00:00:01:18 - 00:00:32:03 Unknown Welcome to the On Record podcast. A podcast where we talk with professionals and subject matter experts from diverse markets that are using and producing video and audio in innovative ways to support their organization's objectives. My name is Mike Anzalone and my co-host is Andy Simmons. Today our guest is Brian Christ. Brian is the manager of technical services for Audio Biz Audio Biz a manufacturers representative for Shure Audio. 00:00:32:05 - 00:00:57:18 Unknown Welcome, Brian. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah. Looking forward to our podcast and conversation today. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved with specifically audio? Yeah, certainly. Like a lot of people in our industry, I was kind of heavily involved in things during middle school and high school theater productions. 00:00:57:19 - 00:01:26:11 Unknown You know, my own little band, things like that. And it just turned out that a local company that did live concert production needed some help. So I applied for that, went to it. And a couple months later I was out sort of, mixing bands, and stuff right off the bat. After a little while, I went on a couple small regional tours and then transitioned into the installation market, which I've been in for quite a while now. 00:01:26:13 - 00:01:48:01 Unknown And, about, 13 years ago now, I got hired by Audio Biz and the manufacturers rep field. So in addition to Shure, we support a number of other lines, but, Shure is certainly, local a market leader and kind of near and dear to our hearts. So here we are. So to kind of get started, today we work with a lot of clients. 00:01:48:06 - 00:02:14:10 Unknown And, you know, part of when we work with clients, of course, we we design a complete video package. And part of that also is audio. And oftentimes when we work with clients, audio is one of those things that are often overlooked or taken for granted. But yet we find audio is actually a little bit more complex, than just kind of putting up a microphone. 00:02:14:10 - 00:02:37:10 Unknown In a way, you go. So with your experience, Brian, can you tell us a little bit about some of those complexities and how you and your organization have overcome some of those? Yeah, certainly. There's so many different aspects to it. And I think you nailed it on the head that a lot of people tend to just take audio for granted. 00:02:37:12 - 00:03:00:14 Unknown It's a thing even years ago when you picked up a regular analog phone line. Most people don't realize that your head was basically separating your ear, from your mouth. And that's what sort of stopped a lot of the echo that maybe would go on. And that's a very common problem. It happens in things like this, like the podcast that we're doing right now. 00:03:00:16 - 00:03:34:17 Unknown It happens in things like boardrooms, anywhere where there's two way communication that can come into play. Shure Has been, market leader in dealing with that. We do it both physically and with programing. In DSP or digital signal processing, to remove things like echo from a two way conversation. Additionally, when you get into things like boardrooms, huddle spaces, you know, the things that are designed specifically so that you can communicate with someone else. 00:03:34:19 - 00:03:54:17 Unknown People have a tendency to focus on a lot of the other things. The video, the color of the walls. Glass seems like a really, really good choice. And a lot of those things are not good for quality audio reproduction. And let's face it, that's the whole reason that we're here. It's the reason we're talking right now. 00:03:54:19 - 00:04:17:18 Unknown Seeing your faces is great, but if we can't understand each other, then this is going to come to a screeching halt very, very quickly. So in addition to things like echo cancellation and just providing excellent microphone pickup, which I see you two are already set up with, with your. Shure microphones, there Shure is doing a lot of innovation in the background. 00:04:17:20 - 00:04:53:18 Unknown They are doing things like doing AI noise removal, which some platforms do automatically, but sure does with a couple of their products natively. They're developing new things like attempting to, remove reverb from a room to maybe make a bad architectural choice into not something that's going to be a detriment to the meeting. So they are just constantly innovating, constantly learning, and constantly using the new tools that all of us are presented with every day, like AI, to help push those solutions to a better level. 