Bad Sound

Intro

TTThere’s a particular kind of helplessness that settles over you about forty-five seconds into a support act at a mid-size venue. The band hits the first chord and the room is immediately wrong. Cymbals arrive as a metallic shriek that bears no resemblance to any acoustic event in nature. The bass guitar, rather than anchoring anything, just vanishes; swallowed by some unexplained arrangement of physics and neglect. The vocal sits on top of all of it like a polystyrene cup on a flooding river: technically present, practically useless. You look around. Other people register the same small flinch, then do what audiences have collectively learned to do. They endure.

And here’s the thing: it’s a failure of the most basic duty owed to a paying audience. Sound is not decoration; it is the event itself. Across venues large and small, in cities that consider themselves musically sophisticated, live sound is treated with a casual indifference that would get you fired in any other technical role. You wouldn’t accept a lighting rig that illuminated half the stage. You wouldn’t accept a bar that served drinks warm by default. But blown-out tweeters and a treble shelf cranked to eleven? That, apparently, is just the texture of going out.

A chain of small failures

You don’t need to know the technical details to understand why live sound goes wrong so consistently; but tracing the path a sound takes before it reaches your ears does illuminate something. Each step is another opportunity for negligence to compound.

Sound begins at a microphone, which converts physical wave energy into a voltage. That signal travels via cable to a stage box, onto a multicore snake or digital network, and into a mixing console where it’s processed and blended with every other source on stage. From there, processed mixes go to amplifiers, which drive speakers, which radiate acoustic energy back into the room. The room itself then acts as one final, involuntary filter, before any of it reaches your ears.

The chain is not especially complex. A competent audio engineer understands all of it within a few years of serious work. What produces the disaster is how thoroughly shortcuts compound each other. A damaged capsule, a hot gain stage, an equalizer patching over a room problem it was never meant to solve; each one adds its own distortion to the pile, and by the time it all reaches the speaker system, the original signal is buried somewhere underneath.

The compound problem

Distortion stacks. Each node in the signal chain that adds even a small amount of harmonic distortion combines with the next. By the time the sound leaves a poorly managed system, you’re not hearing music anymore; you’re hearing music plus a layer of noise that your brain spends the whole set trying to subtract. That’s why you leave some gigs feeling beaten up even when the volume wasn’t unreasonable.

What you experience at the bad gig is a sound that is simultaneously too loud and unintelligible, fatiguing within ten minutes, where the quiet passages feel muddily quiet and the loud passages hurt. That’s a system in distress, not a system being pushed hard. The two feel very different from the front of house, but they look the same from the mixing desk if you’re not paying attention.

And these lead to the Four Deadly Sins…

Gain structure

The first, and honestly most consequential, setting that an engineer makes on any channel is gain: how much amplification gets applied to the raw signal at the console’s first stage. Too low, and the signal never reaches its optimal operating level; downstream noise becomes audible. Too high, and the preamp clips, introducing harsh harmonic distortion that no downstream processing can undo. Getting this right means the signal consistently hits its sweet spot across all channels, with enough headroom left for dynamic peaks.

In practice, at a typical mid-size venue, gain is set hastily during soundcheck, rarely revisited when the opening act’s drummer turns out to hit considerably harder than expected, and treated as a rough approximation rather than a precise calibration. Everything else the engineer does at the desk flows from this single setting. You cannot EQ, compress, or spatially place a signal that’s already clipping at its input. The damage is upstream of every other tool on the console.

The treble problem

The boost at high frequencies: the harshness, the piercing quality, the tendency for voices and guitars and cymbals to collapse into a single undifferentiated brightness. It’s probably the most universal complaint about live sound. Its origins are partly physiological and partly just habit.

The physiological piece: human hearing is naturally more sensitive between roughly 2kHz and 5kHz, which is where the formant frequencies of speech sit. Sounds in this range feel present and intelligible compared to lower frequencies. So when a tired or inexperienced engineer feels a mix lacks clarity, the instinct is to reach for the high-mid EQ band and push it up. Standing at the console in the centre of the room, this feels like an immediate improvement. It also creates a harshness that accumulates over a two-hour show and is genuinely exhausting.

The habit piece: many venue consoles arrive at the start of a show with EQ settings left over from whoever was there the night before. That engineer’s high-frequency boost becomes the next engineer’s starting point, who may add more. Over time, channel EQs drift systematically upward in the treble, the same way the overall volume drifts up over the course of an evening as the room fills with bodies and the engineer compensates.

What the audience ends up with is a mix that’s top-heavy: intelligible in a clinical, slightly fatiguing way, but missing the warmth and dimensionality that live music can actually deliver. The low-mid frequencies, the ones that make a kick drum feel like a physical event in your chest and give a baritone voice its authority, get systematically underrepresented. The mix arrives at the listener as a two-dimensional version of what it could be.

