Nobody at a good event ever compliments the audio-visual. That is the point of it. You notice AV only when the microphone cuts out during the keynote, when the slides will not come up on the screen, or when the people at the back cannot hear a word.

Long Island Wave learned that the easy way, by hiring people who got it right. We have used Long Island Video for one of our own events, and the reason we are writing about them is simple: on the day, nothing went wrong, and nobody in the room had to think about the sound or the screens once.

They are, in our view, the premier audio-visual staging and installation company on Long Island.

Who they are

Long Island Video Enterprises LIVE operates out of 110 Pratt Oval in Glen Cove and describes itself as one of New York's leading full-service AV rental and staging companies, as well as a full-service provider of audio-visual system design and installation. They cover the entire New York metropolitan area, and through a network of affiliated providers they can support clients nationally.

That combination is the unusual part. Most firms do one or the other. Event staging is a production business measured in hours, where a crew rolls in, builds a room, runs a show and strikes it the same night. Systems installation is a construction business measured in years, where a room is wired once and has to keep working long after everyone has forgotten who installed it. Long Island Video runs both.

Event staging and technology

The event side is what most people will meet first: staging, sound, lighting and video for conferences, galas, tours, product launches and corporate meetings.

Three things define how they work. Comprehensive support, meaning they are involved from initial concept through final execution rather than turning up on the day with a truck. Current equipment, covering staging, audio, lighting and video integration. And, most importantly, expert on-site management: their people stay in the room for the duration, watching for the problem before it becomes a problem.

That last one is the difference between a vendor and a partner, and it is the thing you are actually paying for. Anyone can drop off a speaker. Far fewer will stand at the back of the room for six hours so that the moment a presenter's laptop refuses to connect, somebody is already walking toward the stage.

System design and installation

The installation side serves conference and training rooms, event venues, schools and houses of worship, which is a genuinely demanding spread of environments. A school auditorium, a boardroom and a century-old church each present a different acoustic and a different set of constraints, and the work is not interchangeable.

Their process runs from custom system design matched to the venue, through full procurement and installation, to commissioning and testing backed by a warranty. The commissioning step is the one worth asking any installer about, because a system that was never properly tuned to the room it lives in will disappoint for years while looking perfectly fine on the invoice.

See them at the Melville Chamber Business Expo

If you want to size them up in person, they will be at the Melville Chamber of Commerce Business Expo on Tuesday, October 27, from 10 AM to 3 PM, at the Hilton on Broadhollow Road in Melville, as the premier provider of audio-visual staging and installation services at the show.

It is a fitting room to meet them in. An expo floor in a hotel ballroom is exactly the environment their event division builds for a living, so you can look at how the room is running while you talk to the people who do that work.

Bring the actual question. "We have a 200-person annual meeting and the hotel's in-house AV quoted us something alarming" gets you a useful conversation. So does "our boardroom's video conferencing has never worked properly since we moved in." Both are the sort of problem they solve, and both are better asked face to face than over a contact form.

Getting in touch

Long Island Video Enterprises LIVE is at 110 Pratt Oval, Glen Cove, NY 11542. Call (516) 759-5483 or email [email protected], with separate addresses for production, rentals, design and sales on their contact page. Their galleries are worth a look before you call, and the testimonials page covers the corporate, nonprofit and institutional work they do across the region.

Glen Cove puts them inside a comfortable drive of Garden City, Melville, Hauppauge, Huntington, Westbury, Plainview and the rest of the Nassau and Suffolk business corridor, and they work throughout the New York metropolitan area.

The best compliment we can pay them is the one we opened with. At our event, nobody talked about the AV. That is the whole job.