The worst professional job I ever heard was a Nanci Griffith concert at Baltimore's Meyerhoff Concert Hall. The hall was designed for an unamplified symphony. The unsound sound people brought in speaker towers. Nanci brought her big band.

The result was certainly loud enough. However, Nanci's voice was lost in noise and the instruments bled together. Made me wish I had not attended.

I recently had an experience at a wedding reception. The bride and groom asked me to play a few songs over the local band's PA system. It seemed to be an impossible job for their sound techie to get any vocal volume without feedback. My guitar was "plugged in" to the system and went out quite nicely. After a miserable few songs, I left the stage suspecting that only the people 5 feet away heard me, be no one else.

Once off stage and watching another acoustic perform suffer, I noticed the problem. The PA was channeled into a guitar amplifier which sat about 8 feet directly behind the microphone. The set up begged for feedback and it sure delivered.

Roger in Baltimore