The most common AV mistake isn't a broken mic — it's a setup that doesn't match the room.
The most common AV mistake isn't equipment failure — it's a setup that doesn't match the room or the format, either overbuilt and wasting budget or underbuilt and audibly straining by the second hour.
Start with room acoustics, not a speaker spec sheet
A hard-surfaced hall with a high ceiling behaves very differently from a carpeted conference room, and needs a different speaker configuration to sound clean — this should be assessed on a site visit, not assumed from a floor-plan drawing.
Match lighting to function, not just mood
Presentation-heavy formats need enough ambient light for note-taking and screen visibility without washing out projected content; performance formats can push further into mood lighting because visibility of a printed agenda isn't the priority.
Screen and LED sizing follows sightlines, not the room's square footage
The correct screen or LED wall size is determined by the distance to the farthest seat that still needs to read text clearly — a common error is sizing screens for the room's floor area rather than its actual sightlines.
Ask what's in-house versus rented
For recurring or predictable formats, in-house equipment tends to be more reliable than per-event rental, simply because it's maintained to a known standard rather than depending on whatever unit happened to be available that week.
