We’ve all probably experienced dinner at a restaurant that’s so noisy you can’t hear the conversation around the table, or been in an airport terminal with announcements so loud you have to plug your ears, or a train station where you had to strain to understand announcements that sound like they’re being made by Charlie Brown’s teacher.

Those are all examples of one of the biggest challenges AV professionals face – communicating (OK, selling…) the importance of managing sound effectively within diverse environments to clients who don’t see how audio affects or influences almost every part of our daily life. And expressing the importance of audio is difficult. We repeatedly encounter installations where the appropriate audio solution for a project is “value-engineered” out to save money, which means the client wasn’t convinced by the audio argument (or maybe they’re just cheap 😉 ).

So how do we talk about and educate on the importance of sound in our environments? How do we articulate the effects that a value-engineered solution will have on the overall functionality of a conference room, huddle space, or even public venues? Well, start with education. This week we released a new white paper called “Clear Communications: Placing the End User at the Heart of Collaboration”. The latest in our series of white papers that specifically address the importance of sound, it talks about how organizations can prepare for and address the needs of a distributed workforce. Key to this is the partnership of IT departments and AV experts (not surprising), and how the alignment these two resources can truly produce an amazing, reliable experience for the end user – our ultimate customer.

It’s a great companion piece to the Frost & Sullivan white paper “Huddle Spaces: Bridging the Gap Between Desktops and Large Conference Rooms” that we commissioned, which focuses on the often-overlooked needs of small conference rooms and the expectations users have for their AV experience in those spaces. Rounding out the set is our white paper “Building In Sound”, which discusses the implications sound levels have on our long term health (spoiler alert: it’s not good).

I encourage you to download our white papers and the corresponding infographics (we had a lot of fun with these). I hope you’ll find the information you need to support conversations around why good audio needs to be planned for and installed – regardless of the application space.