Well thank you all for your inputs (pun intended). The question was more rhetorical than
practical, actually.
I think there are two "craft" areas:
System designer/tuning/optimization, and Mixing. The needs and responsibilities then get filtered by use: theater/musicals, pop music concerts & festivals - arenas and stadia, theaters and soft seaters, clubs; houses of worship of various scales; corporate presentations - from boardrooms on up.
Over all I find most of the audio at the
level of artist/show/tour being discussed here to be acceptable to the performer/
producer representatives. Over on the ProSoundWeb live audio forums we have fellow soundhumans occasionally complain about a mix or coverage (especially in arenas, and when you try to make music in a room built for basketball/hockey, you're taking your chances - hit it, Zuben!*). There's a whole lot of non-intuitive stuff going on when
loudspeaker systems overlap and reducing the damage takes time and FFT analysis with aural confirmation of success (or not). Measurement is another item I'll
cover below. Some of the guys/gals who get the most from the quiet time they have are theatrical touring. They have lots of things to take care of in 8 hours and they have to concentrate on the stuff that matters, first.
As we move down the food and money chains the
level of "what's going on" awareness starts curving down until you hit the bar band mixed by the drunk guy who consistently finds the "Suck" knob and turns it mercilessly. It's more in the middle of the bell curve that the Suckage Constant® seems to move about for no apparent reason - an otherwise serviceable mix defeated by lousy coverage,
clipping amps or distorting wireless, or a
system deployed as best it could be, only to be
fed a
Mixxe Crappe. At this mid
level, often one audiohuman wears several hats, too, and their expertise may not be equally distributed among said hats. They do well enough to keep the gig.
Measurement is one of my favorite things and up front I like to admit I made hundreds of invalid or inappropriate measurements when I started out. I took my first
Smaart class in 2004 and I think it helped me make fewer bad measurements than I might have otherwise. What the training covers is using the FFT measurement tool, but the "why" of any particular measurement is left for Day 3, and the why is the most important part - if you don't have some idea of what you should be looking at/for, how will you know if you're seeing it and, most importantly, do your ears confirm what you see on
screen?
I've said before that
Mixxes Crappe exist because the mixerperson doesn't know what things are supposed to sound like and, if they do, they lack the experience and ear training to manipulate the controls of the
console to achive the desired output. Or the Suck
button is stuck again.
* Extra points if you name the artist I paraphrased.
