Audio and video technology has long been available to enhance that communication, giving punch and power to voices that could not otherwise be heard by the throngs assembled before them, clearly delivering the spoken word in rooms of stone and stained glass, adding life and richness to settings for dance and theatre, and becoming a compositional tool for the art itself.

Classrooms have become conversational and connected, libraries social and kinetic, museums interactive and animated, conference and lecture rooms portals to far-away colleagues. The audio and video systems that enabled these transitions have themselves become tools nearly as complex and nuanced as the messages we use them to deliver. The designer’s challenge has grown beyond mastery of the systems: while every effective system delivers coverage, power, naturalness, and richness of sound as well as clarity, sharpness and saturation of image, the most successful offer new artistic opportunities for performance and are so seamlessly integrated that we might forget for a moment we are meeting the gaze of someone a continent away.

 We approach our AV work from many perspectives – as live sound experts, engineers, technicians, and even architects – and we spend our careers learning from one another. Many of us who know acoustics best have some history on the stage. Those of us who know AV best have that and more: awards in show sound design; years of experience in mixing live sound for artists of the highest caliber; the contractor’s perspective gained through long hours of soldering connections, pulling cable and hanging clusters; the user’s perspective gained through scores of projects completed, commissioned, and supported well past opening night.

The systems we design are means to this end: a full and effortless experience for the user; the enhanced spirit of a happy crowd or connection between collaborators; perhaps even some inspiration from the systems themselves along the way. To do this, we think it’s critically important to know how sound behaves within the rooms the systems and people inhabit together. As long as rock stars run into the crowd at a concert’s climax and then unplug for an encore, this will be so. Our knowledge of acoustics informs our systems design and vice versa, so we endeavor to strip away the false boundaries between them. 

Our systems work is thus rooted in breadth of experience, regard for all sound (no matter its means of delivery), and a commitment to the visual realm. It considers audio and video as programmatically fundamental and intrinsic to a room’s design: so much more than just a ‘system’. It is accomplished through lively dialogue with those around the design table and pursued until beyond opening night through a process of identifying priorities and devising insightful solutions.

We embrace the technology, and we do it exceedingly well.