Most event AV goes wrong in the booking conversation, not on the day. These are the questions that separate a vendor who will carry your event from one who will drop equipment at the door and leave.
1. Who is actually on site, and for how long?
“AV included” sometimes means a technician sets up and leaves. Ask specifically: is a technician present for the whole event, or only load-in and strike? For anything with a live speaker, you want someone at the desk the entire time. A muted mic with nobody to fix it is the most common event AV failure there is.
2. Have you worked in this venue before?
Venues have quirks that cost hours: loading dock access windows, union labour rules, ceiling rigging restrictions, house sound systems you must patch into rather than replace, power drops in the wrong place. A vendor who has worked the room knows these. One who hasn’t will discover them on your event day.
3. What happens if a microphone fails mid-session?
The answer you want is “we carry spares of everything on the critical path.” Wireless mics, receivers, batteries, cables. If the answer is about how reliable their equipment is, they don’t carry spares.
4. Who is running the room if my event is hybrid?
Hybrid events need someone whose only job is the remote audience — monitoring the stream, managing remote Q&A, watching that the encoder hasn’t dropped. If the same person is mixing room audio and running the stream, the remote audience will be the thing that suffers when something goes wrong.
5. How is the room audio getting to the remote attendees?
The answer should involve a direct feed from the mixing desk. If the plan is a laptop microphone or a camera’s built-in mic picking up the room, your remote audience will hear a hollow, echoing version of your event. This is the single biggest quality difference between a professional hybrid event and a bad one.
6. What’s the plan for presenters who arrive with their own laptop?
Someone always does, usually five minutes before they speak, with an adapter nobody has. Ask what connectors are provided at the podium and whether there’s a spare switching path. A good answer includes a rehearsal slot for exactly this.
7. Can we do a technical rehearsal?
For anything with executives, press or investors present, insist on it. Thirty minutes the day before — walking each presenter through their mic, their slides and their clicker — prevents nearly every embarrassing moment that happens on stage.
8. Is the recording included, and what will it actually look like?
“We can record it” covers everything from a single locked-off camera at the back of the room to a properly framed multi-camera edit with the presentation cut in. Ask what you’ll receive, in what format, and when. If the recording matters, it changes the camera plan and needs deciding before the event, not after.
9. What’s not in this quote?
The most useful question of the nine. Common exclusions: overtime beyond a stated window, power distribution, rigging, venue-required labour, second-day setup, extra rehearsal time, shipping recordings. A vendor who answers this openly is one you can plan a budget around.
A rough sense of scale
A straightforward seminar — speakers, a screen, a couple of microphones, a technician on site — starts around $750 a day. Multi-camera conferences with staging, lighting design, show calling and streaming run to several thousand a day, because the crew size and equipment change entirely. What drives the number is rarely the equipment list; it’s crew hours, venue labour rules, and how many things have to work simultaneously.
If you only ask three
- Is a technician on site for the whole event?
- Have you worked this venue before?
- What’s not in this quote?
ZenjMedia produces corporate conferences, town halls, product launches and hybrid events across Greater Boston — AVIXA-certified, 25 years. See event AV services, hybrid event production or conference AV support — or tell us about your event.
