If concert sound is bad, don’t blame the Sprint Center
By TIMOTHY FINN
The Kansas City Star
On Wednesday night, Tina Turner opens her North American tour at the Sprint Center.
If you’re going to the show and it’s your first at the Sprint Center, be warned: Fans have complained about the acoustics.
If the sound is bad, whose fault is it? Fans have blamed the arena, but experts say bad sound falls on the sound engineer.
In the days after the Bruce Springsteen concert in August, fans swamped The Star’s music blog with complaints about the Sprint Center’s acoustics. Some examples:
“When you fork over $100-plus per ticket, you shouldn’t have to suffer through hours of bad audio.”
“The quality of the sound was terrible. First time at the (Sprint Center) and maybe the last.”
“The sound was HORRIBLE. Very disappointed. Even when I knew every word I couldn’t understand one thing he sang.”
However, the sound has been adequate or even good at other shows, like the Police, Tom Petty, Bon Jovi, Brad Paisley and all nine Garth Brooks shows.
Bad sound at a concert is not usually the fault of the venue, several sound engineers told The Star. Good sound, they say, starts with the band and the engineer behind the console.
“With the way systems are designed these days, you shouldn’t have too many bad shows,” said Jeremy Dixon, president of Digital Sound Systems Inc. in Overland Park. “It all starts with the band and the band’s representative in the front of the house.”
“In general, it comes down to how the engineer adapts to the environment,” said Mark Davis of Kansas City, a sound engineer who has toured with scores of bands.
“That can be a challenge when you’re doing clubs or even some theaters that are different from one another. But arena shows are essentially the same from one arena to the next: basically the same PA, same console, same-size room.”
So what explains the difference in sound from, say, the Alicia Keys show to the Police show just a week later in the same place?
Several variables, said Davis and Dixon, from the size and volume of the band’s monitors and the kind of music a band plays to the size of the crowd. And sometimes it comes down to someone — the band or the engineer — having an off night.
Sports first, music second
Neither Dixon nor Davis attended the Springsteen show, but both had theories on why a tour that uses top-of-the-line equipment and hires award-winning engineers might have an off day.
Dixon said: “They have two monitor engineers and they’re both up for engineer of the year in our little world. The system designer, who tweaks the system at every show, is up for system tech of the year. And the front-of-house guy is a huge money guy.
“I didn’t see the Sprint Center show, but I’ve seen several Springsteen shows on this tour. Some have been absolutely awesome. Some have been not as good.”
Because of the size of his band, Springsteen’s tour is a good example of a band posing a challenge for the sound engineer, Dixon said. Springsteen tours with three guitars, a bass, two keyboards, a violin, a saxophone, drums and, at times, four vocalists.
“The stage volume is huge on that show,” he said.
And the sound engineer has to accommodate all that noise in a slightly hostile acoustic environment.
“Sports arenas by design were designed to amplify crowd sounds to make the clapping and cheers louder,” he said. “When you turn a sports venue into a live-music venue, the key is to have enough PA (public address) to get over that sound threshold and then distribute the sound appropriately.
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