00:04:53:20 - 00:05:23:18 Unknown So when you start working with a with a client and you go on site to see their environment, what are the what are the things that you notice about the environment itself that has an impact in terms of your recommendations from an audio perspective? Yeah. The first thing that I like to ask, which is often overlooked and I'm even guilty of it occasionally, is we get ahead of ourselves and we don't ask, what are you doing in this room? 00:05:23:20 - 00:05:49:03 Unknown Just because a room has a table in it today doesn't mean it well, tomorrow. And with space being at a premium and people trying to maximize their investment in AV, a lot of these rooms have turned into multipurpose spaces. So I think, to a certain extent, gone are the days of having a lower level boardroom and a training room, when you can have one room that kind of provides both of those functionalities. 00:05:49:05 - 00:06:12:17 Unknown So that's the number one thing that I always try to ask is, what are we doing in the space? The other thing is the physical location. So that can determine not only any pitfalls that might come up, like the glass walls that I mentioned before, high ceilings, drywall ceilings versus acoustical tile, things like that. The physical environment. 00:06:12:19 - 00:06:39:17 Unknown It also a lot of times advises us on where we can place microphones. So there's times when in theory, a ceiling microphone might be the best solution. But if we can't put it in a place that makes sense, we may have to kind of rethink, the order of operation that we're doing things and, and maybe switch that to a table microphone or in a smaller space, a display mounted microphone. 00:06:39:18 - 00:07:03:00 Unknown So the use case and the environment are both very, very big. When we try to advise people on the proper product to use, when when we start working with clients, we have a tendency again, very similar to what you just described, to really understand what is the workflow in this space, and just as importantly, what is it that you need to hear? 00:07:03:00 - 00:07:39:14 Unknown Like you need to hear conversations. You need to hear individual speakers? We kind of take, you know, go down the path of, well, here's, something that is an omnidirectional microphone. This is a uni directional microphone. This is an array type of microphone. Brian, for our listeners who aren't familiar with audio technology. Could you kind of break down the various components of an audio system to make it, at least so they have a kind of a basic understanding of how all of these different boxes work together? 00:07:39:16 - 00:08:00:15 Unknown Yeah, certainly. So we'll start off with kind of the most simple, versions, which is just a single microphone. Sometimes those are hanging, sometimes they're on a table. A lot of people are just familiar with that in a form where you're holding it directly in front of your mouth. Those come in a number of different pickup patterns. 00:08:00:17 - 00:08:25:16 Unknown As we refer to them as. And a couple that you mentioned, we'll just go over real quick. So an omnidirectional microphone picks up everywhere around the microphone. So if you imagine, say, a balloon that might be just blown up, that's perfectly round. That has some disadvantages in that it picks up everything around it. They generally have an advantage of being, a lot higher fidelity. 00:08:25:18 - 00:08:49:07 Unknown What we have to do to change the patterns, which I'll discuss in a second, is alter some of the physical characteristics of the microphone, to change it. And that always affects, sort of the frequency response of what we hear. And also the phase, which we also perceive. I won't go down that rabbit hole because that is a very long discussion to have. 00:08:49:09 - 00:09:12:14 Unknown The most popular microphone pattern, for a single microphone is probably the cardioid. It's named that because it does look a bit like a heart. So that rejects sound from the rear. So that can be very useful for a couple things. It can reject room noise. It can reject, people talking maybe having a side conversation in another area, in a stage environment. 00:09:12:14 - 00:09:35:20 Unknown That's why you can see people with speakers on stage and it doesn't immediately come through the microphone. That can further be refined into a couple patterns, which I'll just touch on called super cardioid and hyper cardioid, which are both tighter still. But much like everything else, there's a trade off the tighter you make that microphone pattern. Generally speaking, you will end up with a little bit of a pickup in the center of the back of it. 00:09:36:01 - 00:10:06:17 Unknown So you're kind of sacrificing, rear rejection for width. The most popular thing currently, that we deal with in the corporate and education market is the array microphone, that you mentioned before. Those can come in any number of different configurations, and it's basically taking a large amount of microphones, using them to pick up the source and then using signal processing to form that into a beam. 00:10:06:19 - 00:10:39:21 Unknown And that beam will then target a specific talker and attempt to ignore everyone else in the room. As you might imagine, the more microphones that you use in that situation, the tighter and more precise that beam can be. So a really good example of that is our MXA920 ceiling microphone. It's kind of our flagship. We've been through a couple different iterations of it, but currently that will scan an area that you define, find up to eight people talking, and focus a beam on those particular people. 