Last night I attended an awards banquet with my wife. She teaches at a charter school with multiple locations, and all of the Ohio schools came together to honor the honor-roll kids. In a 1,000 seat ballroom at a downtown hotel, I heard some very unprofessional audio mistakes, and it reminded me, sometimes it can be about what you don’t hear.

Being in the back of the room, typically slightly higher than the congregation, you probably can see who is paying attention, who is sleeping, what new youth group couple is holding hands, and who is texting during the service. Seems a lot of people don’t pay attention, and I seem to find a lot of sound engineers pay too much attention during church.

One problem I encounter in churches, is the sound engineer never moving out from behind the board. It should not be a surprise that most churches (and a lot of clubs I’ve run sound in too, unfortunately) have horrible ‘sound booth’ placement. So, if you’re under a balcony, in the back corner of the room, and inside a closet, and the sound is PERFECT from where you sit, you must have done a great job compensating for the bad acoustical enviornment where you are, but what about the rest of the room? Is the congregation being subjected to bad audio and holding your responsible?