Thread: Vocal Intelligibility?

Something that happened at last night's show, although not exactly the same, triggered this "Grampa memory".

At a club show with a well known singer songwriter, he came back to the console between sets, not to complain but just to "shoot the shit" and catch up on adventures since our last encounter.

A woman who wanted to talk to him came up and seeing me asked, "Are you running the sound? I'm having a really hard time understanding the words".

The artist immediately spoke up, "Mayaum, would it help you understand the sittchyation if I were to remind you that ahm from Texas and ahm DRUNK!".

Proving once again that it's not AlWAYS the system OR the operator.

Originally Posted by Lee Brenkman

Something that happened at last night's show, although not exactly the same, triggered this "Grampa memory".

At a club show with a well known singer songwriter, he came back to the console between sets, not to complain but just to "shoot the shit" and catch up on adventures since our last encounter.

A woman who wanted to talk to him came up and seeing me asked, "Are you running the sound? I'm having a really hard time understanding the words".

The artist immediately spoke up, "Mayaum, would it help you understand the sittchyation if I were to remind you that ahm from Texas and ahm DRUNK!".

Proving once again that it's not AlWAYS the system OR the operator.

I did a high school battle of the bands years ago (OK-OK I did a lot of them years ago) and when the first band was doing sound check-the principal came up to me and said he could not understand the words.

I asked him to stand next to the singer. He did and then came back and said he could still not understand the words-with his ear right next to the singers mouth (wish I had a camera with me).

He wanted to "clean it up" with all the knobs I had.

Yeah right!

Some years ago we provided the technical infrastructure for an evangelical crusade. Sometimes we were in very good spaces... but the facilities that were not good were very, very bad.

One time they were booked in big concrete box of a room, 24' ceiling. Throw in a few columns, too. Capacity of around 2,000 IIRC.

Part way through the 'message', a fellow approached FOH and said "we can't hear Brother ______". We asked him to point out his seat, thinking perhaps he was behind a column, but no such luck. Our tech went to that seat, sat and listened for a minute and came back to FOH. "I can hear him just fine, but let's try something." He gave his headphones to the fellow and PFL'd the pastor vox. After a bit he was asked "is that better than what you hear at your seat?" "Not really." "I'm sorry, but I can't understand him, either."

The issue? The Pastor would get excited and his speech would get more heavily accented.... heavy Cajun. His words became gumbo. There was no filter for that anywhere in the system.

not to essentially retell the same story but...

our church had a special speaker come out for an evening lecture and i was manning FOH. 30 seconds after he started, our Senior Pastor appeared at my side and told me to 'turn it up' because he couldn't hear the speaker. well, i've spent a good bit of my career with talking heads and i knew that the level was fine and that making it louder would only excite the room and lower intelligibility, so i did nothing. 5 minutes later he was back asking me to do the same thing. at that point i thought maybe he just had some age related hearing loss, so i put a little more 3k edge into the speaker's mic. couple minutes later he was back asking for still more level. it was at that point that i realized that the problem wasn't the amplification. it was the fairly thick Indian British accent that the speaker had. i explained to our pastor that didn't have an 'accent filter'. i actually saw the light bulb appear over his head and he suddenly realized himself what was happening. pretty funny to see....