00:10:40:03 - 00:11:03:18 Unknown And even though it's just a two by two ceiling tile that almost looks like a heating vent, it has well over 100 microphone elements in it and an awful lot of processing to make that happen, but the results kind of speak for themselves because a well tuned, array microphone will sound just like you're speaking into a gooseneck mic that's maybe six inches from your mouth. 00:11:03:20 - 00:11:28:21 Unknown Now, will that microphone work on it's own? Do you or do you need to feed the audio signal for lack of a better term, into a DSP? For example? So we do have a couple different options. Most of the microphones that are currently manufacturers have a DSP built into it for things like echo cancellation, equalization, things like that. 00:11:29:01 - 00:11:56:19 Unknown Some of them even go above that and add noise reduction and automatic gain so that a quiet speaker might automatically get lifted. A little more. So for, medium to large, and down to small, obviously spaces, single microphone can work, and does work pretty well. Depending on the output of it, you might need a converter box to get it into, say, the PC or the sound system you're working with. 00:11:56:20 - 00:12:20:11 Unknown But a lot of our products have that built in. If you need to expand it. We also, of course, make standalone, DSPs, which can take multiple microphones, kind of bring them in, process them, and then get them to, you know, the, the computer that you're having the meeting on your, you know, computer that you're doing a podcast on. 00:12:20:13 - 00:12:50:10 Unknown We, we kind of cover all avenues on that particular system, but we also play nice with other manufacturers. So there's way too many to name. But for the most part, any modern DSP product, a Shure microphone will work just fine with, for additional processing if needed. A lot of our clients, we work, we do a lot of work with health care simulation, where these environments are. 00:12:50:11 - 00:13:18:07 Unknown Think of it as like a mock operating room. Could be. And, and oftentimes we'll see activity in one area of the room, activity in another area of the room, or maybe multiple areas in the room. We'll have multiple mics. Can you can you walk us through how you can we can connect multiple microphones into a single audio stream. 00:13:18:09 - 00:13:43:11 Unknown Like again, if you can kind of walk us through that, that process. Yeah, absolutely. If the microphones are analog. So think like a simple hanging microphone, which I know you guys, use on a very regular basis. They work great. They work best when paired with a processor that can do a process we call auto mixing and auto mixing. 00:13:43:13 - 00:14:12:15 Unknown Although it is somewhat accurate, is a little confusing because the mixer doesn't actually mix. So to speak, for you. What it does, more often than not, is intelligently tries to turn those microphones on and off when speech is detected, coming through. They also attempt to detect if the same voice is coming through two microphones. It will prioritize one of them over the other, and that gets rid of a lot of extra room noises. 00:14:12:20 - 00:14:35:20 Unknown As an example, if two people are talking, they can be slightly out of time, or one might sound better than the other, microphone that is. So using something with an auto mixer, is definitely a good idea to kind of get those together. That process becomes a little bit easier when you're using a digital microphone. 00:14:36:00 - 00:14:57:16 Unknown And to be clear, a digital microphone is always analog on the front end and then outputs digital on the back end. But using some modern, things like Dante, which is a, audio over IP protocol, we can easily take multiple microphones, put them on a standard network, and then mix them together at any location, that we desire. 00:14:57:16 - 00:15:23:14 Unknown And that functionality can be applied to just plain analog microphones with a small adapter as well. Brian I have a question in that regard. So he Mike had mentioned, healthcare simulation. If you were to go into an institution that had, something set up already that you thought like, wasn’t optimal or maybe had poor audio. How could that kind of effect, that institution's ability to like, review and learn from their recordings? 00:15:23:18 - 00:15:50:01 Unknown What are some of the result of not having, you know, a set up that you might suggest? Yeah. Just audio confusion. So if you can imagine you're sitting at a dinner table, right. And most restaurants that we go into are noisy environments. Even the quieter ones have people having conversations around you. And if you can just, you know, think to yourself, well, I've never been in a medical lab before, but I've certainly been out to eat. 00:15:50:02 - 00:16:16:16 Unknown And the more distractions you have around you, whether you can see them or not, if you can hear them. It hampers your ability to not only comprehend what's being said, but also to retain that. Because if your mind is struggling to just understand what the person across from you is saying, or, you know, down toward the end of the table, that's less work than it's doing to retain that information. 