As so often happens, I was recently in a church running audio for the weekend services. This was the second time I had operated audio for this church. There were no less than five comments made about the audio levels. I know that when someone new comes in to mix there will always be a difference. It got me thinking though, how often do we listen to the one negative comment and adjust to it.
As far as i know there was one comment made by someone in the front row that it was too loud. I;m not sure what was too loud but the comment was delivered to me and I was instructed to turn it down a couple of notches (whatever a notch is). When the adjustment was made, I then received a couple of comments that it needed to be turned up a bit. Perhaps I went three notches instead of two.
Most likely there were several hundreds people in the space that enjoyed how it sounded or at least they were not offended by anything, but because one person spoke up changes happened that precipitated more changes, ultimately resulting in an inconsistent audio quality.
I have a suggestion: How about we determine the environment we want to create and do it. Make no apologies for it, be intentional. This doesn’t mean we don’t listen to the negative feedback, in fact, I encourage you to provide a forum for such feedback to occur. I suggest though that we do not try to make everyone happy, we will fail and be miserable while doing it. Don't you think?
