Earlier this week, Mrs. Day and I went to an odd kind of open mic and live performance event at a local venue. A friend was playing with a 3-person pickup group and he’d invited us to hear him play. The venue is an old (1899) theater that has been converted to a really nice restaurant, music venue, and events center. The place has a nice stage with intelligent acoustic treatment and all of the seating is close to the stage with a capacity of about 300 people.
As we entered the facility, a solo vocalist was accompanying herself on acoustic guitar and it was loud enough that I put in hearing protection as we entered the main room. I suspect she might have had a reasonably decent voice, but the combination of poor microphone selection (the usual SM58), shrill EQ, possibly a harsh pole-mounted sound system, and about 15dBSPL too much volume for the venue just made her sound irritating. As we entered the room it didn’t take long to ignore the performer and carry on a conversation with our friends who were already there. We stayed for our friend’s act, which was pleasant and enjoyable but the sound system didn’t contribute anything positive to the experience. The three acts that followed returned to the painful and ignorable quality of the first act.
A not insignificant part of what motivated me to leave California and my job at QSC was the fact that it was obvious that our products were not enhancing music, just making it painfully louder. As an electronics engineer, I’d kind of hoped that working in professional audio might be, at least, a benign contribution to society and, at best, a positive contribution to music. Like my later medical device experience, it was pretty obvious by 1991 that making music louder has no upside. Louder is just louder, it isn’t better, more musical, more dynamic, or even more intelligible. More often than not, louder is outright harmful; causing hearing damage across the demographic board and wasting energy pointlessly.
As a performer or a live sound tech, controlling volume has always been at the top of my list of important tasks. 99% of the time, when I go on to an open mic stage, I ask to have both the monitor and mains turned down. I’m likely the last of a generation from when sound systems didn’t exist in small venues. When I was a kid, I cobbled together enough money to take the train from west Kansas to Kansas City to see several of my jazz heroes on the famous 18th and Vine District. I lucked into seeing Dave Brubeck’s quartet, Stan Getz, and several national and regional jazz groups in small clubs and theaters before I was snagged by the cops for being underage and escorted to the railroad station and sent back to Dodge. There wasn’t an amplifier to be seen at any of those places, except for a couple of small Fender guitar amps. Since then, I have been lucky enough to see enough low volume concerts and performances, across several genres of music, to know how small the contribution volume is to music. And I have yet to see a high volume concert that was worth attending, termination with what was once one of my favorite bands putting the nail in the coffin of my fandom with one of the worst sounding FOH “mixes” possible.
At the other end of that experience was a 1967 concert at the Dallas State Fair Music Hall Theater with Sam and Dave as the headliners, Otis Redding as the middle act, and (I think) Arthur Conley as the opener. The “PA system” was a Shure Vocalmaster with a couple Vocalmaster columns and a total of 100 watts of moderate distortion power to drive it all. The only thing in the pa was the vocals and the large horn band simply “mixed themselves” by listening to each other on stage. The band was loud enough for the 3,400 capacity audience who were far from quiet or stuck to their seats. I have yet to hear or see a better show.
I have proven this, repeatedly, with the systems I’ve run over the years: if the music is good, people will shut up and listen. If you suck, you can’t get loud enough to not suck. When an audience has no good reason to listen to you, they won’t, no matter how loud you make your noise. If you are doing something that draws their interest, you will be heard.