00:16:16:17 - 00:16:39:17 Unknown So especially in something like a lab situation, where you're learning, or when you're reviewing those, to your point to, you know, maybe do an after action report or you want to show another person what happened. The less precise that microphone, audio is, the less impactful that lesson will be at the end of the day. 00:16:39:17 - 00:16:57:10 Unknown So it's very, very important that all of that is crystal clear and is focused on the area or person that you want it to be focused on as humanly possible. It makes me just kind of think of like, you know, my two kids are both talking at the same time, and I'm like, hold on one at a time. 00:16:57:11 - 00:17:20:15 Unknown I'm not picking this all up. Yeah, exactly. And and I'm just as guilty as everybody else. I will say you are never as quiet having a side conversation as you think you are. It's a good note. Yep. You know, another application that we we come across often would be like wireless lapel mics. Tell us a little bit about that technology. 00:17:20:15 - 00:17:46:16 Unknown And where you see it being beneficial and where you might see it being, a challenge. Yeah. Wireless lapel mics are great. They are extremely popular. And they're popular because they're very unobtrusive. Right. So, as the name implies, you clip them, you know, on a lapel or maybe down on your shirt. It acts as a pick up. 00:17:46:18 - 00:18:07:01 Unknown One of the added bonuses to it is the user tends to forget that they're wearing it, which is usually a good thing because they tend to speak more naturally. They're not focused on staying in front of, say, a gooseneck microphone or boom microphone, and it allows someone to move freely about the environment, do whatever they need to do. 00:18:07:03 - 00:18:33:05 Unknown Regardless of the task, and still have that audio picked up, hopefully in an intelligible manner. The kind of pitfalls to them are they are by nature, farther away from your mouth and as is obvious, to anybody that's heard anything. The farther away you are from something, the quieter it gets. But if you're in a room, the room noise doesn't get any quieter. 00:18:33:07 - 00:19:00:08 Unknown So if somebody else in the room is talking, if somebody is jostling tools or a plate or surgical instruments, it's roughly going to be the same distance from that microphone as your mouth. So it tends to be less effective in those noisier environments just because when you take the distance into account, the background noise doesn't necessarily get overpowered by your voice. 00:19:00:10 - 00:19:23:06 Unknown There's also a couple other pitfalls. If you're using reinforcement like speakers, you have to be a little careful, to EQ it properly so that you don't get that feedback. Howl. But the the primary pitfall is that outside kind of interference of noise and part of that can get really pushed over the edge if somebody is wearing it incorrectly. 00:19:23:08 - 00:19:50:11 Unknown If they put it down halfway, you know, between your chin and your bellybutton, that's going to reduce the effectiveness of it because it's now twice as far away. You know, people sometimes hurriedly clip them on. And to our previous conversation about having a cardioid mic. If that mic is on sideways, it's now going to have less of a pickup, of your voice and more of a pick up of any room noise that might be in that direction. 00:19:50:13 - 00:20:18:02 Unknown Brian, we've been kind of focusing more on the microphone audio aspect when we work with clients. We also talk about, again, two way communication being, in simulation, it's kind of referred to as like the voice of God. Right. You've got this speaker overhead in the ceiling. An instructor may say, you know, start simulation or provide other types of instruction. 00:20:18:04 - 00:20:50:13 Unknown Oftentimes we could put like a wall speaker next to what, you know, the mannequin that they're working on. And that could be the voice of the mannequin. Sometimes will recommend private talkback where an individual will be wearing an earbud and the instructor can talk to them privately. How is your work like, or how involved are you when you're designing an audio system to kind of not only think about the microphone technology, but that other aspect, like the speaker aspect of the technology? 