“The music is all around us, all you have to do is listen,” is a quote from the film August Rush, and it is one that applies to the AV sphere. Indeed, from corporate, to command and control, to live events, to higher education, audio is present in every facet of the industry. This presence has become only more powerful and prominent as performance audio technologies have rapidly advanced in the past few years.
To keep pace with that momentum, Commercial Integrator debuted a new Deep Dive report last year, seeking to spotlight high-performance audio applications and the technologies that power them. In this issue, we aim to continue to take this initiative forward. Here, we’ll take a look back at the previous year while also anticipating the road ahead for performance-audio technologies and applications.
For this year’s Performance Audio Deep Dive report, CI turned to the expertise of industry stalwarts, all of whom provide compelling insights into emerging trends and technologies in the performance audio space. They also touch on the challenges faced in the performance-audio space and highlight the growth of immersive audio, wireless systems, and audio-over-IP (AoIP) in different projects and environments.
A Successful Year
According to Sean Wargo, VP of market insights, AVIXA, when considering the performance of the past year, things appear to be going well in the overall market context. “The feasts and famine of the performance-audio sector is largely tied to the larger venues and events industry,” he begins. “Fortunately, the headlines readily convey strong results here.” Wargo notes that ticket sales gradually went up as consumers continued to look to experience live music. “This [created] a drive for venues to continually improve their experiences, taking the demand past just questions of simple replacement,” he explains.
Scott Wright, president and owner of Lifeline Audio Video Technologies, strongly agrees with this outlook. He adds that the past year has fared “…better than expected.” In his opinion, many were still playing “catch up” this past year as the industry’s product availability finally started to improve in different sectors. Regardless, Wright does not expect there to be a slowdown economically. “People are still spending money on technology and finding it to be a priority now more than ever!” he proclaims.
For Dan Allen, enterprise architect at AVI Systems, performance-audio applications had a great run in the corporate environments. “It’s been a great year!” he enthuses. “As our customers raced to outfit and update their workplaces with the modern technologies to support hybrid workforces, demand for performance audio was higher than ever.”
