Welcome back to AV Truth, a weekly series where I share real-world lessons from AV projects in the field. In previous weeks, we explored meeting rooms, command centers, training spaces, and video walls.

This week, we turn to a critical, but often overlooked, part of the system; Audio DSP tuning.

Video might look great, but if audio fails, the room fails.

Bad video gets a pass. But bad audio? That’s a deal-breaker.
You can sit through a pixelated screen.
You won’t survive a meeting where people can’t hear or be heard.

What people often get wrong about DSP:

• It’s not “set and forget.”
  A DSP is not static. It’s impacted by layout, furniture, and even how many people are in the room.
• AEC can’t fix everything.
  Echo cancellation won’t save you from poor mic placement. Physics always wins.
• Gain structure matters.
  If just one mic is too loud, or one speaker is out of phase, the whole experience suffers. You can’t tune around poor fundamentals.

The mistake we see way too often:

Someone uploads a DSP file from a past project into a brand-new room.
Different layout. Different acoustics. Different mics.
But the same file.

The result?
A client says, “It works, but it sounds weird.”

In one case, the logic was copied from a square room to a curved glass boardroom.
We fixed it in under an hour. But the client had been using it like that for months.

What proper tuning actually looks like:

• Testing with real users — not just pink noise
• Understanding the use case, not just the hardware
• Clean gain structure from input to output
• Acoustic Echo Cancellation and Noise Reduction tuned to the room
• Someone who listens with ears, not just meters

Final truth:

When DSP is tuned properly, nobody notices.
When it isn’t, it’s all they talk about.

Because in the end, people don’t judge your system by how it looks, they judge it by whether they can clearly hear someone say:

“Can you hear me now?”

That’s it for Week 5, next week, we’ll open the rack and dive into the part of the system your client never sees, but integrators never forget.