00:20:50:15 - 00:21:25:06 Unknown Yeah, it's certainly equally as important. Because if you're talking and I can't hear you, that's just as bad as vice versa. Right. So speaker placement is definitely a large consideration in the corporate world. We tend to care a little bit less about where that speaker is located, but especially in a situation like a lab. In the example you just cited, having the voice coming from the mannequin is great because as humans, we localize sound all day long. 00:21:25:06 - 00:21:46:01 Unknown That's part of the reason that we have two ears. It's not even necessarily just to hear things on each side. It's our brain kind of analyzes the difference between those two sounds and makes an approximation of where they're coming from. And we've all had that happen before. When you hear something, you instinctively turn toward it, whether you can see it or not. 00:21:46:02 - 00:22:11:00 Unknown And so in an intimate setting, like a medical lab where there's only a few people or a few sources that you think if a, if a sound comes from an area that you're not expecting it to. That again confuses your brain. It causes you to think about other things. You have to take a few extra seconds to locate that, you know, sound visually, and then carry about kind of where where you're at. 00:22:11:02 - 00:22:35:02 Unknown The second part of that is just intelligible audio. So speakers are directional, just like microphones. So if you have a speaker that's behind you and all speakers have a coverage pattern where they're sort of rated to have full range audio, the high frequencies tend to lose that coverage pattern first, because they tend to be a little bit tighter. 00:22:35:02 - 00:23:05:12 Unknown And the unfortunate side effect of that is that what we hear with the and the S's and and the sibilance and how we perceive consonants and things like that. So an incorrectly placed speaker. If taking localization out of the equation can also really hamper your ability to understand anything that's coming through it, and the earpiece. In a situation like a lab is a great solution if it's unobtrusive because it's direct communication. 00:23:05:13 - 00:23:46:00 Unknown There's no chance that that will get back into the microphone, itself, which could cause a doubling or an echo, you know, or more confusion. So you're absolutely right. Like you, you do need to figure out the exact use case, the flexibility of the space and then decide what's best for the speaker application as well. You know, you bring up an interesting point, because there's been a number of instances where, a client will want to communicate privately through the earbud, but they'll also want to be able to hear that private communication on the recording. 00:23:46:01 - 00:24:22:02 Unknown So, you know, really the use case would be I'm going to give this individual some instruction. I want to be able to observe how they express that particular instruction, or how, another participant that they're working with responds to that. So from an engineering perspective, how would you accomplish something like that? So to accomplish that, you need a mixer, whether that's, virtual in the case of a DSP or maybe physical with something with faders like we've all seen, that has multiple outputs, we refer to it as a matrix. 00:24:22:04 - 00:24:51:04 Unknown Generally in the industry, but in that case, you would have in a very simple situation, we'll say, the microphone in the control room, the microphone in the lab, a speaker in the control room and a speaker in the lab. And in that case, we can create, aside from the speakers, say, a third mics, that's both of those microphones and run that to a audio recorder, a video recorder, a live stream, as an example. 00:24:51:05 - 00:25:17:17 Unknown And in other instances, that's exactly how one might do, like a press feed, or something like that, to get, get things one way to the far end where you can pick up both of those rooms. But it's definitely important to have a separate mics specifically for that, because if you don't, then we can, you know, have things happen like you hear your own voice in the room if you try to put, you know, two different rooms through one particular speaker and, and some pitfalls like that. 00:25:17:21 - 00:25:39:09 Unknown Brian, I have a question for you. So we talked a lot about like in the actual workplace, but with with the rise of things like hybrid education and telehealth, especially over the last almost like five years at this point. How is this kind of change the way we thought about audio capture? Because I know that's something that we talk a lot about at, at IVS is like capturing a screen and a camera and putting it all together. 00:25:39:09 - 00:25:58:09 Unknown But how do you think about that in terms of audio? Yeah, it's it was certainly a challenge. It's a little bit less so now that we have some experience with it. But yeah, primarily before we had two things, there was in-person and there was remote and that was it, you know. And now we have to think about both. 00:25:58:09 - 00:26:25:17 Unknown And that requires a lot of pre-planning on the design. And, as well as putting the right equipment in to implement that, when you run into things where you're trying to say, have a microphone go through a speaker in a room and be broadcast to the far end. There's a lot of things that we and you, have to do and manage in the background to make sure that those signals don't get muddied, that there's not two of one thing coming through. 