Design-build audiovisual for Austin offices, hotels, restaurants, venues, and public buildings. We design the system, specify it, build the rack, install it, and support it afterward.
The first page of results mixes companies that do completely different jobs. Some rent lighting and staging for an event next month. Some install home theaters. Some are directories listing whoever paid. All of them describe themselves as audiovisual, so an operator trying to get a restaurant or an office floor built ends up comparing quotes that are not comparable, and often finds out late that the company they picked does not do permanent commercial work at all.
We are the third kind. Crunchy Tech designs and installs permanent commercial audiovisual systems: the sound, the displays, the control, and the infrastructure behind them. We do not rent equipment for events and we do not do residential. What we do is come onto a project as the technology partner, work out what each room has to accomplish, hand your architect and general contractor requirements they can build to, then install and support what we designed so one company is accountable. Since 2008.
What We Do Here
Every system is designed, installed, and supported by our own team in Austin — never subcontracted.
From downtown towers and Domain office floors to South Congress restaurants and the suburbs north of the river, we design, install, and support commercial audiovisual systems across the metro.
Long stretches past 100 degrees mean outdoor components need real thermal headroom, and the equipment room needs cooling to hold at or below 75 degrees.
Patios run most of the year here, which makes outdoor audio and displays a permanent zone rather than a seasonal add-on.
Hail and straight-line wind are genuine risks to anything mounted outside, so enclosure and mounting selection account for impact exposure.
A high share of local projects are ground-up or full renovations, so requirements get into the architectural plan while conduit and pathways can still be placed properly.
What we do here
Most of our Austin work sits in four places. The design question is different in each one, and the equipment list always comes last.
Corporate teams usually arrive with a platform already chosen and a room size assumption that does not hold. Manufacturer marketing sells a system built for five people into a room that seats twenty, and everyone at the far end of the table spends a year being hard to understand on calls. So we design from the space: the dimensions, the acoustics, whether the walls are glass or drywall, what actually happens in the room, and which platforms your people and your clients use. Microsoft Teams Rooms, Zoom Rooms, and Google Meet each want something different from the hardware. That gives you microphone and camera coverage matched to the room, displays sized for the furthest seat, and controls that behave identically on every floor.
Two things tell you a room's audio was never designed: you cannot hold a conversation, or you cannot hear what the operator wants playing. Both trace back to speakers placed without accounting for direction, height, and hard surfaces, often run around the perimeter so the middle gets no coverage and the edges are punishing. So audio gets zoned at the processor, with the dining room, the bar, and the patio each tuned to the concept instead of sharing one volume control. A hotel is several venues in one building, so the lobby, the restaurant, and the meeting floors get designed separately. Austin patios run most of the year, which makes outdoor a permanent zone on weather-rated hardware and its own amplifier channel.
Austin has more rooms hosting live music than almost anywhere, and the installed system has to share the building with it. The usual failure is a house system that fights the act, or one nobody trusts so it sits unused. Zoning solves it: the performance area becomes its own zone that drops out of the house program during a set, the areas away from the stage stay usable, and a preset brings the room back cleanly once the band packs down. Our scope is the permanently installed system and that zoning. We do not book talent and we do not mix live shows. Where you bring your own engineer, we give them a clean, documented tie-in point.
Austin is a state capital and a major institutional market, so a meaningful share of local work is speech rather than music. Briefing rooms, hearing rooms, and training spaces get designed around intelligibility and feedback control, with microphone coverage matched to how people actually sit and speak. Large facilities need public address, which is a separate discipline from background music: an announcement has to carry across a big space and be understood, including emergency instruction for someone who cannot see where they are being sent. Where a project carries its own procurement or security requirements, we design to them and confirm the specifics per project rather than assuming.
Ask what happens after the install, because that is where the categories separate. An event production or rental company sets up lighting and sound for a date and takes it away afterward, which is a genuinely different business from a permanent build. A residential installer does home theater and whole-house audio, which uses different equipment and different standards from a room that has to run every day for a business. A directory listing is neither, it is a lead form. What you want for a restaurant, an office floor, or a venue is a commercial design-build integrator: a company that designs the system, specifies it, builds and tests the rack, installs it, commissions and tunes it on site, trains your staff, documents it, and supports it afterward. That is us. We do not rent equipment for events and we do not do residential work. A useful screening question for anyone you are comparing: ask who is accountable if the room does not work on opening night. If design and installation sit with different companies, the answer is usually nobody.
When your architect produces a first floor plan, and earlier than most people expect. There is no reason your technology partner is not at the architectural phase, since by the time the building is going up the mark has already been missed. A project a year out does not need a large upfront spend, it needs the technology requirements in the architectural plan, because you cannot submit a clean permit set or get an honest general contractor bid without them. What the GC needs early is specific: conduit sizing, pathway plans for open ceilings, blocking and backing behind every display, power for the rack, and cooling for the equipment room. Projects engaged at the architectural phase see roughly 95% fewer change orders than projects where we arrive after construction has started. Austin rewards that more than most markets, because so much of the work here is new construction rather than a retrofit into a finished room, which means the cheap moment to get it right actually exists and is easy to miss.
