Every brand we build with · Kansas City. Named honestly.

A dealer line is one we are authorized on: a dealer agreement of our own, with the manufacturer or with its distributor (NAD and Loewe come through the distributor), or one we come under. James Loudspeaker is sold as James by Sonance and comes under our Sonance agreement, Ketra is Lutron’s full-spectrum LED brand and comes under our Lutron agreement, and Q-SYS is QSC’s platform and comes under our QSC agreement. What an agreement covers differs by manufacturer — buying direct, registering a project before it is sold, how a warranty claim is handled — so we confirm those terms for the equipment in your proposal instead of promising one set of rights across every line. A carried line is one we specify, buy, install and service through distribution. We carry and install those, and we do not describe ourselves as authorized on them, or as a partner, because we have signed nothing that would make it true. We publish the split because it is the kind of detail that quietly inflates itself on a website, and a homeowner comparing integrators deserves the version that survives a phone call to the manufacturer. Several of the dealer lines also carry a formal credential; each is listed under Credentials on this page, spelled the way it was issued.

Usually, and it is a normal request rather than an awkward one. Most manufacturers in this industry sell through the same distributors we already buy from, so a line we have no page for is often a purchase order rather than a project. What changes is what we will promise: on a line we work with every week we can tell you how it behaves in year three, and on one we have never installed we will say so plainly and price the learning curve into the schedule instead of hiding it. If a brand is genuinely unavailable to us — some manufacturers hold territories closed — we will tell you that too, and point you at the closest line we can stand behind. The only answer you will not get is a yes that turns into a substitution on delivery day.

The room picks the line, not the other way round. We start from what the space has to do — how loud, how bright, how much ambient light, how far the seating is from the screen, whether the walls are open or finished, whether it has to survive a Kansas winter outdoors — and then from what has to talk to what, because the control system is the part a family lives with daily. From there the shortlist is usually two or three lines, and the deciding factors are boring and practical: lead time, whether the finish matches the millwork, whether parts will still exist in ten years, and what we can service ourselves rather than ship back. We will show you the shortlist and the reasoning before anything is ordered.

Some, as part of a takeover. A house whose original integrator has stopped answering the phone still needs someone who can get into the system, document it, and keep it running, and on a Control4, Crestron or Lutron takeover we inherit older control processors, amplifiers and camera systems we did not specify. That work is worth doing whether or not we put the equipment in. Savant is the exception: we do not sell, install, service or take over Savant systems. What we will not do is quietly re-badge someone else’s install as ours.

From the manufacturer, and each page says which document it read. The model names, series, ranges and capability claims on these pages are taken from the manufacturer’s own published material rather than from a distributor summary or a competitor’s page, so if a page tells you a projector family exists in four models, that is the manufacturer’s count. Anything that is our own experience rather than the manufacturer’s claim is written as ours. If you find a page that has fallen behind a product refresh, tell us and we will correct it — the pages are maintained, not published once and abandoned.