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Getting Techy With It feat. Ed Veeser from QSC!
Ed stopped by our Experience Center for an in-depth conversation with Pat and Neil Hufford from Mainline Marketing. After explaining what brought Ed to QSC, we learn what makes Q-SYS so special, how they handle updates, and what is in store for us in the future. (New to the Q-SYS Ecosystem? This hilarious 5-minute video will get you up to speed on everything you need to know!) We also find out why everyone in the U.P. of Michigan is a Green Bay Packers fan, how COVID impacted the industry, and his love of Wisconsin.
About Ed Veeser
Ed Veeser is a Senior Manager of Professional & Managed Services at Q-SYS, residing in Madison, WI. Originally from Michigan, Ed's career in film and video production led him to California, where he developed a passion for automation and technology. He has since returned to the Midwest, where he enjoys spending quality time with his family in nature. Connect with Ed on LinkedIn or reach out to
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Transcript
Welcome to another episode of Sound Connections. In this episode, getting techy with it, Pat sits down with Ed Vesor from QSC and Neil Hufford from Mainline Marketing. They get deep into why the Q-SYS platform has become so popular and explain the benefits of implementing Q-SYS Reflect Enterprise Manager. You'll also learn that Michigan has an upper peninsula, who knew, and why Ed loves the Green Bay Packers. We hope you enjoy this Sound Connection.
Pat
Welcome to another episode of Sound Connections. We are here with Ed from QSC and Neil making his appearance, his debut, as it were, on Sound Connections from Mainline. Gentlemen, thank you for being here today. I appreciate it.
Ed
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Pat
Of course. I want to start with Ed and I want to talk about where you're at and what you do for QSC.
Ed
Yeah, cool. So I live in Madison, Wisconsin, but I handle for QSC system side, so for the integrated side of QSC. I work with end users in the western United States and Florida. Those are my territories. And QSC is just cool enough to let me live in Wisconsin, which is something I actually wanted to do.
Pat
Oh, all right. Well, that's nice.
Ed
Yeah, I got into integrated AV in 2015. I was in live events, corporate AV before that in LA, doing camera directing and projection for a few venues in LA, mainly a big ballroom in Beverly Hills. It does a lot of galas and fundraisers and award shows and stuff. And wanted to try something different, had just gotten married. My wife really wanted to live in San Francisco for at least some period of time. And I had a buddy up there who worked for Crestron. And he said, “You would do well here. You should come and work for me.” Here in this Crestron office, the one that was in San Francisco, which is where they had a training facility and a handful of application engineers whipping up proof of concepts and that kind of thing. I have always taken this guy's advice. He gives great advice. He's a great friend. His name is Greg Mattson. Today, he is the control product manager at QSC. We worked together in live events in LA. He gave me a call one day knowing I was looking for something different. He had already gotten immersed in Crestron in Northern California. He said, come work for me. So I did. It was a very tough first year entering a much, much more significant career move than I realized. But it was a great choice. Things happened, and we each ended up working at QSC in different departments. I think we'll just probably always be together.
Pat
It seems like you guys are kind of tied at the hip. That's not a bad thing.
Ed
He has taught me so much, and now he's in a great position to really make big moves for a major platform that I love, which is QSYS. So my job is to be buddies with guys like Greg and the other product managers and learn a whole lot about QSYS and go out and evangelize it. And so I talk with end users, as opposed to most people in our sales force at QSC are talking to the dealers, integrators, and consultants as well. A little bit different for me. I'm sort of intentionally separated from that channel, and I'm really just trying to meet people that are managing complex AV systems at universities and for large corporations and at venues and that kind of thing, and just get them introduced to the platform, show them that it is something that they can learn in a matter of days as opposed to a matter of years. It's just a really solid file management approach and ecosystem problem solver for their AV infrastructure.
Pat
Is that how you would describe it if someone came up to you and—
Ed
Yep.
Pat
And was like, what is that?
