As Gaieties approaches, I reminisce about all the times I’ve been to the theater. In my bout of nostalgia, I am painfully reminded of all of the times the sound tech has been crappy. There were the Gaieties shows where I couldn’t hear the pit orchestra very well. In the musicals at my high school, they would miss cues and forget to turn on someone’s mic in time. At a Roots concert in DC last spring, the speakers completely died for a couple minutes. And even on Broadway where I saw West Side Story, performers belted it out and clipped the sound through their microphones a few times.

Why, from high schools to Broadway, can’t the sound tech ever be outstanding? Done well, you don’t even think about the guy in the booth. You hear all the lines, and the balance of instruments and voices in musicals comes through fine. Done badly, you curse under your breath at whoever is twiddling the knobs wrong. It becomes a distraction from the plot and the characters.

To be fair, it’s not a simple task. You have to manage dozens of microphones placed all around the stage to pick up all needed sound while preventing feedback. Then you have to balance them, making sure nothing drowns out anything else. You have to know the whole show so that you can cut or cue performer’s mics at the right time. All while making sure nothing breaks, runs out of batteries, or gets unplugged. It takes cooperation from the entire cast and crew. And for the person in the booth, it’s like juggling dozens of balls at once.

But just because something is complicated and difficult doesn’t give people an excuse to suck at it. It’s not easy to sing, dance and act, but performers work hard at it all the time and their effort shows. Are the sound engineers just lazy?

I think part of it is that the use of microphones and speakers is not an innate skill. Taking a photo, video, or writing something are much more natural to people; we are a visual species. Setting up a PA and adjusting sound levels for the mics and speakers doesn’t incorporate the same kind of instinct.

Because, the problem doesn’t just happen in the theater—how many lectures have you sat through where you couldn’t hear everything properly? People act like clueless tourists in a foreign land when faced with a PA system. It’s not that difficult—everything has to be plugged in and turned on, but not too loud or too soft. Several times I’ve seen a person give up and start shouting to an audience.

Whatever the issue, the truth is that the sound technician, be it the “expert” in the booth or the professor in a lecture hall, wields immense power to make a show or lecture terrible just by being incompetent. Please, sound techs in show business and anyone else with a microphone, do your job right. Don’t be distracting and let me hear it.