A 960 × 960 mm cabinet is 100 mm deep. Almost nobody asks about that 100 mm until the wall is already framed, the reception desk is already ordered, and the facilities team has already been told the screen will be "flush".
Then the shop drawing comes back and the conversation changes.
Indoor LED projects almost always start with pixel pitch: P2 or P2.5, 600 nits or 800, which controller. That is the easy part, and it is decided in a week. The mounting is decided in the first site meeting by people who are not in the pitch conversation — the architect, the structural engineer, the MEP contractor, the building's facilities manager — and it constrains everything the screen can do afterwards.
Here is how that decision actually plays out, from the supply side.
The three ways a wall can hold a screen
Wall-mounted. A steel sub-frame is fixed to the wall or to the slab behind it, and the cabinets hang on that frame. Cheapest and most common. It works when the wall is flat, when the wall can take the load plus the frame, and when there is somewhere to stand behind or in front of the screen to service it.
Suspended. The screen hangs from the slab above on rods or a truss — mall atriums, airport halls, exhibition centres, anywhere the screen has to float in the volume rather than sit on a surface. This is the method most often drawn beautifully and engineered last.
Recessed. The screen sits in a niche built for it, with a trim or shadow gap around the opening, so from the room it reads as part of the wall. This is the method with the most hidden requirements and the one that fails most quietly.
Rear service decides whether the room behind the wall exists
The AIS2 is a 960 × 960 × 100 mm standard box with rear service: modules and electronics are reached from behind, which is why the front face is a clean uninterrupted surface with no hinges and no visible seams. That clean face is bought with space. Plan roughly 500–600 mm of standing and reaching room behind the wall, and plan it as permanent, not as "the maintenance guy will figure something out".
In a corporate reception this often means a false wall 600 mm off the structural wall, or a service corridor behind the screen. If neither exists, the honest answer is not "we will manage" — it is a different cabinet. The AISE2 is the same module, same pitch, same control platform, but an 80 mm slim box with front service: it comes out from the front with a suction tool, so the wall behind it can be solid.
Two builds, same picture, completely different buildings. Choosing the screen before choosing the access side is how projects end up cutting a hatch into a finished lobby wall eighteen months later.
Make the opening a multiple of the module, not of the room
The AIS2 module is 320 × 160 mm and the cabinet is 960 × 960 mm, which is three modules wide and six high. A wall is therefore always a whole number of cabinets plus a border — never a free-form rectangle.
If the architect's opening is 3.0 m wide, the screen does not become 3.0 m. It becomes either 2.88 m (three cabinets) with 60 mm borders, or 3.2 m with the opening adjusted. Getting that decision made at drawing stage costs nothing. Getting it made after the joinery is installed costs a variation order and two weeks.
The same arithmetic decides height. A 960 mm cabinet on a 3.4 m reception wall leaves 2.44 m — either one row of cabinets with a very tall border, or two rows at 1.92 m and a proper shadow gap. Buyers who send finished dimensions with the enquiry get a cabinet layout drawing back; buyers who send a render get a surprise.
Recessed: depth, air, heat, and the fire wall
A recessed screen needs more depth than the cabinet. Take the 100 mm cabinet, add cable and power clearance behind it, add airflow, and you are typically designing a 200–250 mm niche — before finishes. In a corridor wall that is a fire-rated assembly, that niche is now a penetration that has to be detailed, and the screen's own power supplies are heat sources sitting inside it.
Three things to settle before the niche is built:
- Ventilation. Sealed niches cook. If the only air path is the shadow gap, say so on the drawing and size the gap for it.
- Access. If the cabinet is rear service, the niche needs a rear access panel or a room behind it. If it is front service, the trim has to be removable without destroying the plaster.
- Trim tolerance. A shadow gap of 10–15 mm absorbs the building's own tolerance. A butt joint against a painted wall does not.
Suspended: the ceiling is a structure, not a finish
Hanging a screen from a ceiling grid is not hanging it from a ceiling. Anchors go into the slab or into steel designed for the load, and that steel has to exist in the structural drawings before the ceiling closes.
Two details that show up after handover:
- Air. A diffuser blowing across the face of a suspended screen puts a moving gradient on the picture and dust on the modules. Keep supply diffusers off the screen face, not just off the screen.
- Service access. A suspended screen in an atrium is serviced from a lift, a catwalk, or a scaffold. If the answer is scaffold, the client has bought a screen that will only be maintained during a shutdown.
Eight questions for the first site meeting
- Which side can be opened — behind the screen or in front of it?
- What is the finished opening, in millimetres, and is it fixed?
- Is the wall flat enough for a sub-frame, and who checks it?
- What is behind the wall: structure, a service shaft, a fire compartment, a bathroom?
- Where does power land, and is there a local isolator the facilities team can reach?
- Where does the heat go in summer, when the building is closed?
- How will someone reach the top row of cabinets in five years?
- Who signs the shop drawing — AV, architect, or facilities?
That last one is the real question. On projects that go well, one person owns the mounting decision and everyone else works to it. On projects that go badly, the screen is specified by one party, the wall is built by another, and the argument is settled on site with a saw.
The screen is the part you can still change late. The wall is not.
The AIS2 indoor fixed cabinet — 960 × 960 × 100 mm, P2, rear service — is here: https://www.mlxled.com/product/ais2-indoor-led-display-screen-960x960mm/
If the wall behind your screen cannot be opened, the AISE2 is the same module at 80 mm with front service: https://www.mlxled.com/product/aise2-indoor-led-display-screen-960x960mm/
I work with MuenLED, a Shenzhen LED manufacturer. If you are laying out an indoor wall now: is your constraint the 600 mm behind the screen, or the 60 mm border around it? #MuenLED
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