Meet Samia Scoda: A Lifelong Passion for Sound

For Samia Scoda, the pursuit of great sound started at home—and occasionally shook the house.

What began as a modest home audio system grew into a full 9.2-channel setup, with countless hours spent experimenting with speakers, amplifiers, subwoofers, placement, and tuning. Each adjustment was another opportunity to find more clarity, depth, impact, and immersion.

“My parents often shook their heads while I shook the house,” Samia recalls. “And we had the best movie night in the neighborhood.”

Today, that same curiosity shapes her work as Brand & Product Manager at Ashly Audio, where she connects customer needs with the people and products that help bring audio systems to life.

Connecting People, Products, and Ideas

Samia’s role touches many parts of the customer experience. She works with customers, representatives, dealers, consultants, and sales teams, providing system design assistance, product recommendations, training, and support.

Those conversations also help inform what comes next. By bringing customer feedback into discussions with engineering, marketing, and other teams, she helps ensure that real-world needs remain part of product development and planning.

“My goal is to help Ashly Audio build trusted relationships, deliver exceptional solutions, and continuously improve the experience for our customers and partners,” she says.

Whether she’s contributing to a product launch, helping someone work through a system design, or developing training, the purpose is consistent: help people get the most from their audio systems.

From Home Theater to Live Sound

Samia’s interest in audio soon expanded beyond the living room. Car audio became another outlet for experimentation, offering lessons in efficiency, engineering, and system optimization.

By her later high school years, she was helping a local band with PA systems and backline support, spending time at front of house whenever she could. Live production, DJing, sound engineering, and installation design have remained part of her life ever since.

Alongside that technical experience, Samia earned a Bachelor of Science in Marketing and Management from Penn State University. Her career brought together sales, leadership, marketing, and a deep interest in how things work, eventually leading to a VP of Sales role with a loudspeaker manufacturer.

She later joined JAM Industries to help manage its loudspeaker portfolio, gaining experience with Ashly products in real-world applications. As her relationships with the Ashly team grew, joining the brand became a natural next step.

Sound You Can Feel

Ask Samia what makes audio special, and the conversation quickly moves beyond equipment.

For her, the memorable moments happen when a carefully tuned system and the right music come together—when the listening experience becomes so immersive that the equipment seems to disappear.

She also loves the physical energy of live sound: knowing a song well enough to anticipate a moment, leaning into the low end, and feeling the audience respond.

“It’s a powerful reminder that great audio isn’t just something we hear,” she says. “It’s something we feel and experience together.”

That connection between technical detail and human experience also informs her appreciation for AquaControl. She values the way it brings sophisticated system capabilities into an approachable interface, helping integrators tailor controls to the people who will use them.

A Hands-On Approach

Outside of work, Samia is often on a motorcycle, enjoying winding canyon roads and mountain views. Her enthusiasm extends to the workshop, too, where she enjoys maintenance, troubleshooting, and performance upgrades on motorcycles and cars.

The appeal is familiar: understand the system, pay attention to the details, and keep learning how to make it perform at its best.

She brings that same energy to working with people. Asked what stands out most about Ashly, her answer is immediate: the team.

“Without question, it’s the people,” she says, pointing to their passion, dedication, and willingness to help one another succeed.

Her advice for someone starting a career in pro audio reflects those values: get involved, seek hands-on experience, stay curious, and build a reputation for being dependable.

“This industry is built on trust.”

Samia’s Quick Mix

• Go-to artists: Bring Me the Horizon and Metallica
• Musical range: Metalcore to soulful house, depending on the mood
• Favorite console: Allen & Heath Avantis
• Outside interests: Motorcycles, American muscle cars, and making or fixing things
• Early bird or night owl? Always burning the midnight oil
• Coffee or tea? A self-described coffee snob
• Mac or PC? Mac, 100%
• Headphones or speakers? “Speakers… I want to feel it.”
• One more thing: She loves making people smile—and calls herself the “Queen of Puns.”

Meet the Team: Jim Schwenzer, Director of Service & Technical Support

Since 1995, Jim Schwenzer has been one of the people customers can count on when they need answers, guidance, or help solving a problem.

As Ashly Audio’s Director of Service & Technical Support, Jim spends his days answering technical questions, troubleshooting systems, repairing equipment, supporting service technicians, and tracking recurring issues that can help inform future product and quality improvements.

In short, he helps people fix things.

“I have a hat that says, ‘I fix stuff and I know things, that’s what I do,’” Jim says. “Kind of sums it up really.”

Decades of Hands-On Experience

Jim’s background combines electronics, live sound, and musicianship. He holds an associate degree in electronics, has 40 years of real-world bench technician experience, has played music since the age of 12, and has spent decades working in bands and running live sound as a Front of House and Monitor Engineer.

That experience gives him an unusually broad perspective when helping customers troubleshoot a system.

One of his favorite parts of the job is solving problems that do not seem to have an obvious answer.

“I enjoy figuring out ways to achieve a functional system design using something that, in theory, should not be able to accommodate the specified requirements.”

That problem-solving mindset is also why he has a soft spot for Ashly’s PEMA series, which he describes as a “Swiss Army Knife” for smaller systems.

“You can do really big things with a little PEMA, and that intrigues me.”

Sharing What Experience Teaches You

For Jim, technical support is about more than fixing equipment. It is also about passing along lessons learned over decades in professional audio.

“Sharing knowledge that can only be learned through decades of experience with people who may be encountering things for the very first time really makes me feel good as a person.”

Those years of experience have also sharpened his ear. Jim can often identify feedback frequencies by ear and says he can frequently diagnose the root cause of a problem from a detailed description of the symptoms.

He jokes that this makes him “borderline psychic.”

The People Behind the Products

After more than three decades at Ashly, Jim says the people are still one of the biggest reasons he enjoys coming to work.

“I honestly think of everyone here as a close personal friend,” he says. “It is a comfortable, friendly place filled with genuinely good people who share a love for what we do.”

That shared pride carries through to the customer experience, from building reliable products to helping integrators choose the right gear, program systems correctly, and achieve the results they are looking for.

For Jim, audio matters because it is everywhere.

“Music stimulates the mind, soothes the soul, alters the mood, enhances the experience,” he says. “Audio is literally everywhere you go, whether you realize it or not.”

His advice for anyone considering a career in professional audio is simple:

“Do it. If you enjoy what you do for a living, you will never work a day in your life.”

Quick Facts

Favorite genre: Rock & Roll
Go-to artist: The Beatles
Favorite piece of gear: Fender Telecaster
Outside of work: Cooking, fishing, and spending time with his dog
Early bird or night owl: Night owl
Coffee or tea: Coffee, all day long
Mac or PC: PC
Analog or digital: Analog consoles, digital processing, and tube guitar amps
Headphones or speakers: Big speakers, preferably very big speakers