The blown speaker

This one is inexcusable. A blown driver produces a distinctive, papery, raspy distortion on transients. It is not subtle. You can hear it on the first note. And yet, venues accept it as routine; often for months, sometimes indefinitely, because the cost of replacement is non-trivial and accountability for the system’s condition is diffuse enough that no one specific person feels responsible.

The damage doesn’t stay contained to the frequencies that driver covers, either. Speaker cabinets are tuned as systems, with crossover networks directing different frequency bands to different drivers. A blown tweeter disrupts the phase relationship between drivers, creates comb filtering artefacts, and degrades the system’s power handling across the whole range. One blown driver makes the whole cluster worse. The engineer then compensates by boosting the frequencies that damaged driver covers (making it rasp more), or just turns the system up (which makes the distortion more present at the expense of everything else). Both choices are bad. Both happen constantly. It’s fucking infuriating. Then I see people just dancing (to the beat or not) and I get double mad. Why are we suffering?#/!

Sound reinforcement is called reinforcement for a reason. Its job is to preserve something that already exists and project it outward; not to transform it into noise at scale.

The support act problem

The economics of live music concentrate resources at the top of the bill. The headliner brings their own engineer, or has toured enough to build a relationship with the venue’s crew. They’ve done advance work: sent a rider, made calls, established expectations. They arrive for soundcheck knowing what they need, and there’s time to deliver it.

The support act, by contrast, gets thirty minutes of soundcheck in a room that hasn’t been tuned, with whoever’s available, using a stage plot submitted hopefully several weeks ago and ignored until twenty minutes before they walked on. They’re expected to establish monitor mixes, dial in the FOH sound, and identify any system issues before a filling room creates completely different acoustic conditions than existed during the check. Same job, one-sixth the time, none of the accumulated context.

The result, reliably, is that the support act sounds worse than the headliner; not because their music is inferior, but because the structural conditions of live production actively work against them. The audience absorbs this as a quality judgment, because audiences aren’t thinking about signal chains, and the support act’s sound gets bracketed as the price of the evening.

Worth saying plainly
Every headliner was once a support act. The systematic under-resourcing of opening slots is not only disrespectful to working musicians; it damages careers. Audiences form lasting impressions during those twenty-five minutes. A technically catastrophic show, however unfairly, sticks to the music.

The room is doing things too

Even technically competent engineers sometimes treat the room itself as an afterthought. Every space has a resonant character: frequencies it amplifies, frequencies it absorbs, dimensions that create standing waves at predictable wavelengths, surfaces that reflect sound in ways that smear transients and reduce intelligibility.

A low-frequency standing wave, for instance, builds up when the distance between two parallel reflective surfaces equals a half-wavelength of a particular frequency. In a room twelve metres long, this creates a resonance and its harmonics that fall squarely in the musically important bass range. At those frequencies, the room acts as an amplifier, building energy that makes a mix feel muddy and undefined at every listening position that happens to fall at a pressure maximum. An engineer who doesn’t account for this fights the mud by cutting low frequencies globally, producing a mix that sounds thin everywhere except at the positions where the room is boosting those frequencies anyway. It becomes an infinite loop of compensation.

Professional system deployment includes a process called room correction or system alignment: measurement microphones placed at multiple positions in the audience area, acoustic measurement software mapping the room’s frequency and phase response, and a system-wide equalizer tuned to correct for what the room is actually doing. This can transform a difficult room but it requires time, measurement equipment, acoustical knowledge, and a willingness to treat the PA as a precision instrument rather than a stack of black boxes that are either on or off.

At many venues, this process simply doesn’t happen. The PA exists in its default configuration, tuned when it was first installed and never revisited. Room furniture changes. The ceiling treatment gets replaced. A new speaker cluster gets added without recalibrating the existing system. The cumulative acoustic drift goes unmeasured because no one has been assigned to measure it, and the audience pays the difference, every night. Every night. EVERY NIGHT.

What good sound feels like

This standard exists. It is achievable. It is regularly achieved, not only at large-scale events with unlimited resources, but at small venues, in difficult rooms, on modest budgets. The gap between good sound and bad sound at the 400-capacity level is almost never the quality of the equipment. It’s the quality of the attention.

Good sound at a live venue has a quality that’s hard to describe but immediately recognizable. The room feels like it’s breathing. Individual instruments sit in distinct places; you can locate the hi-hat in a way that feels physically plausible rather than a generalized shimmer coming from nowhere. The low end is felt as much as heard, specific and rhythmic, tied to the kick drum’s attack rather than a booming undefined weight. Voices land with body; they sound like amplified human throats and not processed signals.

