We have been doing this since 2006. If you keep records that long, and we have, you end up with something more useful than opinions: a list of what actually goes wrong, and how often, and why.
Read that list backwards and it becomes a specification document. Because almost none of those calls were caused by the things clients agonize over at the start.
What people worry about
Which brand of loudspeaker. How many inches of television. Whether the projector should be laser. Whether to go to the next model up.
These are enjoyable decisions and they are worth taking seriously, because they determine how good the result sounds and looks. But in twenty years we can count on very few hands the service calls caused by any of them. Choose a good speaker and it will still be a good speaker in 2040. Choose the model below and you will enjoy it slightly less and it will never once break because of the choice.
What actually generates the calls
Where the rack went
Far and away the leader. Equipment ends up in whatever cupboard was left over, because nobody drew a home for it. It is unventilated, so it runs hot, so components age faster and fail sooner. It is unreachable, so every visit costs more. Sometimes it is behind a wardrobe that has to be emptied first. Twenty years of marginally more expensive service calls, all descending from a space that was never on a drawing.
Where the keypad landed
Two inches is the whole difference. A keypad beside a switch bank rather than in it, or on the hinge side of a door, is the detail a client notices every single day for the life of the house. It is free to get right on a plan and genuinely expensive to move once the wall is finished and painted.
Nobody left a pull string
The most valuable thing you can put in a wall costs almost nothing and carries no signal at all. A conduit and a string means the next fifteen years of upgrades are a morning's work. No conduit means fishing, patching, texture, paint — or a compromise, which usually means going wireless somewhere it should not have been wireless.
The studs decided the viewing height
Not the sightline. Not the seating. Not the fireplace the room was designed around. Framing nobody told us about becomes the family's viewing position for the next twenty years, and by the time anyone notices it is wrong the room is finished.
No service access
An in-ceiling speaker in a soffit with nothing above it. An amplifier behind a fixed panel. A camera at a height that needs scaffolding rather than a ladder. Every one of these was sensible at installation and turns every future ten-minute job into a half-day.
Nobody agreed who holds the accounts
The system was set up under an installer's email address, or a builder's, or a homeowner's old work address that stopped existing. Years later something needs re-authorizing and there is no way in. We have spent more hours on this than on any hardware fault, and it is entirely a paperwork problem.
Nothing was labeled
Twelve identical cables. No markings. Somebody is going to pay, at an hourly rate, to work out what they already own.
The pattern
The expensive decisions are made on an ordinary Tuesday by someone who is not thinking about audio-visual at all.
That is the real finding. Not one of the items above is a technology decision. Every one is a construction or a coordination or an administrative decision, made early, usually casually, usually by somebody with a hundred other things on their plate and no reason to know that this particular choice echoes for two decades.
Framing goes in. A cupboard gets used for something else. A drawing gets revised and the low-voltage sheet does not get revised with it. None of it is anybody's fault. It is simply what happens when the person who will have to live with the consequence is not in the room when the choice is made.
What we changed
We stopped waiting to be called at trim.
Now the questions get asked at design development, when the answers are still free: where does the rack live and how is it ventilated, which walls need blocking, where does every keypad land, which ceilings can take a speaker, where does the conduit run, who is going to own the accounts. Then we walk the site before rough-in and check the drawing against what actually got framed, because those two things are never quite the same.
It is not a more sophisticated approach. It is the same approach, moved earlier, informed by a very long list of what happens when it is not.
This is the entire argument for being in the drawings early. If you are building or renovating, the cheapest hour you will ever spend with us is the one before anything is priced.
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