An IPVM Equivalent For The AV Market?

JH
John Honovich
Mar 11, 2013
IPVM

A member wants to expand into the audio / visual market and is looking for an equivalent resource to IPVM in that space. Does anyone have any recommendations?

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Carl Lindgren
Mar 11, 2013
MI
Matt Ion
Mar 11, 2013

^That's the first one I thought of as well. They're not ad-free like IPVM but there are lots of good articles, and forum participants from around the world.

JH
John Honovich
Mar 11, 2013
IPVM

What's the best part of AVS? I am assuming it's the Forum itself because there does not seem to be a lot of new articles and reviews. Yes/no?

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Carl Lindgren
Mar 11, 2013

The site does have some reviews (under the "Reviews" tab), but there are also a number of very good reviews in the "Forums" area by both sellers and end users. There are some very knowledgeable people posting on there who can pick apart nearly any piece of consumer electronics (including me - cctvtech). Of course, like any open forum, there is a lot of "chaff" and often you have to wade through dozens, or even hundreds, of pages on a given piece of equipment to find what you want, but it is usually there.

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Sean Nelson
Mar 12, 2013
Nelly's Security

Yeah its the most dominant. Pretty cool site.

MI
Matt Ion
Mar 12, 2013

Carl's got it - some really good participants there. Kinda like CCTV Forum before it was overrun by Dahua and Avigilon ;-)

Avatar
Carl Lindgren
Mar 12, 2013

For those of you who were unaware of AVS Forum before Mat and I mentioned it, be aware the site can be daunting. There are discussions with tens of thousands of posts and literally millions of views. One of the discussion threads I have visited and posted to has 31,970 posts and 4,170,166 views (and counting). There are discussions about basically everything under the sun (and many that couldn't stand the light of day).

Although you might think many discussions would get out of hand considering the thousands of posts in thousands of threads each day, they have some excellent and dedicated moderators who usually know when to let things go and when to reign things in.

Discussions range from experts debating Acoustic properties of Expanded Polystyrene to just us men debating Movie with the HOTTEST girl you've ever seen.

You could spend days searching some of the longer threads for an exact piece of information you know is there but can't remember exact details or exactly when a post was made (I have).

TIPS: Search, search and search again. Post anything in a thread and it will pop up in the "Forums: I've Posted" section (once you sign up and get a username). Then it's easy to find that thread again for answers. Check out "Forums: New Posts" and "Forums: Hot" at least occasionally for the latest. Also check out Ralph Potts' reviews of the latest movies.

HB
Harris Bond
Mar 12, 2013

Ok, this is right in my alley.

First question is: Resi or Commercial AV - huge differences, we do both but we are on a small market. Also what about automation?

The best "open" resource for a pro is the RC custom installer's lounge.

Then there are two "closed" excellent forums that are free but require proof that you are a pro:

I would say that AVS is much more worse than cctv forum because a very small number of real pros post there and there is a lot of misinformation - or to say it better: the information there is very suitable for DYI projects but it is usually unacceptable if you do it professionally.

All the above are discussion forums. Then you have a quite big range of commercial and trade magazines and websites to choose from.

SP
Sean Patton
Mar 12, 2013

Another +1 for AVS Forum, espicially in the DIY, Pro level Projection and Digital Cinema areas.

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