Leonard Suskin

Leonard C Suskin, the pixel-and-inkstained wretch, lives in the suburbs of the greatest city in the world with his wife, two children and cat. A veteran of the AV industry, he works for Spectra Audio Design and continues to pen fiction and poetry in his spare time. Opinions are his own, not reflecting his employer, colleagues, rAVe staff or three cats - though they'd likely agree. The cats, that is. You can find him on Twitter @Czhorat.

Let’s Talk About Specs

The scene: Project manager training, major integration firm. Dramatis Persona: A project manager, new to the wonderful world of commercial AV A veteran of the AV industry The Dialog: “I’m worried about this bid we just won. There’s no way we can do all of this.” “Why, what’s wrong? It looked like pretty standard conference […]

I’ve spoken about the things that keep an AV professional up at night — in part the growing rise of one-box, easily configurable solutions sharply reducing the need for highly skilled integration in simple spaces. That trend continues with both industry stalwarts like Crestron and smaller upstarts like Owl Labs selling single-device collaborative solutions. That’s […]

I don’t know if “As a Service” has replaced “experience” or “convergence” in the AV buzzword bingo game, but it certainly has been a hot topic as of late, opening some interesting questions as to how the business models of traditionally hardware-centric AV companies fit into a software — and software as service — based […]

“I’m a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are.” –Homer J. Simpson I’m with you, Mr. Simpson. Even if my ideas aren’t all crazy, I understand that as a cisgender, heterosexual, Caucasian male living in the United States of America I have just about every […]

With the new branding, AVIXA appears to have picked up a new motto, one which many of us have seen on the various promotional items for sale in the AVIXA store at InfoComm: “Together, we can change the way people experience the world.” Those who know me I believe in language, and believe in having […]

Another InfoComm is now behind us. As we return to our everyday lives, we should look back and reflect on what we learned and experienced over the past week. For those of you who weren’t able to attend, this is a chance to share some of the lessons I found across the country in Las […]

“Experience” has been the big word in the industry as of late, even beyond the big change in our trade organization’s name to “Avixa” — the Audiovisual and Integrated Experience Association. Is this a buzzword, or should this represent a change in the way we design, and even how we think? It shouldn’t, because user […]

Some categorize the quality of a user experience as a hierarchy, like this one: An accessible user interface does its job. You can access and interact with the interface. A usable interface is one which can be manipulated to achieve a desired result. This doesn’t mean that the result is something of particular value to […]

The past centuries have spanned many technological eras, each with a dominant aesthetic as well as dominant technologies. The Victorian era was the age of steam, of the first attempts to harness electricity. It was also an era of brass, polished wood, colored glass. It was an era in which a technical marvel was also […]

I still remember my first concerns about user engagement with the technology we provide. It was over a decade ago; we were fitting out four conference rooms per floor over about a dozen floors. Video teleconferencing in two, local presentation in the other. Pack up, head for the elevator, repeat. It was one of my […]

CES is here and, with it controversy. Of the six keynote speakers, six are male. That’s a ratio, for those of you mathematically inclined, of 1:0. Of those six, one is Asian, five white. None are African or African-American. This is the second year in a row that they’ve chosen not to invite a woman […]

An AV consultant once had a conversation with an executive from manufacturer about the most expensive home he’d seen. He asked what kind of control system one would build for a ten-million dollar home. The executive answered that there’d be a single button. When the button was pressed, a servant would walk into the room […]

When we think conference room and collaboration technology, we too often think of audiovisual collaboration technology, and when we think about that we think of a small set of traditional AV manufacturers, largely unknown to those outside of the industry. We think of control system manufacturers such as Extron and Crestron, of Vaddio and its […]

Names have power. Names matter. Decades of fantasy literature have taught us that. Kvothe, the kingkiller, gained control of the very air itself when he learned and spoke the name of the wind. In the wizarding world, nobody would dare speak the name of Lord Voldemort. On Roke Island, the young Sparrowhawk learned the secret […]

I’ve written time and again about the rise of software as opposed to dedicated hardware. About AV as a Service (AVaaS). About how all of those black and grey boxes we’ve come to know and love will soon disappear, to be replaced by services running on virtual machines. It isn’t just a rule about audiovisual, […]

Last week, I wrote about Biamp and the announcement that Dante will now be an option in their smaller TesiraFORTÉ DSP units. While it is an interesting story and the TesiraFORTÉ DAN units do fill a niche, it might not be as important as it appeared to me at first reading. I’ll tell you why […]

Editor’s Note: Leonard Suskin has additional thoughts on Biamp’s TesiraFORTÉ DAN, which you can read here. ISE has never been quite as big to me as InfoComm, though not for any particular reason. Perhaps it’s that time-zone differential is even worse heading East across the ocean than West to Las Vegas [or due South to […]

I’ve been writing for some time about how the days for dedicated hardware in the commercial AV realm might be numbered. We will always, of course, need edge devices: loudspeakers and amplifiers, microphones and audio digitizers. Video encoders, video decoders. Displays. Between all of these devices, however, live the entire world of AV switching, control, […]