Ed
QSYS from QSC is a software-defined audio, video, and control infrastructure. It's really a client-server relationship. If I ever show you a software demo and you think, oh, okay, this actually makes my life easier. I think I can start to automate some things here. Maybe I can even make some modifications to a user interface, which with our old platform wasn't the case. I had to call somebody and it cost a thousand dollars or whatever. If I bring a demo to you like that and that's starting to resonate, then there would have to be on your network what we call a core. If you look at a Q-SYS core, assuming you've looked at backplates of audiovisual equipment, you would immediately recognize it as a DSP. You would see the mic line inputs and outputs and the USB connection. And it is a DSP, but it is really a multimedia processor that can handle all of your HDMI distribution, your PTZ cameras for conferencing, and all third-party control. It can even be the connection to the cloud so that you can monitor all of your devices on the network anywhere you have an internet connection.
Pat
So, it's kind of like an end-all, be-all to everything?
Ed
It's quite powerful, yeah. Typically, it will go into a job, maybe at a Fortune 500 company or something for the first time, as a DSP. But it grows into the head-end primary processor for much more than just audio processing.
Pat
So, was COVID a boon in what you do? Did it help you elevate to another level? Was it something that, maybe due to demand, accelerated a process for you that maybe wouldn't have had we not gone remote for two years?
Ed
I don't think it would be honest to say that it accelerated. I think we had a roadmap established before COVID, which coincidentally happened to be very good for people who now need to bring in remote conferencing and have people working remotely but still be able to communicate. And a very good roadmap of products for flex spaces and larger collaboration spaces than the huddle space. That kind of was our direction before COVID. I think that COVID has gotten us to more customers because of the need. But it didn't necessarily change our vision of the platform or the ecosystem.
Neil
I think, if I could just chime in on that, one of the benefits that I recognized early on about Huston specifically was, you make your initial investment in the core, right? Right. And maybe I just wanted to route my audio to these conference rooms or these whatever. And we're having all of our meetings in person because it's 2019 right? And, all right, this audio process may be a little expensive. I don't even know. But now, okay, now we have to do all this remote stuff. Now you're telling me that I only have to spend just a little bit more money on the peripheral. The system's already capable of expansion. Like it's just, it's ready to expand into video, into control. Now, not only can it expand into video conferencing, but I had this touch screen that used to route my speakers. Do I need to buy a new one of those? No. That could be reconfigured too. You can use that same hardware. You can use all the same stuff. You just have to add this one piece or maybe you already had it, and you just didn't even know it. Maybe it was already built with the core and you just weren't even using it. It's so expandable. And I think that's just a great thing about Q-SYS. Like you buy it and it's so jam-packed with what it can do. At any level you buy it. And then if you need it to go really big, it can expand all the way really big. Or if you need it to be small, it can be pretty small.
Ed
We're very serious about packing features into our software. So about four times a year, you'll see a new major release of Q-SYS Designer. That's our configuration programming environment where you're going to do everything. You're going to build your whole system, all your audio routing, all of your HDMI routing, all of your cameras, all of your control, all of your user interfaces, all done in this one platform. And a handful of times a year, there's a new version of that platform that comes out that you can upgrade to should you want to. Should there be a feature there that works for you that you want to take advantage of. And they're usually serious features, you know, like free features added to the software that prevents you from having to go out and buy another little black box. For example, in 2015, acoustic echo cancellation, which is required for any video conference, any conferencing space with loudspeakers, has to have acoustic echo cancellation. And what that means is whatever is coming through your loudspeakers is subtracted from the microphone signal so that you don't have the echo going back to the far end. I'm sure you've been on a Bluetooth call, somebody's on their phone in their car and it's not really...
Neil
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
Ed
It's impossible.
Pat
That's my favorite thing. I think everyone loves that when it's on the Zoom call.
Ed
So it has to be there. And we're certainly not... The only ones, I mean, it's no secret. You must have acoustic echo cancellation in a conference room. We added it in the form of free software. I mean, before that, cores were audio distribution for cruise ships and theme parks that didn't necessarily have to consider a far end speaker. But just building an algorithm into our software is a good example of our approach and how you are making a really safe investment with a core. It's something that's going to grow well with you.
Neil
I mean, that's just exactly what I was talking about. Like, you may have bought this thing to route audio and then you're like, oh, man, now I needed to do conferencing. Well, turns out, just download the new designer. It already does that. And then for free, they give it to you for free and now you just have to implement it, and it's there. And when the next thing comes out, they're always evolving at QSC to make it better.