Both, and the accountability is the point. Most consultants hand over a specification and leave, and they are not accountable for whether the room works on opening night, which is how you end up with a designer and an installer blaming each other while you sit in the middle. We design, specify, procure, build the rack in our shop, install, commission, train your staff, document the system, and support it afterward. One company, one point of accountability. Crunchy Tech started in 2008 as an AV support company before it ever designed systems, and years of fixing other people's work is why our racks get built to be serviced: fully enclosed, every cable labeled at both ends, power separated from audio and data. We have opened racks that looked fifteen years old after three months in an uncooled closet, with dust caked on every surface, and replacing cooked components runs into the tens of thousands. We will quote a fixed bid once the scope is genuinely settled, and we will tell you plainly when a fixed number is going to cost you more than the design work would have.
The design work does not change, but the approval path does. The metro is several separate municipalities, so a project in Round Rock, Cedar Park, Leander, Georgetown, or Bee Cave answers to its own review rather than to Austin's, and we confirm that for the actual address rather than assuming one process covers the region. It matters most on anything structural or electrical, which on an AV project usually means display and speaker mounting, rack power, and work above a ceiling. For an operator running rooms across several of these cities, the useful approach is one repeatable standard: the same control layer, the same presets, and the same staff training everywhere, with the physical design adjusted per room since a downtown conversion and a new suburban build are not the same problem. That keeps a manager transferable between locations and keeps support predictable rather than location-specific.
Client successes drive Crunchy Tech to become better. Below is how our customers feel about us.
Just do it. Spend the money. It’s well worth it. It’s not worth your time, hassle, energy, and stress of trying to make it look right and do it right when there’s somebody who has been doing it for years and has perfected the craft.
You're a great partner with Florida Hospital and this project will make a difference in Children's Health.
Working with Crunchy Tech was a fantastic experience from start to finish. They handled the sale and installation of all our sound and TV equipment at The County Bar in Aviston, IL, and absolutely nailed it. We were on a very tight deadline, and they not only met it—they delivered top-notch quality and service the entire way. Highly professional, responsive, and easy to work with. We couldn't be happier with the results.
Crunchy's AV Services are outstanding. Staff members are experts, who really extend themselves to find the right technology for helping us reach our marketing goals in creative ways. The best thing about working with Crunchy is collaborating with the staff – they are patient, responsive, knowledgeable, and available.
Crunchy has been great to work with. They communicate well and deliver as promised.
The work Crunchy has been doing is a game changer for this industry.
Being able to reuse the existing structure created a much lower cost for the client and they were ecstatic.
Crunchy has done an amazing job on our A/V install. The sound is perfectly balanced throughout our many zones and the entire system is super simple to use.
Just do it. Spend the money. It’s well worth it. It’s not worth your time, hassle, energy, and stress of trying to make it look right and do it right when there’s somebody who has been doing it for years and has perfected the craft.
You're a great partner with Florida Hospital and this project will make a difference in Children's Health.
Working with Crunchy Tech was a fantastic experience from start to finish. They handled the sale and installation of all our sound and TV equipment at The County Bar in Aviston, IL, and absolutely nailed it. We were on a very tight deadline, and they not only met it—they delivered top-notch quality and service the entire way. Highly professional, responsive, and easy to work with. We couldn't be happier with the results.
Crunchy's AV Services are outstanding. Staff members are experts, who really extend themselves to find the right technology for helping us reach our marketing goals in creative ways. The best thing about working with Crunchy is collaborating with the staff – they are patient, responsive, knowledgeable, and available.
Crunchy has been great to work with. They communicate well and deliver as promised.
The work Crunchy has been doing is a game changer for this industry.
Being able to reuse the existing structure created a much lower cost for the client and they were ecstatic.
Crunchy has done an amazing job on our A/V install. The sound is perfectly balanced throughout our many zones and the entire system is super simple to use.
We don’t sell you what we have. We design what you need. That line is the operating principle I’ve built Crunchy Tech around for the last 20 years. And it’s the single sentence that separates us - and the small handful of firms like us - from the other 97% of the commercial AV industry.
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There’s a pattern I’ve watched play out for 20 years in hospitality AV, and it always ends the same way...
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"Where's my quote?"
Read article arrow_forwardTell us about the project: the address, the phase it is in, who the architect and general contractor are, what is decided and what is still open. If construction has not started we work from the drawings. If it has, the consult starts with your locations and what each room has to do, includes a site visit to confirm what the building and the jurisdiction allow, and comes back as one engineered scope rather than a parts list.