00:26:25:19 - 00:27:02:03 Unknown And so we have to use tools like matrix mixers and echo cancellation and, and things like that. A lot of the more advanced products, like array microphones as an example, will actually allow you to feed it the audio. That's coming from the far end. And it will not necessarily even use that to remove audio actively, but to just have it know when someone outside of the room is speaking so it knows not to try to focus a lobe and find that speaker, in the room, which would obviously be heard through the loudspeakers in the space. 00:27:02:04 - 00:27:23:08 Unknown So yeah, there's definitely, definitely a lot of planning. And, in a lot of cases on site tweaking of those things to make sure that all of those aspects are, are addressed, especially when you have a triple threat of recording, far end meeting and in-person reproduction as well. You can definitely tell that that's one area that most of us don't really understand. 00:27:23:09 - 00:27:41:03 Unknown When you get a bunch of people in in a room with laptops and then you have a screen going, and then you have someone on a phone and it's like, wait, what do we mute? So yep. Exactly. And there's there's ways to mitigate that on the back end in the DSP. But it kind of goes back to the very first thing we talked about. 00:27:41:03 - 00:28:00:10 Unknown Right. Knowing what they're going to use that room for and planning appropriately for that to happen. Because most people that have been in any kind of a meeting have experienced exactly what you described. Someone forgets that they had a slide to share, so they joined the meeting and their laptop mic is on and their laptop speaker is on. 00:28:00:11 - 00:28:37:15 Unknown And then all heck breaks loose, for about 30 seconds until someone finally goes over and hits the button, you know? Well, Brian, I think you you you've provided a lot of good information, and I think you've proven the fact that there's a lot that goes into putting together an audio system. And, and so your expertise is, is very welcome in terms of, again, if our listeners are thinking about, well, gee, I'm, you know, I'm in the process of putting together a new speech and language lab or a new simulation lab. 00:28:37:15 - 00:29:10:13 Unknown What are the what are the top 3 or 5 recommendations that you would offer them or provide guidance with in terms of these are the these are the things that you should first think about before you, you know, even think about a particular type of microphone. Yeah. First would definitely be the room, if and when we can, as you're both painfully aware, a lot of times we are going into spaces that were designed long before we were involved. 00:29:10:15 - 00:29:41:01 Unknown And there are some things that we can do with, say, acoustic paneling and some small changes to mitigate, some of those. But an after the fact application is never as good as doing it ahead of time. And then there's also some other things that you have to consider. So specifically in a med lab or any med situation, you can't just say, I want to throw up a two inch fabric panel over here, because now we have to think about cleanliness and sanitation and can we clean it? 00:29:41:01 - 00:30:07:00 Unknown And what happens if something gets into it? So room consideration should always be number one. Unfortunately, we find it very rarely is. The second thing. Again, kind of just going back to the first thing we discussed today is what's the use? Like, where the people are going to be. It's a 20 by 20 room. 00:30:07:02 - 00:30:44:02 Unknown Well, that doesn't really matter that much if they're always going to be in the same ten by ten foot space. That can really open us up to a lot of different opportunities. Similarly, if there's a table in the room, you know, or maybe it's like a smaller operating suite, we need to know if people are going to be standing next to the walls, because if we design that system to only pick up the operating table and there's a bunch of supervising people standing on the outside, we might not intrinsically know to design for that without asking the correct question. 00:30:44:04 - 00:31:07:12 Unknown You know, at that time and sort of the the third one, I would say, is what are any privacy concerns that might, you know, be at play. Right. And that kind of goes to both microphone and speaker choice. So we talked about earpieces. Those are great for localizing, you know, sound to a single person or a group of people. 