By Dan Daley Special to InfoComm International It’s time for our periodic update on spectrum — that invisible resource that pro audio counts on for wireless transmission, mobile companies covet for new services, and the government continues to auction off. We’re starting to get clarity on this big issue (though we’re far from done monitoring […]

By Dan Daley Special to InfoComm International Like a video game, virtual reality (VR) technology allows participants to experience the world in simulated environments. But it may also change the game for the AV businesses. In the span of a couple years, the industry has seen tangential technologies, such as drones and the Internet of […]

By Dan Daley Special to InfoComm International Hotels have been a stalwart of event production for decades, hosting trade shows, conferences and everything in between. They’re also no strangers to live music: The hotel lounge bar has long been the setting for a wide variety of acts — cheesy and otherwise. But a cohort of […]

Dan Daley Special to InfoComm International The pro-AV business landscape has been fluid for some time. The tectonic shift from analog to digital as the technological foundation of the industry set the tone for constant change, as new platforms and formats, from digital audio to 4K video, have generated relentless technical churn. At the same […]

By Dan Daley Special to InfoComm International When the anticipated 8,000 to 10,000 attendees walk into the Javits Convention Center on Manhattan’s West Side Nov. 11-12 for InfoComm Connections New York, they will not be experiencing a mini version of the annual June InfoComm Show. Rather, they’ll be seeing an exciting slice of the continuously […]

By Dan Daley InfoComm International When tech managers and AV pros gather in Pittsburgh this October for the annual conference of the Consortium of College and University Media Centers (CCUMC), they’ll have a lot to talk about. The use of AV is evolving rapidly in the higher-education space, but experiences vary widely, based on everything […]

By Dan Daley InfoComm International One of the most significant shifts in AV has been the one that’s taken the touchscreen controller off the wall and put it in the pocket; the one that’s taken the presentation off the laptop hard drive and added it to the phone. The ability to control AV systems from […]

By Dan Daley Special to InfoComm International There’s an old saying in the media business: Sound is the stepchild to picture. In the audio community, a persistent subset of that equation has long held that acoustics is the junior partner of sound. Awareness of how the ambient environment of a space affects the quality and […]

By Dan Daley Special to InfoComm International It’s sometimes hard to reconcile the putative mission of a church with what has become the technically sophisticated entertainment experience inside many of them. But irony hasn’t stopped many houses of worship from pursuing ambitious AV technology strategies in an era when video dominates media of all types. […]

By Dan Daley Special to InfoComm International The phrase “portable PA system” conjures up images of an ancient E-V bullhorn speaker with a handgrip connected by a thick curly-Q wire to the kind of microphone Broderick Crawford used on Highway Patrol in the 1950s. And anything that conjures up images of Broderick Crawford isn’t actually […]

By Dan Daley Special to InfoComm International Like “punt” and “Hail Mary pass,” the huddle room draws its name from football terminology embedded deep in the lexicon of American business. It’s also the outcome of a long-term trend in corporate architecture by which traditional, closed-off offices have faded from favor, while wide-open workspaces pioneered by […]

By Dan Daley Special to InfoComm International It wasn’t that long ago — two generations or so — that someone could become a lawyer in the U.S. by becoming an apprentice to a working attorney, doing the reading, absorbing how the process works, and eventually setting up her own practice. You’d have to go back […]

This column was reprinted with permission from InfoComm International and originally appeared here. By Dan Daley Recent years have seen a rise in the number and severity of life-safety disasters at live events, particularly in the concert-touring sector. In 2011 alone, the industry had to contend with storm-related disasters at the Indianapolis State Fair, where seven concert-goers […]

This column was reprinted with permission from InfoComm International. It’s been more than three years since the United States threw the metaphorical switch that transitioned the country from analog to digital broadcasting. In the process, it created a controversy around what are called “white spaces” –  the radio-frequency (RF) spectrum that acts as a buffer […]

Written by Dan Daley This column was reprinted with permission from InfoComm International and originally appeared here. Networked digital audio has become a goal for many live-event producers, with the Holy Grail being an analog-to-digital conversion that takes place at the stage box, with the audio signal staying digital until it hits an amplifier on […]