Ed
I was working with a Fortune 500 company, getting to know their rooms, doing some troubleshooting. They were using a Core 110f, very, very common, popular model core. And they were only using it for audio processing for conferencing spaces. And they had kind of a stack of other manufacturers' products to do the other things that those rooms required. Control and video distribution mainly. And their conferencing platform of choice was and still is Google Meet. Well, Google Meet, running on a little Chromebox in a hundred credenzas in this building in San Francisco that I've spent a lot of time in, I found myself having to troubleshoot these systems a little bit. And I had to start to wonder about the Google Meet piece and how is that really being controlled? Because that particular platform does not include an API. As a programmer, you really can't build the controls to drive a Google Meet room. The documentation doesn't exist to do that. And yet there was a device, a really big expensive device in the rack, that was connected to the Chromebox and giving this customer up, down, left, right, enter and keyboard control so they could make Google Meet calls from a third party device. And it was like a big amount of expensive rack space to get that done. And I was like, what is going on here? And I just looked into it a little bit, and I realized that all this thing was doing was taking RS232 serial control, so serial control output of a major expensive processor and converting it to USB and it was emulating a keyboard into the Chromebox so that they could have some keyboard commands on a piece of glass.
Pat
Some keyboard, not even...
Ed
Up, down, left, right, enter, yeah. So I was like, that's a real shame because this is making my troubleshooting much, much more difficult. And I called up Greg Mattson, Control Product Manager, and I said, look, there's already a USB connection from this Chromebox to the Core 110f for audio. We have a serial port on our 110f. Can you help me write a module so that we can just kind of like have a keyboard inside the 110f to control this Chromebox? And then I get a whole bunch of rack space, and I get a simpler system that does the same thing. I was trying to ask him to help me write a module for the serial port, right? And he says, “Well, wouldn't it be better to just build HID onto that USB stack that they're already using?” And I was like, “Well, that's why you're the product manager.” And literally the next firmware release had that component in it.
Pat
This is why I called you, for you to tell me that.
Ed
Yeah. And I mean, that was impressive to me. That is agile. The next firmware release has a little block in it with a full keyboard that's going to work over that USB connection that I thought I just needed for audio. That was a success with the customer, by the way, too. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, they saw that and said, yep, okay, we get that.
Neil
I think another major benefit of going along that path. So you had a Q-SYS core that was doing the audio, and then you had a third party that was doing the keyboard. And then maybe there's another third party that's doing the video. If you can get that into one product into a Q-SYS core, then you only have to hire one guru, the Q-SYS guy, not you hire the audio processor guy to come in and go, “I don't know, the keyboard's not working.” They're like, “Well, can you fix it? Now you got to call the keyboard guy.” And then you call the keyboard guy and he's like, “Well, my USB is talking to whatever you got to call the video guy.” And then it's like, you have to have three techs that specialize in the individual thing where Q-SYS kind of brings it all home into one box of, no, we can fix it here. When you enclose it at all into one thing, there's a major benefit and a cost savings, honestly. If you're trying to operate a facility, a meeting room, anything, if you can reduce the amount of interfacing you have to do between a whole bunch of different companies or products, that's just a win.
Ed
Yeah, faster analytics, just know where the fire is that needs to be put out right away is a huge, huge win for these four-person, five-person teams that are managing a thousand complex spaces. It's always going to resonate if you can do something a little bit more intuitive and a little bit simpler and not lose any functionality whatsoever.
Pat
Yeah, and knowing the fire department to call, kind of like what you were saying, it being all under one roof makes it very easy to go, “Hey, this thing's not working,” and everyone can go, “Okay, we know exactly who we're going to talk to to get this figured out.” And then troubleshooting is between one person and a machine instead of three people and multiple machines that are talking to each other in different ways. So that simplification is really, really awesome.
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Ed
For the listeners who are not going to realize this, there was another podcast recorded here today, which I sat in on and observed and found very interesting and I enjoyed. And I was a little bit jealous because she was very eloquent and interesting and artistic and talked from the heart. And I knew I was going to come in and talk about a software-defined processor.
Pat
You can talk about that from the heart.
Ed
I am actually kind of passionate about it.
Pat
Which is great.
Ed
But I was thinking of LA Story with Steve Martin. You guys ever see that movie?
Pat
Yes.
