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The Music Industry's Crisis Writ Large
The NY Times has an opinion piece that makes starkly clear the financial decline of the music industry. It's accompanied by an infographic that cleverly renders the drop-off. The latest culprit accelerating the undoing of the music business is free, legal online music streaming. "Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half. At that rate, the industry could be decimated before Madonna's 60th birthday. ... 13- to 17-year-olds acquired 19 percent less music in 2008 than they did in 2007. CD sales among these teenagers were down 26 percent and digital purchases were down 13 percent. ... [T]he percentage of 14- to 18-year-olds who regularly share files dropped by nearly a third from December 2007 to January 2009. On the other hand, two-thirds of those teens now listen to streaming music 'regularly' and nearly a third listen to it every day."
Plenty thanks, only 2000+ shows in 20 years, most of which were repeat bookings, some in the hundreds of shows. Not to mention at least that many more that I had to refuse as I was already booked, often 6 months in adavance.
Where did I say poor equipment that wont go as loud as I want? You just made that up, re read what I wrote. How many times have you mixed a band? Ah of course none.
I will explain it simply as you don't seem to have a clue about live sound. If a rock band for example is very loud on stage(Instrument amps and speakers can be surprisingly efficient)say 105 dbspl one needs to be able to add 10db of volume (115dbspl)above the off stage volume for the vocals to be heard clearly.
A snare drum on its own can when hit hard, exceed 120dbspl.
Hence you need a powerful system capable of exceeding the off stage level. Turning down the volume is not an option in this scenario, unless the band is willing to turn down on stage, and let me tell you that virtually never happens, or if it does only for a few minutes then they are back up again.
To ensure quality some "headroom" (Unused power)is required, that is power above what is required, to keep all points in the signal chain below the threshold of clipping, and hence the sound clean. Even so most systems I used would flash the clip lights on the peaks of the bass drum, this is not unusual with high powered actively crossed over systems.
In an active xover system clipping of the bass amp does not effect the higher frequency channels.
One of the things I discovered was that clean sound can be very loud without bothering listeners, whereas dirty or poorly equalized sound can be annoying at almost any volume.
At no stage did I say I wanted a system to be louder if it was crap. That would just result in louder crap.
As a long time live sound professional I did not choose crap systems for my shows, but some were equipment provided, so one had to make do with what was there. When I specified the systems it was never a problem.
Obviouslyly the quality of the band and their instruments and amps has a huge influence too.
On many occasions I mixed multiple acts, some of which sounded like crap and had me working my ass off thinking I was doing something wrong.
When the next act came on all of the problems were gone and the sound great without any changes on my part, but even after many years it is sometimes very difficult for me to be sure whether it was the engineer/system causing the bad sound or just a bad band!
Like I said if you are not at the desk doing the gig you have no idea under what limitations the sound guys is operating, and no real basis for criticism.