Most importantly, it doesn’t TIRE you. You can stand in front of a well-configured system for two hours and emerge without the ringing ears, the headache behind the eyes, the subtle nausea that is your body’s response to sustained distortion exposure. This is the simplest diagnostic available: if you leave a show feeling beaten up, the sound was bad. If you leave feeling like you could go back in, however exhausted, it was being managed properly.

Why it stays broken

The question of why this persists, when the knowledge and the equipment both exist and are widely available, is partly economic and partly cultural.

The economic argument is real and I won’t dispute that. Hiring a full-time system engineer with acoustic measurement expertise and a maintenance budget adds a significant ongoing cost to a venue that’s probably already running thin. Outsourcing to whoever’s available per-show saves money at the direct cost of consistency. Most venues choose the latter. The saving appears on the spreadsheet; the cost is borne by audiences and musicians, diffusely and invisibly.

The cultural argument is more insidious. Live sound, unlike recorded sound, has developed a tolerance for imperfection that conveniently functions as cover for negligence. There is a widespread belief, held by audience members, venue managers, and some engineers alike, that live sound is inherently rough; that it’s supposed to have an edge and a rawness; that precision is somehow inauthentic to the live context. This belief is false, but it is useful. It allows systematic under-investment in acoustic quality to be reframed as an aesthetic choice. Grunge, baby.

The engineers doing this well don’t accept that framing. They apply the same rigour to a three-hundred capacity room that a recording engineer applies to a studio session, because they understand that the audience deserves it and the music demands it. They arrive early, measure the room, stand at different positions across the audience area to understand what different listeners are actually experiencing, and treat the support act’s thirty-minute slot with the same seriousness they bring to the headliner’s two hours.

A minimum standard

What would it take to fix this, at the individual venue level, for any room willing to take the work seriously? The list is shorter than it should need to be.

What would it take to fix this? Less than you’d think.

1. Replace blown drivers when they fail, not when it becomes embarrassing; the PA is infrastructure, not inventory.
2. Measure the room before each show, correct the system EQ for its actual response; with Smaart or Room EQ Wizard this takes under an hour and changes everything downstream.
3. Put gain structure targets in writing and tell every engineer who works the system what they are, and check them at the start of every show.
4. Give support acts a house engineer for the whole set and a quiet room to check in.
5. Start EQs flat; cut, don’t boost.
6. Take monitor mixes seriously: a failing wedge forces the musician to compensate, which forces the engineer to add gain, which degrades what the audience hears. The chain runs both ways.

The audience knows

A club, a Tuesday night in November. The support act: three people, a guitar, a bass, a drum machine. They play for twenty minutes. The sound is, against all odds, right. The kick has weight. The vocal sits forward in the mix with presence and warmth, neither shrill nor buried. The room feels, briefly, like a resonant instrument rather than a box full of standing waves and compromised infrastructure. People who arrived looking at their phones are looking at the stage.

Audiences can’t usually describe, in technical terms, why a show sounded good or bad. They don’t arrive equipped with the vocabulary of signal chains, crossover frequencies, and room modes. But they know. They know in their bodies; in the quality of attention they can sustain; in whether the music reaches them as something felt or merely heard. Good sound changes what music can do to a room full of people. Bad sound prevents it.

The support act on that Tuesday did nothing unusual. They played their songs. What was unusual was that someone took the time to configure the room so those songs could actually be heard. That should not be unusual. It should be the floor.

The disrespect of bad sound is, in the end, a choice: not always a conscious one, not always made by a single accountable person, but a choice embedded in budgets and maintenance schedules and how time gets allocated on a show day, and in whether the engineer loading out at midnight leaves the console in a state that makes the next person’s job easier or harder. Making the other choice, consistently, across every show and every act on the bill, is what separates a venue that takes music seriously from one that merely hosts it.

References and further reading

1. Bob McCarthy, Sound Systems: Design and Optimisation (Focal Press, 3rd ed.) — the canonical text on modern loudspeaker system alignment, room measurement, and the MAPP/SIM methodology.

2. Glen Ballou (ed.), Handbook for Sound Engineers (Focal Press, 4th ed.) — comprehensive reference on every aspect of the signal chain, from transducer physics to amplifier topology.

3. Dave Rat’s writing and video work on professional FOH engineering practice, particularly his systematic approach to gain structure and console workflow.

4. Meyer Sound’s technical white papers on the physics of room acoustics, speaker directivity, and the principles of time-aligned, cardioid subwoofer deployment.

5. The work of acoustician Leo Beranek, particularly Concert Halls and Opera Houses, on the relationship between architectural acoustics and perceived musical quality — foundational for understanding how rooms shape sound independently of the reinforcement system.