Ed
So there's a scene where they're having fancy cappuccinos in Beverly Hills, and the camera is dollying around the table and there's a million conversations going on. And then Steve Martin is sitting next to a young lady and he says, “So, what are your interests?” And she says, “Oh, well, actually, I've been taking a class at UCLA about conversation.” And he says, “Oh, really?” And she says, “Yes.” That's one of my favorites. I just had that feeling.
Pat
You've got to love Steve Martin. He's wonderful. So I need to ask, where do your football allegiances lie? Because you're in Wisconsin, so I need to know. How does that work?
Ed
Well, that's true. I'm from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We are almost all Packer fans in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Okay. So not everybody knows where the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is. A lot of people think it's Ontario, or they think that there's a mistake on the map and it's actually Wisconsin.
Pat
That's not what that is.
Ed
It's part of Michigan. It's just a different peninsula connected by a bridge. Where I grew up, a two-hour drive to Green Bay or a seven-hour drive to Detroit, that's an easy choice. I'm a Packer fan.
Pat
Wow. I mean, real tough. The Lions have made it real hard on you to pick over the last three decades or so.
Ed
Yeah. Before I got into a gig where I had weekends off and I was doing live events, you can't imagine how hard I worked when I was living in California and doing live events to just be able to watch TV at 10 in the morning to see the Packers. I mean, I would move mountains to just don't put me behind a console at 10 in the morning. I'm going to watch the Packers. And what about you?
Pat
Oh, I'm a Giants fan. I'm a perpetual loser. Okay.
Ed
What? You got two Super Bowls.
Pat
We have two Tom Brady Super Bowls and I will take that to my grave. I am overwhelmingly happy with that. But yeah, I mean, Eli is... He's fine. He's fine. I think he'll make the Hall of Fame just because he beat Brady in both Super Bowls. But I think that that's the thing that he'll be able to hang his hat on. Yeah. Giants fan. Unfortunately, maybe we'll see. Stuff had Daniel Jones is a quarterback, I think. Yeah. We'll see.
Ed
Saquon's coming back. Things can happen. Things can happen.
Neil
I've been traveling all week. This is my first trip since March of 2020.
Pat
Things are opening up again.
Neil
I'm out there. I'm a little rusty. But I've been traveling with Michael Cooley from Mainline Marketing. He's a gem. It's been awesome. Yesterday, I was in Tampa for the first time in my life. I just couldn't help but think about those Buck fans must just like feeling real good about themselves. Loving life right now.
Neil
Yeah.
Ed
Didn't need to see another Tom Brady Super Bowl.
Neil
It's inevitable. You might see another one. I might. It could.
Pat
It could happen. Yeah. That dude is, I don't know. He ages. He's Benjamin Buttoning the NFL right now and I don't understand it. I don't get it's the avocado ice cream probably.
Neil
No, but out of New England though. He's awesome. He's throwing the trophy over open water. Incredible.
Pat
How about when he was super duper hammered walking off the boat and he was like stumbling. Yeah. I was like, you don't get this Tom Brady in New England. No, you don't. He is unhinged now and I love it. Yes.
Neil
True, true Florida man.
Ed
Yeah. Well, on that diet that he adheres to that might've just been like a beer and a half that got him in that state.
Pat
Might've been like a tequila shot and he was like, “Oh man, this is what alcohol is like.”
Neil
I think I'll throw the Super Bowl trophy.
Pat
I'm going to just throw it over the open water. Why not? This is a good idea, right?
Neil
Amazing. Amazing.
Pat
Well, okay. So I let us get off the rails there because I like to talk football, but I will pivot back. So what kind of fun stuff can we expect from QSC coming in the near future? What are some things that are maybe in the you know, some irons in the fire that we got going on?
