“Just take my word for it” is not a phrase that provides a lot of comfort and assurance when purchasing anything. If you buy a house, you want to see the home inspection report. If you buy a used car, you want to see the Car Fax report. Buying an installed A/V system should be no different. Whether you’re spending $50,000 on a new audio system for a small conference center or half a million dollars on a concert sound system for a performing arts venue, proof of performance isn’t something that should be taken for granted. If you’re buying the system and installation from a reputable vendor, they will have done their engineering homework in the selection and layout of equipment in order to achieve certain performance goals. In a sound system, they should be able to tell you things like the maximum SPL achievable and how many decibels of headroom are available. In a video projection system you should know what the maximum brightness on the screen is and what kind of contrast ratio you’ll realize with the ambient lighting present. Lighting and acoustics are no different. You are buying a certain result, and the vendor you’re buying it from should be able to prove at the end of the job that their system did what they claimed it would.  

Recently CTS Audio was called in to tame an extremely acoustically challenging gymnasium that had just been built for the Nashville Korean United Methodist Church. Upon taking baseline measurements, we found the RT60 time at 1KHz to be 6.3 seconds. This was so live that you couldn’t hold a conversation if you were more than a few feet away from the person you were talking to. After constructing an acoustical model and creating a solution to bring the reverb time down below 3 seconds, the church signed a contract but insisted on a proof of performance clause. Confident of our engineering, we agreed to an RT60 target of 2.8 seconds +/- .5 seconds or we had to fix it at our expense. When the acoustical materials were installed, final measurements were taken and we confirmed that we had met or beat our predictions at all frequencies of interest. The church had peace of mind going into the project that one way or another they were buying a result, and so should you. Do not be afraid to insist on proof of performance parameters in your contract with your A/V vendor. Be aware that you’ll most likely pay a little extra for this service because it represents extra work for your vendor, but in the end you’ll sleep easy at night knowing that you got what you paid for.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 10:32 am and is filed under Audio/Video Installations. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.