A Sound Strategy for Your Senior Living Community
Elevating the sound of your community pays big dividends on resident experience and operational performance.
Smart senior living operators know that a comprehensive, easy-to-use tech infrastructure is as vital to the success of a community as security, safety, and care.
Enter Tazergy, a full-service technology provider specializing in senior living communities. For more than a decade, Tazergy has helped organizations create tech environments that elevate and enhance the lives of residents, while also supporting the caregivers and other staff members responsible for making the overall technology experience run as smoothly as possible.
This is especially true of the audiovisual experience.
“Let’s face it: AV is part of the fun anywhere you go,” says Matt Haywood, Tazergy’s founder and CEO. “Even with differing tastes and preferences, almost everyone enjoys a movie, a performance, dancing, working out to music — good AV keeps the community engaged.” And the fun shouldn’t have to stop because of an outdated or poorly planned audio-visual solution that doesn’t facilitate easy connections and transitions. When it comes to AV, no one wants to fiddle with multiple remotes or need an expert degree to operate a TV.
That’s why Tazergy spent more than a year researching a variety of Audio and Visual manufacturers to select the right partner for its comprehensive AV solution, eventually deciding on Bose Professional.
“It included easy-to-use programming tools that allowed us to create intuitive custom interfaces for every deployment, and system automation capabilities that eliminated the need for many of the complexities that were already out in the AV industry,” says Jeff Alexander, Senior Audio Engineer at Tazergy. “It also provided the very highest quality audio experience — and being Bose, it had brand recognition for the residents and the owners.”
The Power of AV Planning
Let’s start with a simple example that’s likely familiar to anyone who’s spent time in a senior living community: Someone turns on a TV in a common area that already has ambient music playing, creating a cacophony of competing sounds and sending folks scrambling to find the controls for lowering the music volume. Then the show or sporting event ends, and the ambient music doesn’t restart until someone notices or cares to turn it back up.
Tazergy can create an audio environment where turning on the TV automatically mutes the background audio, which then comes back up once the set is no longer in use. Residents and staff can control the TV audio with ONE remote, eliminating the need for a separate, clunky audio control interface.
But the benefits go far beyond solving simple problems like dueling audio sources. Tazergy’s design and consulting services can:
- Create an engaging space to watch a movie, coordinate a performance, or host a local speaker.
- Assure ease of use with wireless microphones used by guest speakers or for performances at the community. Staff members receive training on how
to use the technology to help facilitate resident engagement and provide an elevated experience. - Integrate automatic projection screens, window shades, and dimmer lights to create a theater ambiance with the press of one button.
- Improve meeting spaces by using cordless microphone systems.
- Design customized remote control interfaces for users’ smartphones, tablets, and laptops to be able to control the type of music and volume.
Working with Tazergy also means expert support, training team members, and troubleshooting the tech issues that invariably surface in even the most thoughtfully designed systems — without needing to have IT or Audio professionals set foot in the building.
“Everything that we engineer and put together is built with remote support in mind,” says Haywood. “We know that when we get a phone call, we need to be able to easily and effectively support the clients, communities, and customers that are calling us and be able to triage the problem. We’re able to even make remote changes and programming changes as needed.”
Ground-Up Case Study: The Variel
First opened in 2022, The Variel represents a new standard in elegant, high-end retirement living. Located just north of Los Angeles in Woodland Hills, California, The Variel offers stunning views of the city and the nearby mountains from expansive floor-toceiling windows. The amenities include multiple bars and restaurants, lounges, an art studio, an indoor pool, a fitness center, a full-swing golf simulator, a juice bar, theaters, and outdoor spaces with gardens and welcoming courtyards.
In a senior living community that looks and feels like a boutique hotel, a couple of sound bars and TVs with built-in speakers weren’t going to work. So developer Harbert/South Bay Partners engaged Tazergy to build an extensive and seamlessly connected Bose Professional sound system — including nearly 40 loudspeakers inside and outside, all installed to fit perfectly with the community’s luxury coastal decor.
“Bose Professional’s high-end reputation and exceptional quality matched exactly what we were trying to do with The Variel,” says Adam Arnold, director at Harbert South Bay.
Cassandra Moan, The Variel’s director of memory care, emphasized that the effect isn’t just aesthetic: By elevating live on-site entertainment and creating theater-quality movie experiences, Tazergy’s AV system truly brings the community together, she says.
Redesign Case Study: The Quadrangle
It’s not just new communities that can benefit from a comprehensive AV plan. Tazergy worked with The Quadrangle, a continuing care retirement community (CCRC) in the suburbs of Philadelphia, to overhaul a system that had been installed piecemeal over the course of decades.
“They were the perfect example of too complicated,” Alexander says. “Since the community was completed in the late ’80s, local AV integrators had been piling one solution on top of another to meet all the needs that they had — and the result was a system that was grossly overcomplicated and unreliable.”
In a single multi-purpose auditorium, The Quadrangle had three separate audio systems, one each intended for public speaking events, recorded music, and live musical performances. Tazergy replaced this overly complex setup with a seamless Bose system that provides high-quality audio for any occasion — as well as a simplified system for The Quadrangle’s in-house television network, which broadcasts live events, movies, and other programming to TVs across the 87-acre campus.
“They can simply push a few buttons and create content,” Alexander says. Whether it’s new construction or replacing unwieldy, outdated AV infrastructure, Tazergy and Bose Professional help senior living providers build the seamless, reliable, and intuitive AV systems that residents and operational leaders demand.
Learn more about realizing the power of sound in your community. Contact us today for a free consultation.