Since your a fellow old schooler, I'm sure that you have had your share of jobs that were lost to some johnny-come-lately hacks that were given your quotes by the client and used you proposal as "custom installation 101" and probably still had no clue how to execute the plan.
My favorite moment was when I saw one of my shadetree competitor's quotes and realized that not only had they copied my proposal layout exactly, but they copied my cover letter word for word!!
What I meant by the earlier post is that too many of the newer trunk slammers AND bigger companies with green install departments don't know how lucky they are that guys like us struggled with the growing pains of REAL custom in the early days....
Old schoolers learned to DESIGN whole house wiring and screw down punch-down blocks, RF splitters, combiners, attenuators, taps, and RF amps to a half sheet of plywood.
Old schoolers made "multi-zone" systems by stacking remote controlled stereo receivers together and using Xantech line level distribution amps and IR routers with whatever keypads or remotes we could get to work consistently. It was that, ADA, or B&O, which were also super-klugey.
Old schoolers learned to set up CRT projectors with finicky video processors without the benefit of video upconversion and adequate onboard video switching.
Old schoolers has to plant 10' dish systems and calibrated the massive beast to rotate and pick up signal from a dozen individual birds in the sky. Then to share the receiver through the house, you had to use a primitive analog tuned modulators that for some reason you could never get set perfectly so every TV tuners in the house tuned in clearly.
All that, and we had to wait 2 weeks for our parts from Channel Plus, Xantech, Channel Master, etc. to come from the individual factories... we didn't have the luxury of stocking multi-line distributors in every town. I have to laugh when I'm at the will call counter of my distributor and I hear a spoiled newbie walk in and cry "what do you mean you dont have that keypad in stock in light almond?, I need it for a job this afternoon!!"
Now, anyone with a tax ID and a van can be an expert.
He can throw up a DSS dish and split it out to a dozen or more receivers with off the shelf, amplified multi-switches...
Wire a house with a structured wire panel with modules that do the majority of the system design for you...
Plug and play an integrated multi-zone receiver where you literally only have make the connections and program the CD player commands to the system keypads to get a finished system...
Send a half dozen sources with different connections into any $800 or higher receiver that will automatically convert your signals and output a single connection on to a single lens projector with a nice onboard scaler that needs little more than a simple twist of the zoom and focus control to be dialed to the screen.
And on this thread we have one of these "expert" newbies who probably never struggled to integrate a science project of consumer and pro products because thats all that existed, or ever contributed ideas to peers and to the industry, is trying to put down someone like Mitch Klein who helped make his job so easy.
