Paul Harris established Aurora Multimedia Corp. back in 1998. Aurora’s factory in New Jersey builds Paul’s ideas, and he has a bunch. Aurora has a good number of ‘firsts’, and continues to be an innovative force in the commercial AV sector.

Paul himself is a disruptor as much as he is an innovator. He talks like a man whose cerebral cortex is crunching data at least twice the speed of most of us and is obsessed with making Aurora product better than anything else on the market. The flipside is he can’t understand why anyone would put up with substandard, me-too, generic hardware. He’s not afraid to voice his disdain and not afraid to put his money (and product) where his mouth is.

Paul Harris: A lot of manufacturing companies like to talk crap and yet they don’t even engineer their own products. They make it look like it’s theirs, but in actuality, they’re just slapping their name on other companies’ product from China or Taiwan. They come into the market with no innovation and copy others. Aurora is a true manufacturer that engineers and manufactures the majority of our products in our New Jersey location. We pride ourselves in making unique products that set us apart from others and create new typologies which change the industry for the better.

AV: I notice on the Aurora website that you invite head-to-head comparisons and provide comparison charts. Most companies don’t want to attract that kind of heat.

Paul Harris: Everyone wants to talk about how great they are, but no one wants to prove it.

I’ve developed spreadsheets that has our products in it and a comparison chart. Aurora is not just willing to talk; we are willing to prove it. Sure, that’s a big statement. When’s the last time you ever saw a company willing to do that? We are. It is not always about winning but seeing where you place. This is how innovation happens and products become better.

For example, with our AVoIP product. We’ll break it right down: the scaling, the latency, the compression type, power consumption, even our testing and debugging get scrutinised.

If you put our product side by side with the original, it will be extremely difficult to tell which one is which due to our image quality and low latency.

Features can make a big difference like full 720p30 MJPEG video as a secondary preview, PiP, quad, roaming mouse, hot keys, videowall, image rotation, EPG, and more.

Then there are the details that make installers’ lives easier. We have a front OLED so they can display the IP address, the serial number, the Mac address. That’s a big timesaver for people in the field. We don’t have different SKUs for transmitters and receivers, just a transceiver model. Same applies for USB and Dante models. Fewer models with more features make inventory easier as well as serviceability.