Welcome to SANE

The AV industry has a standards problem.

Today, the technical specifications that govern how we design, install, and operate professional audiovisual systems are largely locked behind membership fees and paywalls. Want to read the standard that tells you how to certify an AV technician? Pay up. Want to reference the official recommendation for audio signal levels in a commercial installation? Join the organization first.

We believe this is wrong. And we’re doing something about it.

What is SANE?

SANE - the Society for AV Norms & Engineering - is a community-driven organization that creates free, open, and transparent standards for professional AV systems. We operate like the IETF or W3C: all our work happens in the open, all our documents are freely accessible, and anyone can contribute.

Our standards are published under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0. That means you can read them, implement them, share them, and build on them - for free, forever, with attribution.

What we’re building

• SANE Standards - Technical specifications for audio levels, video signal standards, control protocols, cabling, and more
• AV Glossary - Plain-language definitions for the entire AV vocabulary
• Equipment Database - Open, community-maintained spec data for real-world AV gear
• Engineering Tools - Free calculators for throw ratios, dB levels, room modes, and more
  • Blog - In-depth technical writing on AV design and engineering

How to get involved

Everything lives on GitHub. You can:

• Propose a standard by opening an RFC issue
• Improve the glossary by submitting a PR
• Add equipment data to the open database
• Write a blog post or whitepaper
• Build a tool - all calculators are plain client-side JS

This is day one. The first standards are in draft. The glossary has a handful of entries. The equipment database is nearly empty. We need your expertise, your time, and your voice.

Welcome to SANE. Let’s fix AV standards together.