While it may have been a quiet last few months of the year for me as I settle in to my new position back in the integration side of the business, you should know that your pixel-and-inkstained wretch is alive and well. It’s been another interesting year in the AV industry, with quite a bit […]

In an office suite in New York there was a pit. Not a dirty hole in the ground, filled with spikes and threatened by a swinging pendulum, but a cozy little nook of unfinished plywood, crowded with cables, video monitors, equipment racks laden with gear, bundles of cable running to and fro in a Gordian […]

A great deal of digital ink has been spilled on the phenomenon of Pokémon Go, including on these very pages by Gary Kayye, on the AV Power Up! podcast and, of course, by yours truly. There is one more thought which I’d like to share before I wander off to talk about something else, which […]

Assuming that you’ve not been living under a rock, you’ve at least heard about the Pokémon GO! craze. For the uninitiated, Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game produced by Niantic (in partnership with Nintendo, which owns the rights to the intellectual property on which it is based) in which one needs to hunt the […]

And… one more quick one post-InfoComm post. For the second consecutive year, family obligations kept me away from the big show. Last year it was my lovely bride’s recovery from major back surgery; this year was a more joyous occasion as my son graduated pre-school (and yes, this is important; another tradeshow will always come, […]

While I’m not attending InfoComm in meatspace this year, I’ve managed to flitter in and out of the show via Twitter, Periscope, Snapchat, etc. I’ll talk more about the experience of the trade show from afar, but today I’d like to discuss the keynote speech, a recent visit I made to my locksmith and what […]

On the fiction side of my blog (I still do write fiction when I’m not here) I wrote a recent vignette about a shopper purchasing some pre-peeled oranges in a grocery store. If you’re on social media you’ll likely have seen the photo of said oranges making the rounds as an example of our wasteful […]

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend a demo of the new Microflex Advanced microphones from Shure. These are digital beam-steering microphone arrays designed for tabletop (the MXA310) and ceiling (MXA920) placement. They are high-end, solidly built products which fit very well into some design philosophies and perhaps not as well with others. Both are […]

“Include Kodak in this room.” That’s the line in the client’s system review memo which confused me, and one with which I eventually opened an internal training seminar at SMW. What were they talking about? And what was the bigger message? Read on! The memo in question came in a fairly late design phase of […]

This is not a switcher wars post. I have no interest in discussing the various claims made by one manufacturer or another, the counter claims, counter-counter claims or any other such back-and-forth between competitors. The issue to which some of the ongoing discussion about switching technology HAS brought more attention is that of chroma subsampling, […]

The AV industry received some unsettling news last week regarding a potential security vulnerability in Harman’s control processors. It was a rare moment when we as a group were all in the news, though not in a good way. For those who’ve not seen it by now, Ars Technica reported that AMX (now Harman) Netlinx […]

The new year is upon us. In our personal lives, many will be looking to lose weight, exercise more, curb some of our vices. What of the AV industry? Is there anything within the world of technology we should be looking to change as the calendar shifts? Perhaps as the year shifts we can all […]

AV people used to have the coolest toys. Look back not that many years to the first AV touchpanels you saw; people oohed a bit, they ah-ed a bit and — if the installer soldered the nine-pin D-sub correctly — were impressed when the touch of one (soft) button not only turned on a room’s […]

There’s been some chatter around here lately on the CTS certification. Mark Coxon used his skepticism on renewal rates as a vehicle to question the value of the certification. Gary Kayye told us what CTS means to him. This lead me to contemplate what I thought of the certification, about renewal, and about where we […]

Leonard Suskin

Let’s Talk About Specs

What Keeps an AV Professional Up at Night – Part the Second

Scheduling, Software as a Service and the Day I Sat Through the Same Presentation Four Times

On Diversity

InfoComm 2018 Recap, Part the Second: Words by Which to Live

The TIDE Conference and Learning how to Think

The AV Experience

On Delightful User Experiences

Aesthetics, Part the First — Minimalism and the Tyranny of the Black Rectangle

What Keeps an AV Professional Awake at Night

On Myths and All-Male Panels

On Digital Assistants

A Visit with Microsoft

The Power of Names

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Software Revolution

On Biamp and Baseball: Second Thoughts on the TesiraFORTÉ DAN

At ISE, Crestron Goes Big (and Small), and Biamp Steps Towards Dante

An Announcement from QSC, the Death of Hardware and Where We Go Next

Year in Review

My Journey in AV

Accessibility for Everyone in a Virtual World

A Crack in the Wall Between the Real and Virtual Worlds

InfoComm from Afar

A Locksmith, a Monkey and the Oldest Profession: On Disruption

AV and the Price of Oranges

A Morning with Shure and Musings on AV Conference Room Topology

On Language, AV/IT, Teaching and Learning

A Primer on Chroma Subsampling and What It Means In Practical Terms

That AMX Backdoor

New Year’s Resolutions for the AV Professional

On Why We Don’t Have the Shiniest Toys Anymore

In Defense of the CTS Program