Soundcheck Diaries

This Sunday was one of the most anticipated Sundays of the year at my church—the Sunday following Vacation Bible School.

The kids’ choir would be getting up to sing the songs they had learned all week. Families would pack the sanctuary. And, as always, the room had been completely transformed with decorations built around the year’s VBS theme.

It looked fantastic.

Unless you happened to be the audio engineer.

I walked into the sanctuary at 6:00 Sunday morning, looked toward the stage, and immediately stopped in my tracks.

There, suspended directly in front of one of my main loudspeakers, was a huge wooden hot-air balloon.

Not a little decoration.

Not some fabric hanging from the ceiling.

A giant wooden monstrosity.

And somebody had apparently looked at the stage, looked at the loudspeaker, looked at the giant wooden balloon and thought:

Yep. That’s the perfect place for it.

I knew right then that it was going to be a challenging morning.

I tried talking the pastor into letting us take it down. God bless him, he was more concerned about hurting the feelings of the Children’s Ministry leaders who had undoubtedly spent hours building and installing it.

I explained that putting a large wooden object directly in front of a loudspeaker was going to affect what the congregation heard.

He wasn’t persuaded.

I tried again.

Still no.

At that point, there wasn’t much more I could do. The hot-air balloon was staying.

And I had to accept one of the realities of being an audio engineer:

Sometimes your job isn’t to make the system sound great.

Sometimes your job is simply to avert an audio disaster.

When Aesthetics Meet Acoustics

The dynamics surrounding audio in a church can be very different from what you encounter in the professional concert or corporate-event world.

At a concert, nobody would intentionally hang a giant piece of wood two feet in front of the PA and then tell the audio engineer to work around it. Audio coverage and intelligibility are fundamental parts of the production.

Churches can be different.

Ministry leaders are understandably focused on ministry. Children’s leaders are thinking about creating an exciting environment for kids. Creative teams are thinking about how the stage looks. Pastors are thinking about the congregation and the message.

They’re usually not thinking about loudspeaker dispersion patterns, reflections, microphone pickup patterns, or gain before feedback.

Why would they be?

Unfortunately, that can lead to some interesting situations for the sound team.

I’ve seen decorations placed around audio equipment, cables moved, microphones unplugged, and objects positioned in places where they interfere with loudspeakers or microphones. To someone who doesn’t work in audio, a loudspeaker can look like little more than a box hanging from the ceiling.

But that box has a job to do.

And physics doesn’t particularly care how beautiful the decorations are.

That morning, I had to change my mindset from:

I’m going to make this sound great.

to:

How do I keep this from becoming a disaster?

As it turned out, the hot-air balloon wasn’t finished with me yet.

The Balloon Strikes Back

Worship started.

And the music sounded pretty much exactly how I feared it would.

Muffled.

Muddy.

Unfocused.

I’m sitting at the console staring at this enormous wooden balloon hanging in front of my main loudspeaker, becoming increasingly irritated with an inanimate object.

Except by this point, it didn’t feel inanimate anymore.

The balloon had developed a personality.

It was hanging there smugly in front of my PA as if it were looking back at me saying:

Oh, Golden…you think THAT sounds bad? Just wait.

Then worship ended.

The pastor walked onto the stage.

I brought up the fader for his omnidirectional headset microphone.

And the balloon unleashed its secret weapon.

The feedback monster.

Suddenly that ugly, detestable howl came roaring out of the PA.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

There it was.

The sound every audio engineer knows.

My hands immediately went to work, and I pulled the pastor’s microphone back below the point where the system wanted to take off.

The feedback stopped.

The balloon had won.

I stared at it.

It stared at me.

Fine.

You win.

Unfortunately, winning the battle against feedback meant losing the battle for volume. I couldn’t get the pastor’s microphone as loud as I normally would without pushing the system back toward feedback.

So I had to leave his level lower than I wanted.

Now the congregation had to work harder to understand him.

And that’s when this stopped being merely an annoying decoration problem.

It had become an intelligibility problem.

You Can’t EQ Your Way Around Physics

I hadn’t expected such a dramatic reaction from the system, but once I looked at what was physically happening, it made perfect sense.

The wooden panel was hanging only about two feet in front of the main loudspeaker.

Normally, sound leaves the loudspeaker and travels outward toward the congregation. But now a significant portion of that energy was encountering a large, hard, reflective wooden surface almost immediately after leaving the speaker.

Instead of allowing that sound to travel cleanly into the room, the balloon was obstructing and reflecting part of that acoustic energy.

And some of that reflected sound was being sent right back toward the stage.

Enter the pastor’s omnidirectional headset microphone.

An omnidirectional microphone is designed to pick up sound from essentially all directions. That’s useful for many applications, but it also means the microphone is more willing to pick up sound from the PA than a directional microphone positioned under ideal circumstances.

So now I had created the perfect little feedback machine.

The microphone picked up the pastor.

The signal traveled through the sound system.

The loudspeaker reproduced it.

The wooden balloon reflected some of that acoustic energy back toward the stage.

The omnidirectional headset picked up that reflected energy.

The system amplified it again.

Around and around it went.

Microphone → Mixer → Loudspeaker → Wooden Balloon → Reflection → Microphone → Mixer → Loudspeaker…

Once the energy at a particular frequency came back into the system strongly enough, the loop became self-sustaining.

That’s feedback.

And there are only so many things an engineer can do from behind the console when the physical environment itself is working against the sound system.

I could EQ.

I could carefully manage gain.

I could reduce the pastor’s level.

But I couldn’t reach over the console, grab a knob labeled GIANT WOODEN HOT-AIR BALLOON, and turn it down.

The same problem came back when it was time for the children’s choir.

I needed as much gain before feedback as I could get from those choir microphones. Instead, I was fighting reflected energy from a giant wooden surface sitting directly in the loudspeaker’s path.

Once again, the amount of usable level I could get before feedback was reduced.

And this is an important lesson:

Sometimes the problem isn’t in the console.

You can have the right microphone.

The right EQ.

The right gain structure.

The right loudspeakers.

The right engineer.

And still have bad sound because something in the physical environment has fundamentally changed how the system behaves.

Sometimes the Best Mix Is the One You Can Get

Live audio is full of variables we can control.

We can choose microphones. We can move loudspeakers. We can adjust EQ, gain, compression, routing, and levels.

But then there’s another variable:

People.

Sometimes someone unknowingly makes a decision that has major consequences for the sound system. They aren’t trying to create a problem. They simply don’t know that what looks like harmless décor can completely change what the audience hears—or what the microphones hear.

That’s why communication between audio teams, ministry leaders, designers, pastors, and anyone else working around a sound system is so important.

A five-minute conversation before something gets built or hung can save everyone a lot of frustration on Sunday morning.

And I suspect our pastor learned that lesson right along with me that day. After hearing what happened firsthand, I don’t think he’s going to be very enthusiastic about allowing another giant wooden structure to be hung directly in front of the PA.

At least I hope not.

If there are two things I learned from the hot-air-balloon incident, they’re these:

You can’t fight physics and win.

And when the decision makers are absolutely committed to something, sometimes you aren’t going to win that battle either.

At that point, being a professional means accepting the circumstances you’ve been handed, understanding what’s happening, and doing the best you can to keep the show—or in this case, the service—moving.

Sometimes being a good audio engineer isn’t about achieving the perfect mix.

Sometimes it’s about recognizing that perfection is no longer an option and figuring out how to make a bad situation work.

And sometimes…

it’s about surviving the hot-air balloon from hell.