Audiovisual design and consulting for Portland offices, restaurants, taprooms, and campus training rooms. We design the system, specify it, install it, and support it, working from your architect's first floor plan forward.
Nobody owns the audiovisual scope on most Portland projects. Screens land on an elevation drawn by an architect who was never told where the speakers go or how loud the room has to be. The IT team wants the simplest thing that stays off their desk. The operator, who actually knows what the space has to do, gets asked last, and by then the walls are closed, the conduit is in the wrong place, and the change order is expensive. The system gets installed anyway and nobody on staff can run it.
An AV consultant exists to prevent that. We ask what the space has to accomplish, design the system around the answer, and hand your architect and general contractor requirements they can build to. Then we install what we designed, commission it, train your staff, and support it, so one company is accountable instead of a designer blaming an installer. We have worked this way since 2008 across Portland offices, restaurants, taprooms, and campus training rooms.
Who We Serve
Spaces we've wired across Portland — each built and supported by the same local crew.
We design audiovisual systems for Portland offices, restaurants, taprooms, healthcare briefing rooms, and campus training spaces, then install and support what we designed.
Persistent wet months are hard on anything mounted outdoors, so patio speakers, exterior displays, and cable entries get weather rated enclosures and sealed runs.
Gray light for much of the year changes brightness decisions, so we measure a room's real ambient light rather than specifying a display off a showroom impression.
This is a seismic region, so overhead displays, projectors, and speaker mounts are braced for seismic load and we confirm the approval path with the jurisdiction per site.
Mild outdoor temperatures still leave a closed rack room hot, so we specify cooling to hold the AV room at or below 75 degrees before the amplifiers collect dust.
What we consult on
Four kinds of rooms account for most of our Portland work. Each one starts from a different question, and in all four the equipment list is the last thing written.
Corporate teams usually arrive with a platform already chosen and a room size assumption that is wrong. Manufacturer marketing sells a system sized for five people into a room that seats twenty, so everyone at the far end of the table spends a year being unintelligible on calls. We design from the space instead, meaning the dimensions, the acoustics, whether the walls are glass or drywall, what actually happens in the room, and the meeting platform your people already live in, such as Microsoft Teams Rooms, Zoom Rooms, or Google Meet. That produces microphone and camera coverage the room really needs, a display sized for the furthest seat, and control that behaves the same way in every room. Where your IT group owns the network, we work with them on it rather than around them.
Portland taprooms and restaurants are frequently built inside old warehouse and industrial shells, and those rooms fight you. Concrete floors, brick, and a tall open ceiling give sound nothing to land on, so a conversation two tables over arrives louder than the person across from you. Most of that traces back to speakers hung without accounting for direction, height, and room surfaces, often run around the perimeter so the middle has no coverage and the edges are too loud. We solve the room first, then pick the speaker. Audio gets zoned so the dining room, the bar, and the patio each hold their own level and program, and control stays plain enough that a manager can change the room without calling us. Anything outdoors gets weather rated hardware on its own zone, because a wet Portland winter ends an indoor speaker.
Briefing and training rooms in hospitals and on campuses get treated like conference rooms, and they are not. A training room has to work for a presenter, a class, and a remote group at the same time, and a clinical briefing room has to start on the first try for someone who has thirty seconds before rounds. We design those around the schedule and the people rather than the feature list, which means sightlines from the back row, microphone coverage that picks up questions from the floor, remote participation where the room calls for it, and a control layout identical across every room on the floor. Older campus buildings usually mean hard surfaces and short ceiling depth, so acoustics and pathway planning come before equipment selection. Where an internal IT department owns the network, they are in the design conversation from the start.
A big retail floor or building lobby is loud and hard surfaced, and an announcement still has to be understood in it. Volume does not fix that, coverage and intelligibility do, so distributed audio gets zoned and paging gets specified against the room rather than a spec sheet. Most clients also want the hardware invisible, which is solved with placement instead of more boxes. Portland's heavy overcast pulls display decisions in both directions, since a lobby wall facing a gray sky needs less brightness than a south facing storefront in July, so we measure the light instead of guessing. Anything mounted outdoors here lives in persistent rain and damp, which drives enclosure and hardware choices. Anything hung overhead gets braced for seismic load, and we confirm the approval path with the jurisdiction before it is specified.
The acoustics, and then everything that depends on them. A room with a concrete floor, brick walls, and a tall open ceiling has almost nothing in it to absorb sound, so speaker type and placement have to be worked out before anything gets specified. Once that is settled, your general contractor needs a short list from us early, and those are the items that get expensive late. That list is conduit sizing, pathway plans for the open ceiling, blocking and backing behind every display, power for the rack, and cooling for the AV room. Overhead mounting here is braced for seismic load, and we confirm the approval path with the jurisdiction for the specific address. There is no reason your technology partner is not at the architectural phase. By the time the venue is being built, the mark has already been missed, and projects that bring us in at the first floor plan see roughly 95% fewer change orders than projects where we arrive after framing.
At the first floor plan. 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. We model what the space needs and send requirements back for the plan set so the contractor bids against something complete. What you receive is a design package your trades can build from rather than a recommendation memo, which means 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. For timing, engineering and design run two to three weeks after contract, equipment lands in thirty to forty five days, and a new build is usually nine to twelve months from that point to opening.
Both, and the second part is the reason the first part is worth anything. Most consultants hand over a specification and leave, and they are not accountable for whether the room works on opening night. A bid spec document is only as good as whoever wrote it, and it usually originates with someone unqualified to write it. 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. We will quote a fixed bid once the scope is genuinely settled, and we will tell you plainly when a fixed number this early would cost you more than the design work. Crunchy Tech started in 2008 as an AV support company before it was an integrator, which is why the designs get made serviceable on purpose, with fully enclosed racks, every cable labeled at both ends, and power kept separate from audio and data.
Yes, and that is often the cheapest way to start. Send us the drawings, the specification, or the quote, and we will run it through our engineering process and give you a straight read on what is missing, what is oversized, and what will cause a problem in the room you are actually building. If you already own commercial displays or a rack, we usually keep what makes sense once we confirm the models can be controlled the way the system needs. A few things sit outside what we do, so it is worth saying up front. We do not rent equipment, we do not produce video or run livestreams, and we do not operate cameras or book talent for events. We also do not generally take install only work, since 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, and who the architect and general contractor are. If construction has not started we work from the drawings. If it has, we come out, confirm what the building and the jurisdiction allow, and come back with one engineered consulting scope rather than a parts list.
