So, (some of you may be familiar with this from my live tweeting) as I was attending a marketing seminar last month, I had the chance to prove our point about “Be Effective – Be Heard”. The house provided a little self powered, 2 speaker sound system for the speaker to use. He also used a screen and projector to show videos from his laptop computer. Said laptop was also connected to the little sound system. Add in a wireless lavalier microphone of questionable quality and no experience with the equipment and you have a recipe for disaster. (Side note, this was a seminar about using today’s technology to market your company.) So the seminar starts with a video. The video showed up on the screen but all you heard was crackling noise as the wire he was given to connect his laptop to the sound system was a bad one. When he got it to work, there was so much bass you couldn’t understand. I actually looked outside for a thunderstorm first (legitimate thought as it was storming that day). Then he began to speak. This guy was a large man with an average male low voice. Here, he sounded like an AM radio (for the kids, that was what they listened to before streaming internet and podcasts). Static, no depth, hissing, all the things we pick on the fast food drive through for. Once in a while the mic would cut out. As a sound tech, I was out of my mind. But, let me be objective and look at what others reaction might be. Looking around the hall, I could see only about 40% of the attendees actually looking ahead. Afterwards, I asked a couple people the straight question “what did you think?” The first three told me they couldn’t hear it. Moral of this story. How can you get your point across, if you’re not getting your point out to their ears? People are pre-programmed to block out bad sounds. Extraneous noises get ignored by most people. Sound Techs on the other hand get annoyed by it. HAHA. If you sound badly, people will begin to tune you out.45 mins of listening to hiss is not most people’s idea of effective. Let alone the embarrassment of all your equipment failures. You’re supposed to be a professional?
A proper sound technician would have checked all the equipment prior to embarrassment. They would set up better equipment under a proper budget. They would have tested your sound prior to show and set the tone reaction between you and the microphone properly to give you clarity with the right amount of strength.
If you’re doing a speaking engagement anytime soon and you’re in our area, give us a call. It’s a lot more expensive to fail to reach people than it is to hire us to set you up right. Or in any other area, look up “sound technician” or “sound engineer” in Google for that area. It’s really not that expensive in the long run, and you look more professional than this guy who was less effective than the girl at the Wendy’s drive thru I went to earlier for lunch!
