Future Displays: The Pixel Whisperers At Peerless-AV Use Precision Engineering To Makes Curved LED Walls Beautiful

January 27, 2025 by Dave Haynes

This is a digest summary of a profile story from the new Sixteen:Nine Future Displays report – a free download available to all readers. You can find the information and download page here …

Peerless-AV was one of six companies that kindly stepped up to sponsor the report – the sponsor dollars covering off a lot of travel costs and a bunch of time to pull the nearly 250-page beast together…

When you see a curved LED video wall at a sports book or museum, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about the engineering behind it. But in a workshop in suburban Los Angeles, a team of display mounting specialists is steadily obsessing over measurements as small as 11 thousandths of an inch to make these complicated digital digital displays possible, and built to last.

“We position pixels globally,” says Lou Mannick, explaining the work is not just about hanging displays anymore – it’s about precise pixel placement in three-dimensional spaces. And the challenges with that can be immense:

• Heat expansion can cause perfectly aligned walls to develop gaps;
• LED modules can pop out under thermal stress;
• No wall is truly flat, no floor perfectly level;
• Each manufacturer’s LED cabinet design is different;
• Curves and angles multiply the complexity.

The stakes are high because these aren’t simple all-in-one conference room displays that don’t need much more than wall studs and a reasonably true wall surface. The Peerless-AV custom mounts team is working with million-dollar installations, such as:

• A 313.26-degree curved cylinder in Morocco (note that .26 … precision matters);
• A 139-foot-wide sports betting display supporting 20,000 pounds;
• A floating, cantilevered museum wall telling the story of 39 Tribal Nations.

Why Traditional Solutions Don’t Work

“With LCD, we’ve made mounts that could pop in and pop out,” Mannick explains. “There’s no knob-turning with LED. The knob turning has to be done before you put the modules on.”

The company that Mannick founded – ADF Visual Display Products (the ADF is Able Design and Fabrication) – had quietly been behind many of the largest and most complicated video wall projects in North America and globally. It was acquired by Chicago-based Peerless-AV, which had steady “asks” for custom work that didn’t the core business of making and selling a wide range of mounting systems and custom displays like outdoor totems.

The custom engineering team in LA uses:

• Microscopic cameras;
• Heat sensors;
• Expansion gauges;
• 3D CAD software;
• Custom machining equipment.

That’s all necessary to do a job that meets customer needs and respects the often huge capital investment in signature video walls. Choosing mounting infrastructure based on price rather than precision can lead to misaligned video walls, catastrophic failures from metal fatigue, extended installation times, higher labor costs and damage to what can be fragile, hard to repair LED modules.

Looking Forward

As LED video walls become more ambitious, the engineering challenges grow. “Maybe at some point they will become a standard of mounting,” says Brian McClimans, VP Sales at Peerless-AV. “But for now, every chassis is different, every mounting place is different.”

Until then, the engineers will keep measuring thermal expansion down to the thousandth of an inch, ensuring that when architects go big with LED walls, their ideas can look great in reality.  dreams can become pixel-perfect reality.

“We’re working with so many different trades on these projects … We just say, ‘Look, we’re going to build technology walls that’ll hold these LEDs exactly where they need to be in a room. Don’t worry about your building and your wall. Stay out of our way,”’ muses Ross Divanfard, VP of Engineering.

You can download the full story, part of a nearly 250 page report on Future Display tech here, off of this page. It is totally free. No strings other than a very short form to get a sense of who is downloading, and how many.