John Badovinac
John is a 30-year veteran of the A/V industry in Metro New York. After earning a Bachelor of Science degree from Monmouth University, he started his career as a hard-goods manager for the Sam Goody retail chain in the late 1970s. He advanced his career by going to work with Audio Associates as one of their manufacturer's representatives where he remained for the next eleven years. John was then promoted to head up a newly formed subsidiary of Audio Associates, AAC, the distribution arm of the rep company. For the next six years, as general manager of AAC, John was key in establishing the company as a market leader in the custom installation as well as the retail market.
Reuben Eskenazi
Reuben started his audio career at Sam Ash Music in New York. Over the next fifteen years, he held sales and operations positions with several major audio video retailers. Being a musician and doing audio production rounded out his experience in both the commercial and residential audio and video fields. Prior to forming CAVD, Reuben was operations manager for five years at AAC, a leading Cedia focused distributor in New York.
Mark Friedman
Mark brings 23 years of factory and rep experience to the management of CAVD/DDGmetro. Mark's most recent experience was as President of JBL Consumer Products where he was involved in worldwide sales, marketing, and product development for the JBL loudspeaker brand as well as the Pyle and Concord brands. Prior to that, he was Senior Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Product Development worldwide for Carver Corporation. Mark spent over 10 years as Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Onkyo USA Corporation. Before Mark's involvement in factory management, he was a sales representative in the New York Metropolitan marketplace representing JVC and Akai. Mark was the keynote speaker for the Audio Segment at the 1991 Winter Consumer Electronic show.
Nick Gavalas
Nick is very knowledgeable in all aspects of home audio, in particular, custom installation and has personally done numerous installations as the owner of his own retail and custom company. He is very conversant in mobile audio as well and is MECP First Class Certified. Nick worked two years with one of New York's premier video distributors, Diplomat Merchandise. Nick now one of the representatives for the New York Marketing Team is also part of the CAVD/DDG metro team.
Paul Cohan
Paul brings 30 years of experience to our company in key aspects of our business including owing his own retail store and managing a high end custom installation location company. Paul began his career in electronics by purchasing a company in Upstate, New York, which was named Stereo Types, which he operated for five years. After getting married, Paul decided to close the store and move back to Long Island where he was born and raised. He began on the retail sales floor but was quickly promoted to manager where he ran stores for several key retailers in the New York market including Circuit City and The Wiz. For the past 6 years Paul has been the manager for an absentee owner of Home Theater of Long Island, an extremely high end retail/custom installation company on the gold cost of Long Island. Paul brings an overall understanding of all aspects of business and finance as well as the products needed for specing and successfully installing a sophisticated home integration system.
Tom Latsounas
Tom’s interest in electronics stems from his degree in recording engineering. He brings a wealth of experience in the custom installation and home integration market to CAVD. Tom’s career began in 1987 working with ACE Audio Visual, one of the key rental and concert sound companies in the market and for the last 14 years he worked his way up the ladder at Harvey Electronics. Tom started as a floor salesperson at Harvey’s, was promoted to a custom installation designer specialist sales manager and then finally to store manager. He is particularly strong in being able to help dealers design and spec the proper equipment for any level of installation and is of further help to customers because of his engineering background.
Andrew Abate
Andrew brings a solid and structured background as a trained salesman and a customer service representative to our company. His most recent position was at CDW, the computer supply company where he became one of their top salesmen in the Small Business Division. He also provided technical support on networking and IT related issues at CDW. Andrew’s knowledge of IT products and networking is very important to our company’s future, as many of the products and installations that we see in the future will be based on IT protocol.
Allyson Manz
Allyson is the Administrative Assistant for our Long Island location. Allyson’s skills are based on many years of experience as a Administrative Assistant for high tech engineering companies. Her most recent position, where she was employed for 21 years, was with Dvirka and Bartilucci Consulting Engineers. At this firm she assisted in putting together technical reports, bid packages and contract documents for government agencies and private corporations such as IBM, Keyspan and Northrop Grumman. Allyson also brings a great attitude and an incredible people skills to the task.
