Audiovisual consulting, design, and installation for Washington briefing rooms, boardrooms, hotels, and restaurants. We design the system, specify it, build it, install it, and support it, working from your architect's first drawings forward.
On most Washington projects the audiovisual scope has no owner. The architect draws screens onto 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. The person who has to run the room every day gets asked last, usually once 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 can operate it.
That is the problem an AV consultant is supposed to prevent. We come in as the audiovisual partner on the job. The consult starts with your locations and what each room has to accomplish, we design the system around that answer, and we hand your architect and general contractor requirements they can build to. Then we install what we designed, commission it, train the people who use it, and support it, so one company is accountable instead of a designer pointing at an installer. We have been doing that since 2008 across institutional, corporate, and hospitality work in the District, Maryland, and Virginia.
Who We Serve
Spaces we've wired across Washington, D.C. — each built and supported by the same local crew.
From Penn Quarter briefing rooms to Georgetown dining rooms and office floors in Arlington and Bethesda, we design, install, and support commercial audiovisual systems across the District, Maryland, and Virginia.
Washington summers are humid and AV rooms here are rarely cooled on purpose, so we specify cooling to hold the room at or below 75 degrees, because a hot rack of amplifiers cooks itself and collects dust.
Winter ice storms and repeated freeze-thaw cycles work on outdoor mounts and cabling, so exterior hardware gets rated for it and install dates get scheduled around the season.
Height and facade restrictions on many District buildings limit what can be visible or penetrated, so concealment and mounting get settled before equipment is specified, and we confirm the review path per address.
The patio season here is short and worth real money, so outdoor audio and displays are designed to come back online in spring without a rebuild every year.
What we consult on
Most of our Washington consulting work sits in four places. The design question is different in each one, and the equipment list comes last.
These rooms fail in public, which is the whole design problem. A briefing room has to be intelligible to everyone in it and to whoever joins remotely. A training or hearing room has to work for a person who was handed the space that morning and given no instructions. So the design starts with what the room is for and how the seats are arranged, then microphone coverage, display sizing for the furthest seat, and remote participation on the platforms your people already use get specified around that. Federal agencies, associations, and non-profits often carry their own procurement or security requirements, and we work to them and confirm the specifics per project rather than assuming. Control stays simple, because a room that needs a technician in the corner is a room nobody books.
Corporate, legal, and association clients usually arrive with a platform already chosen and a room size assumption that is wrong. 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 unintelligible on calls. So we design from the space: the dimensions, the acoustics, the wall surfaces, what happens in the room, and which platforms your people and your clients bring. Microsoft Teams Rooms, Zoom Rooms, and Google Meet each ask something different of the hardware. That produces the microphone and camera coverage the room needs, displays sized for the furthest seat, and control that behaves the same way on every floor. Where an internal IT group owns the network, we work with them on it rather than around them.
A Washington hotel runs on a calendar somebody else sets. Conference groups, visiting delegations, and association meetings arrive in waves, and the building has to hold a keynote on Tuesday and a reception on Saturday without anyone opening the rack. Treating the property as one system is the usual mistake, so the design goes zone by zone: lobby audio that sets a mood without fighting the front desk, restaurant and bar zones with their own levels, event and directory screens, and meeting rooms built around the platforms guests bring rather than one the property picked. Ballroom systems get presets so a banquet manager can change the room without a service call. In protected buildings nothing can be visible, so speakers and displays get concealed into the architecture without giving up coverage.
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. So audio gets zoned, with the dining room, the bar, and the patio each tuned to the concept instead of sharing one master volume. Displays get placed off sightlines so a screen is a content source rather than an intrusion, and control stays simple enough that a manager can change the room without calling anyone. Washington patios earn their money in a short season, so outdoor equipment is weather-rated on its own zone and specified for freeze and thaw rather than hauled inside every fall.
When your architect produces a first floor plan. There is no reason your technology partner is not at the architectural phase, and 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, 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 AV room. Projects where we are engaged at the architectural phase see roughly 95% fewer change orders than projects where we arrive after construction has started. Washington raises the stakes on that, since a large share of the work here happens inside older protected buildings where reopening a wall means another approval and another crew.
Both, and the accountability is the point. Most consultants hand over a specification and walk away, and they are not accountable for whether the room works on opening day. We design, specify, procure, build the rack in our shop, install, commission, train the people who use the room, 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, which is why we run our own engineering before agreeing to a number. We will quote a fixed bid once the scope is genuinely settled. Equipment rentals, video production, and livestreaming are not services we offer, so what we design is a permanent system you own and we maintain.
Yes, and that is a large part of the work here. The metro spans three jurisdictions, so an organization with sites in more than one of them is working across separate approval paths, and we confirm the path for each address as part of the design rather than assuming one covers all three. The upside of a single partner is one engineering standard, so a person walking into a conference room at any location starts a meeting the same way and your IT group supports one architecture instead of three. Where a client has procurement or security requirements, we work to them and confirm the specifics per project. Support runs through one help desk, where roughly 47% of tickets close in under an hour and about 72% close within a day, usually without a site visit.
You get drawings and documentation your trades can build from rather than a recommendation memo: system elevations and equipment locations, signal flow and single-line drawings, an equipment schedule, conduit and pathway requirements, power and cooling requirements, mounting and structural backing details, and network requirements. On new construction our drawings go into the general contractor's permitting set, so the technology gets reviewed alongside the building. Engineering and design run two to three weeks after contract, equipment lead times land at thirty to forty-five days, and a new build is usually nine to twelve months from that point to opening. Crunchy Tech started in 2008 as an AV support company before it ever designed systems, which is why the design is made serviceable on purpose: fully enclosed racks, every cable labeled at both ends, and power separated from audio and data.
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, and it includes a site visit to confirm what the building and the jurisdiction will allow, then you get one engineered consulting scope back rather than a parts list.