Ed
Yeah. Well, the exciting things right now in the systems portfolio at QSC, which is really where I specialize in, is about taking all of those concepts we talked about earlier in our conversation, all the audio, video and control infrastructure and bringing it to the cloud and having preemptive notifications and the ability to access all of your systems and do anything to those systems, make any modification, any software modification, including firmware from your home office. So there's a very savvy and secure approach to having a core connect to our cloud infrastructure. Every core has at least two NICs on it, two network connections on it. One, typically, what you'll see is one is used for the complex AV network where there's lots of microphones on the network and video over IP and SIP and all that stuff, where you're going to want to have a whole suite of network protocols available and active on that NIC. Meanwhile, there is another one available that's completely segregated. And what we're seeing people do and what the intention was, was for that to be your connection to the corporate network, totally stripped down of any unnecessary protocols to make it as secure as possible. It can connect to our cloud infrastructure, which we've been working on building for the last three years. And once it does that, you will never have to go on the local area network to access this system. You can do it from anywhere. That is a big deal, given everything we've been through in the last year, to not have to get on a flight to troubleshoot a system and have the same level of access to it from your home office that you would in the rack room. So, that's not necessarily new. It's really the professional-tier features on that platform are somewhat new, and it's really rolling right now. It feels good to see it being embraced and those subscriptions go out.
Pat
How has that changed your process? Is that a feature that you're obviously very excited to speak to a client about?
Ed
Yeah, Q-SYS Reflect Enterprise Manager is the name of our cloud monitoring and management platform. You would only be interested in it if you had already adopted Q-SYS as your choice for audio-video control. Or maybe you're really starting from scratch and looking to standardize on a platform, and that's the thing that puts you over the edge. I guess I have spoken with customers who want to talk about that first. For me, the instinct is to save that piece until you've already established this is the right hardware for you. But what's changed a little bit for me is my approach to putting together some of the programming. Now that I know I've got a cloud platform that I can connect to with a full API that can feed data to Salesforce or Splunk, like an IT dashboard, that kind of changes some of what I'm going to do in the configuration, and I'm going to start collecting usable data. It's very interesting the amount of real estate information you can learn from your audio-visual system. Paying attention to signal presence on microphones and the active state of a USB connection to a soft codec, I can really start to understand precisely how many hours a day a particular high-value space is being used. And I can collect that information, send it to Q-SYS Reflect Enterprise Manager, where I know it's going to be safely stored and part of an API that can then feed another platform that's creating charts for me that I'm going to use when it comes time to reevaluate my standards. So that's been pretty exciting to know that Q-SYS, there's another piece to Q-SYS now, which is room utilization and analytics, which is going to pay for itself over time, if you do it correctly.
Pat
Yeah, they say knowledge is power. So all you guys are doing is collecting more and more information. You're collecting it in a safe way, which in today's climate, people hear cloud and they get terrified because nothing is sacred anymore. People, we love clouds, come on. But it sounds like the way that you guys are doing it, it's more secure. It's only feeding information to people that need it and it's a very streamlined process.
Ed
That's exactly right. You have to want the information for it to even collect it. You have to deliberately set up the hooks to pay attention to a thing. And you're the only one who gets that information. We are not collecting it. It's your subscription. It's your event log. It's your data. It's your API token. We're of course aware on the back end of that platform how many licenses, like how many peripherals and how many systems you have up and running because that's critical knowledge to keep our platform up and running.
Pat
So that it continues to run.
Ed
But the granular information within your systems is not something we have visibility on and not something anybody besides yourself will have visibility of. And it's built on a completely modern secure authentication, HTTPS port 443. It's really all you need to have enabled to use that platform. So that's been big and exciting. And I guess you could say I've kind of hitched my wagon to it. I really believe that our cloud infrastructure, our approach to software is very important. And having my head fully wrapped around what we can do in the cloud is going to be good for my career and good for my customers. So right now Q-SYS Reflect is really only one thing. It's cloud-based monitoring and management of your AV systems. But I'm very confident that a few years from now, it's going to be many, many things that you could subscribe to from Q-SYS Reflect. And we make a lot of hardware, but we are a software company. And I don't think it's that far off that you could see us selling Q-SYS shrink-wrapped software that you run on common off-the-shelf hardware of your choosing. And we would welcome that change. We'd develop and research to hopefully get to that point someday.
Pat
So what drew you to Q-SYS? And what drew you to specializing in this type of market?
Ed
So the company that I was with before I went to work for QSC does some similar things. It's definitely a competitor, but in a very, very complicated way that can really be a major headache for people that are having to manage these systems and deal with file management and train themselves so they have the confidence to go to work and not be afraid something's going to break. And I was a technical trainer for that company, which was pretty intense because I was not in that line of work. I was not in integrated AV and then I went to work for this company as a trainer. That was...
