A Sound Home

I am posting this review to help others avoid the nightmare we went through with Chris Ray of A Sound Home.
We recently built a very nice home in South Austin with a well-​respected builder. Unfortunately, Chris was their sub-​contractor for running low volt and audio.
At the first meeting, he talked about our basic needs, and seemed to want to do more high tech things than we really wanted. However, he assured us he could tailor a system to whatever we wanted. He also said he would pre-​wire everything, get us photos of any drops that weren’t wired at the time, and that we would have a chance to pick speakers, listen before we picked, etc.
His bid was okay on the labor, but very high on equipment. At this point, we should have sensed that something was fishy.. . but we went forward on the condition that we would provide the receivers.
He started being very hard to get a hold of.. . when he finally did show up, he wired everything and just popped whatever speakers in — no mention of us choosing anything.
When we were ready to set up our media room, he wanted to charge us $ 2,400 for an $ 800 screen.. . needless to say, we bought our own screen and our own speakers this time around. He installed everything but did not help at ALL with setup — which I thought was the reason we hired him???
Our CD player didn’t work at first — his solution was «oh, it must have broken, go buy another one!» Fortunately I changed the cable and it worked fine.
He also did not give us any pictures of things we wired for in the future. Now we have speakers and TV drops behind the walls but no way to know how to access them.
He was extremely hard to get a hold of — in the end, he stopped responding altogether despite repeated attempts on the builders part and our part. They had to send another company out to try to locate some of the hidden drops.. . at which point we found out he had wired them in the middle of our tray ceiling, which means it is going to cost us a lot more to extend them.
He also put a solid panel cover over all of our wires for the internet — we are still trying to figure out what to do with that!
There were numerous other issues related to him doing a terrible job — too many to list, but they include messed up drywall and paint, having to put a patch on a wall because he had run the wires in the wrong places, etc.
Bottom line — he charges premium prices for an extremely shoddy job, is dishonest in his pricing, has absolutely no work ethic, and in the end went AWOL.
Stay away from this guy!!!