00:31:07:12 - 00:31:33:06 Unknown If multiple people have them, you know. But what if occasionally someone comes in and they don't have that? Do we need to have a backup plan? Right. Will there be side conversations that may be private? Or we'll just put it gently and say of a nature you don't want to appear on a recording. You know, those are things that we need to consider, because if we're using an array microphone as an example, those are great. 00:31:33:10 - 00:31:52:04 Unknown But if you draw someone for an area in a pick up zone, that mic will try to pick them up even if they're whispering. So we need to either provide a way to mute that zone or maybe we switch to a more localized thing like a lavalier, you know, or a simple hanging mic. Multiples, you know, of them. 00:31:52:06 - 00:32:15:20 Unknown So I would say those are the three largest considerations. Once we find out what the room use case in general is, I have to assume that those three examples came from experience, not just like ideas off top of your head. So do maybe have an example or like a memorable kind of fail where bad audio ruined? You know, an otherwise nice setup. 00:32:16:00 - 00:32:39:17 Unknown Oh, yeah. There's, unfortunately too many of them to count. It part of it is a bit of ignorance because, again, we we all take sound for granted because we deal with it every day in personal conversations. And with the advent of, you know, cell phones, which are better on for obviously quite a bit now, all of our personal communications, for the most part seem great. 00:32:40:00 - 00:33:14:16 Unknown And unless you're driving through a dead zone, you know, you're just used to being able to make things work. Almost every horror story that I've kind of dealt with, so to speak, has just been either, we, as a manufacturers rep or a, a dealer, didn't understand the customer's needs or, equally possible. The customer did not get those needs to us, on a unfortunately biweekly basis, I will receive a call where we helped install something. 00:33:14:16 - 00:33:39:17 Unknown I remotely commissioned something, and it sounded great. And they call in a panic. And that panic is because they immediately did something with the system that we did not plan for, or they did not articulate. That is probably the majority of the issues that that come into play when you're dealing with folks like yourselves that, you know, are really good at what you do and know what you're doing, right? 00:33:39:17 - 00:34:05:14 Unknown It comes back down to the original idea of communication. So it's just all about asking those questions. But yeah, there's I could go on for a whole nother podcast, with, some things, involving that. The room is also, I can't stress that enough. Potentially a huge problem. We deal a lot with, you know, things in metropolitan areas. 00:34:05:14 - 00:34:29:02 Unknown You know, hospitals, learning environments are all very noisy. A lot of them are located, you know, in the case of, you know, Milwaukee or Chicago, they're in busy locations. So we visit a room at five at night. We plan for it the next day. There's classes going on next door. There's emergency paging going on outside. 00:34:29:03 - 00:34:47:04 Unknown There's a train outside of the window. You know, there's a lot of things that we might not see in the moment that all of a sudden can become a huge problem that we have to try to mitigate just because we didn't know, enough to check out a check for that type of thing. Those are good lessons learned. 00:34:47:04 - 00:35:13:04 Unknown You know, you don't you don't know what to ask until you come across those, those things. Like if you see, like a street sign says, don't do this because somebody did that at one point. Yep. Exactly. Well, Brian, I've learned a lot today. I picked up a lot of really cool terminology that I think can help me better articulate the value of really good audio engineering. 00:35:13:06 - 00:35:38:16 Unknown Before we wrap up, is there any anything else that you'd like to share with our listeners? I don't think so. I think we we did cover an awful lot. And, of course, you guys are experts in the field. You're always there to assist your end users, and I am as well. Frankly, we cover most of the upper Midwest, and I am always happy to have a conversation, with anyone. 00:35:38:16 - 00:36:12:05 Unknown And I will be as nerdy or plain, as anyone would. Would like. Great. Well, how can our listeners get in touch with you? Yeah. So you can visit us, on our website at Audio Biz, audiobiz.com that has, a wealth of news and information and, and things about the lines we carry. You can also contact our office directly, if you like, at (815) 271-3000 or email us at support@audiobiz.com. 00:36:12:07 - 00:36:23:21 Unknown Again, we're we're always happy to chat with people about their needs. Awesome. Well thanks again, Brian. We really appreciate your time. Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity. 00:36:25:17 - 00:36:37:18 Unknown On Record is a podcast presented by Intelligent Video Solutions, hosted by Mike Anzalone and Andy Simmons and produced by Kyle Shelstad. Find us online at ipivs.com/onrecord and on social media at Intelligent Video Solutions.