Pat
It's daring.
Ed
It was. But I learned something really important, which was the best way to retain information is to force yourself to teach it to someone else. The amount of retention is way above and beyond what a student receives. The teacher in a classroom benefits more than anyone else in that room from the content that's discussed in that room. I came to learn that from experience. And I really felt like a strong sense of satisfaction from the transfer of knowledge, particularly when I was working with end users. I love our integrators and our professional programmers that are out there in the world, but I really get a legitimate sense of joy from making end users who have a lot on their plate, on a lot of different platforms that they need to be good at dealing with, feel like at least this one I've got my head wrapped around, and I'm comfortable with it. And I know that things break, like technology can fail, but I'm going to know where to go with it when that happens. And it's not going to be three days of investigation before I call the right person. I came to see that as being very, very important to this industry. I knew that Q-SYS was the answer, the best of the best when it came to that notion. So that was pretty attractive to me. And then, as I mentioned, my buddy Greg Mattson went to work there, and I have to follow him.
Pat
Yeah, I think it's a law now. I think it's been written into law. So I think the thing we keep hitting on, inexplicably, is that this process is extremely streamlined. From everything that it sounds like how you're describing it, as someone who's using it, can you walk us through the streamlined feature, how it would vary from another product, potentially?
Neil
Yeah, I think from my—I spent most of my years as an end user, only very recently here at Mainline, seeing some other sides of it. But as an end user, when I started off early on as an audio guy, which is what I wanted to be, I didn't want to be a computer guy, I didn't want to be a computer programmer. I wanted to do audio.
Ed
I wanted to do rock and roll. And then they're like, you well….
Neil
You know, that's a little crowded in that area. So you can kind of do these things if you want to do, like theater and then into theater, like, well, there's still not that many jobs, but, you know, you can still do audio. And then that just leads you into other paths. So you find yourself into, you know, an audio DSP or, you know, some sort of piece of hardware that's distributing audio. And you're like, cool, I understand this. I want it to do this. I want it to go here. I want it to sound like this. How do I control this? And when I was a young chap, it was you brought in another company, perhaps one that he may have worked for a long time ago. And they're great. There's this thing. It'll control the audio and control all the other aspects of it. And if you wanted to make a change, it was like, well, you call the computer guy. And he comes, he opens his laptop up, and there’s this whole page of screen with white code.
Pat
Yeah, I love that.
Neil
Clicking away and clicking away and clicking away and clicking away. And 30 minutes later, that play button for your audio player’s moved three inches to the left on the screen. And you're like, awesome. Now I have room to add another button. Can you do that? And it's like, yeah, give me minutes, man. It's like click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. And I don't know how much we're paying this guy to come in and do this, but I'm sitting around waiting. When I was introduced to Q-SYS, it was like, here is the graphical image of the play button. And I'm like, “So you're telling me that if I hit play with this graphical image of the play button, it's just going to play the file?” And I'm like, “Yeah.” Well, but what if on the screen, if I just move it over there? Well, that's where it is now.
Pat
That's just where it lives.
Neil
Oh, my God. That took like two seconds. And if I move it back over there, I can man, you just push it back to the core and it's there now. And I think it was just a really like—all right, I think I might be able as an audio guy, I'm not a computer guy, like I might be able to do some programming, and I can maybe make some control. Like I got the audio thing down pat, but this whole idea of how to control the audio. And then I think once you get comfortable in doing that, then you're like, maybe I can control some video. And then it's just Q-SYS has made it all packed in there where like your confidence just, you know, just to sit down with the core and the software, you can just play around, and you can get confidence because they've made it so easy. They do all the hard work on the back end of the actual program. I mean, it's in the software, there is some complex programming there, but they all do it for you. And it's just so easy and you just play around with it. And, you know, it also has sparked a creative side to people. I mean, you should see some of the I say UCI, which is the, you know, the graphical interface that people use that you can access on an iPad or a touch screen, however you want. You give someone that landscape and QSCs give you the tools for layering and stuff. You should see some of the stuff that people have come up with with layering. It looks—it's gorgeous, and it is like the most complex thing. And I've come across some UCIs and you're like, this is amazing. And I get their file and you go out and look at it and like, I can break it down. I'm like, oh, it's I mean, it's intense, but it's not like I understand it. It's like, oh, it's just a bunch of layers that are like, even for someone who, you know, me, I don't know code language or anything.
