finished with black pleated skirting and ballasted with Doughty 12.5kg stage weights — a freestanding, professional install that needed no overhead rigging and dressed cleanly into the venue.

Microphones — Built for Multi-Presenter Flexibility

Corporate conference formats often shift between lectern keynotes, panel discussions, paired Q&A and roving facilitation across a single day. The mic package was built to handle all of that without reconfiguration:

1 x Lectern Microphone for formal welcomes and keynote segments
2 x Sennheiser e835 G3 Handheld Wireless mics for Q&A and roving use
5 x Sennheiser SK100 G3 Beltpacks paired with 5 x Sennheiser Headsets for panel speakers and hosts
Rigged across four 4-way racks, giving twelve wireless channels of total capacity

Twelve wireless channels for a sub-100 audience reads as overspec until you've worked panel-heavy corporate formats — at which point the flexibility is the whole point. Headset comfort and reliability across long days also matters when senior clinical and operational leaders are presenting back-to-back.

Sound — Clean Voice Reproduction Across the Room

The PA was built on a L-acoustics system — four X8 main tops — driven by a Behringer X32 digital console. The combination gives clean, intelligible voice reproduction across the entire room without overplaying the back rows, which matters in a corporate format where speakers move between conversational and presentational delivery through the day.

Lighting — Stage Wash for Speakers on Camera

Four Chauvet F-160 ZQ LED Fresnels with zoom provided stage wash and key lighting across the speaking area. Even when content isn't being broadcast live, footage gets captured for internal reuse afterwards — and proper stage lighting is the difference between footage that's usable and footage that isn't.

Presenter Support

A concealed 40" comfort monitor at the front of stage gave each speaker their slides without breaking eyeline with the room. Slide control ran on a MicroCue professional clicker — a step up from a basic USB unit, with the reliability senior presenters expect when they're delivering high-stakes content to peers.

Delivery & Technical Support

The full setup was delivered across two days — a dedicated install on Wednesday 11th June with crew on site from 14:00 through to 22:00, followed by the live event day on Thursday 12th run end-to-end by three AXL technicians. Cross-border delivery to Dublin, fully managed install, full operation through the conference, and de-rig the same evening.

The Result

The PortmanDentex Connected Event delivered the kind of clean, considered corporate production a network of senior dental clinicians and practice leaders should expect — and exactly the kind of project that earns AXL more of the Irish corporate work we're actively pursuing.

A strong booking with PortmanDentex, and a reminder that for organisations operating across both markets, having a single AV partner capable of delivering in Belfast, Dublin and everywhere between is a meaningful operational advantage.

Andrew Murray

Since starting out in the AV industry in 2015, I’ve always believed that great events come down to the people behind them. I spent several years freelancing across almost every AV company in Ireland, building experience and understanding what really matters on site. Like many in the industry, COVID brought a pause, but it also gave me the push to refocus and build something of my own.

Today, I’m focused on growing AXL into one of the leading AV production companies in Ireland. We now deliver AV for over 300 events each year, from smaller corporate meetings to large-scale productions. The aim is straightforward: do the job properly, be dependable, and help clients deliver events they can be proud of.