Commercial audio visual consulting and design-build for Cleveland healthcare, corporate offices, hotels, and restaurants. We design the system, specify it, hand your architect and GC requirements they can build to, then install and support what we designed.
On most Cleveland projects nobody owns the audiovisual scope. The architect puts screens on an elevation without knowing where the speakers go or how loud the room has to be. The IT group wants the simplest system that stays off their desk. By the time somebody asks the operator what the space is supposed to do, the walls are closed, the conduit is in the wrong place, and the change order is expensive. The system gets installed anyway, and then nobody on staff can run it.
An AV consultant is there to stop that from happening. We come onto the project as the audiovisual partner: we ask what the space has to accomplish, design the system around that answer, and give your architect and general contractor requirements they can actually build to. Then we install, commission, and support what we designed, so one company is accountable instead of a designer and an installer pointing at each other. We have been doing this since 2008, and in Cleveland most of that work is healthcare and academic-medical space, corporate offices, and downtown hospitality.
Who We Serve
Spaces we've wired across Cleveland — each built and supported by the same local crew.
From University Circle medical campuses to Warehouse District restaurants and downtown office floors, we consult on audiovisual design across Greater Cleveland, then install and support the systems we draw.
Snow and ice come off the lake in volume, so outdoor mounting details get designed for load and install schedules carry slack through the winter months.
Lakefront and downtown venues take sustained wind that inland suburbs never see, so outdoor displays and mounts get engineered for the exposure at that address.
Anything outdoors here goes through repeated freezing and thawing, so enclosures, seals, and cable entries get specified to stay watertight through the cycle.
Summer humidity is hard on equipment closets, so we specify cooling that holds the AV room at or below 75 degrees, because a hot rack of amplifiers cooks itself and collects dust.
What we consult on
Most of our Cleveland consulting work sits in four places. The design question is different in each one, and the equipment list always comes last.
Briefing rooms, training spaces, and lecture environments in a hospital or medical school fail for one reason more than any other: people at the back cannot understand what is being said. The room gets a bigger display and better cameras while the microphone coverage and the acoustics stay unaddressed. Cleveland has a deep healthcare and academic-medical sector, and these rooms run long sessions with remote attendees who have even less tolerance for a bad audio path. We design from the room: its dimensions, its surfaces, how many people are actually speaking, and whether the session is being shared to another building or another city. That sets the microphone coverage, the speaker layout, and the display sizing for the furthest seat. Where the health system's IT team owns the network, we work with them on it rather than around them.
Most conference room complaints trace back to a room size assumption made early and never checked. Manufacturer marketing sells a system built for five people into a room that seats twenty, and the people at the far end of the table spend the next year being hard to hear on calls. Downtown Cleveland offices often sit in older buildings with hard surfaces and awkward ceiling depth, which makes that mistake louder. We design from the space instead: dimensions, acoustics, whether the walls are glass or plaster, what actually happens in the room, and which platforms your people and your clients use, whether that is Microsoft Teams Rooms, Zoom Rooms, or Google Meet. Control behaves the same way in every room, so nobody needs training to start a meeting, and a room standard gets set once and repeated across the floor.
Two things tell you a restaurant's audio was never designed. You cannot hold a conversation, or you cannot hear what the operator wants playing. Both come from speakers mounted without accounting for direction, height, and a room full of hard surfaces, often run around the perimeter so the middle has no coverage and the edges are too loud. Cleveland's entertainment districts make this harder, because so many of those rooms are brick and timber with open ceilings that scatter sound. We zone the audio so the dining room, the bar, and the patio each get tuned to the concept instead of sharing one master volume. Hotels get treated as several venues under one roof, with the lobby, the restaurant, and the meeting floors on their own zones. Control stays simple enough for a manager to change the room without calling anyone.
Screens and speakers are where the most money gets wasted, usually because size and mounting were decided before anyone measured the room. A lobby display picked off a rendering ends up too bright, too dim, or hung on a wall with nothing behind it to carry the weight. In a converted warehouse there is often no place to hide a pathway, so a clean drawing turns into exposed conduit nobody approved. We start with viewing distance, ambient light, structural backing, and where a cable can legitimately run, then specify the display, the mount, and the speaker layout to match. Control ties the sources, the displays, and the audio zones onto one interface, so a manager can change the room without a technician. Signage gets planned around whoever will actually be updating the content.
When your architect produces a first floor plan, which is earlier than most people expect. There is no reason your technology partner is not at the architectural phase, because by the time the venue is being built 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, since you cannot submit a clean permit set or get an honest GC bid without them. Bring us in at that point and we model what the space needs, then send requirements back for the plan set: conduit sizing, pathway plans for open ceilings, blocking and backing behind every display, power for the rack, and cooling for the AV room. Projects that start with us at the architectural phase see roughly 95% fewer change orders than projects where we show up after construction is underway. In Cleveland that matters most in converted brick buildings, where there is often nowhere to add a pathway once the walls are closed.
Both, and the accountability is the point. Most consultants hand over a specification and leave, and they are not answerable for whether the room works on opening night, which is how you end up with a designer and an installer blaming each other. 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. A bid-spec document is only as good as whoever wrote it, and it usually originates with someone unqualified to write it, so we would rather own the whole path. If you want to use us for design only we will do that, and we will be straight with you about the risk of handing our drawings to a low bidder. We will also quote a fixed bid when the scope is genuinely settled.
We resolve mounting, pathways, and what can be visible before anything is specified, because in a nineteenth-century brick building those three things decide the design. Open ceilings mean the pathway is part of the aesthetic, so it gets drawn rather than improvised. Masonry walls mean structural backing and anchor detail get worked out for every display instead of assumed. Where a building carries historic considerations, we confirm the review path for that specific address and design to it. Acoustically these rooms are hard, so speaker type and placement get chosen around the surfaces rather than off a spec sheet. Our drawings then go to your architect and GC with the conduit, backing, power, and cooling requirements spelled out, and on new construction they go into the permitting set alongside the building's.
Usually, after we look at it. Where an internal IT team owns the network we work with them on it rather than around them, since the AV traffic has to live on infrastructure they are responsible for. If you already own displays or inherited a system, we will review the documentation and run our engineering process before saying yes, and the answer ranges from broadly right with a few changes to needs to be reworked. Commercial displays you already have are often fine once we confirm the make and model can be controlled the way the system needs. A few things fall outside what we do: equipment rentals, video production, and livestreaming as a service are not part of our scope. We also generally do not take install-only work, because we need to understand the design to stand behind it.
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 GC are, what is decided and what is still open. If construction has not started we will work from the drawings. If it has, the consult includes a look at the site so we can confirm what the building and the jurisdiction allow, and we come back with one engineered scope rather than a parts list.