Ed
An experienced person put thought and time into it. But you could reverse engineer it and understand within a reasonable amount of time.
Neil
Without knowing code, I guess. It used to be, you know, like 30 years ago, you had to know code. You had to to do something like that. And now it's just, you know, they've made it easy. You still have to be a smart and creative person, but you can do it without knowing code.
Pat
Well, I think that throws back to what Ed had said earlier today, too, is that it's days. It's not years to be able to operate effectively, to be able to function in the way that you want it to. And that seems to be a big through line in everything that QSC is doing with Q-SYS. I think.
Ed
Yeah, right on.
Pat
I'm just assuming from a chair hosting a podcast.
Ed
You nailed it.
Neil
And I feel, you know, it goes back also to the thing about like you can hire a Q-SYS guy in your office building and say you want to make the change where I want the play button three inches over on this touch screen. That can happen very quickly where it didn't used to happen very quickly. I feel like it used to be “All right, well, we're going to call the programmer guy, and it has to take the system down for this long, and we might be able to get to that next.” But like now you can do that fairly quickly. Changes can happen quick. It's so adaptable. Like and I keep bringing up the UCI thing, but it's adaptable. I want—you know what? We're removing the conference from A to B and can we route the audio from that place to that place? Yeah, you can. And it can happen quickly. And the flexibility of that is probably very valuable to a lot of people.
Pat
I would assume the time spent trying to go through the process of setting that up from a 3A to 9B scenario, you're paying not only for your employees to be able to sit there and do nothing because you can't do anything with a system that is down, but you're also paying someone else to come out to be able to route all those things. And that's going to take X amount of hours or days or weeks or whatever. And it seems like, again, how this is being explained and how you guys are kind of talking about it, this can be done fairly quickly and fairly seamlessly.
Ed
And now even remotely.
Pat
And now from the comfort of your own home, you're like, yeah, okay, we're good.
Neil
Dives back into Ed's world of it's becoming now where you may not even have to staff a guy in the building. He may be on like retainer of like you call him and he's on his couch or he's probably working on—
Pat
Playing Minesweeper.
Neil
Yeah, but yeah, you can do that remotely of yeah. Or where it honestly probably comes into effect more is, hey, this isn't working. Okay. Call Ed and he's at his house and he's like, “Okay, hold on.” Opens up his laptop. “Oh, I see what's going on here. I can either fix it from here or hey, can you go down to room B, reboot this thing?” I mean, you can reboot remotely. I mean, there's almost anything you can't do remotely, but the troubleshooting is there remotely where like, oh, I see what's going on remotely here. Here's what you need to do. Boom. That's a quick thing.
Ed
When you're the remote guy, you can really mess with people too because you can get preemptive notifications about these things from the system. So I can get the call and I don't even say hello. I just say you're calling about the amplifier channel, aren't you?
Neil
I already see it's offline.
Ed
And then just be as creepy about it as you can.
Pat
That's perfect. Yeah. You're like, yeah, I nailed that. They're like, what are you talking about?
Neil
How'd you know? We're always watching. We're always watching.
Pat
That's awesome. Is there any other fun hidden gems coming with Q-SYS that maybe you haven't divulged to us quite yet?
Neil
Well, there's some big time product roadmap stuff that's about to be public, but it's not yet.
Pat
So we'll have to have you come back.
Ed
I am doing like some NDA roadmaps, but probably not appropriate to go into on a podcast just yet. But in a couple of weeks.
Pat
Next trip, you'll come back. We can talk about Tom Brady being awful, Aaron Rodgers being the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, and the stuff that you were working on on this trip.
Ed
Man, that sounds good.
Pat
Well, Neil, Ed, thank you so much for hanging out with us on Sound Connections. Guys, thank you for listening to another episode, and we will see you guys all back here next time.
Thanks for listening to another episode of Sound Connections, brought to you by Mainland Marketing in Winter Park, Florida. We hope you enjoyed everything you heard. We hope you enjoyed this Sound Connections. Guys, don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe if you're on YouTube, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. We appreciate it, and we will see you all back here next time.