The Power Of Why: On The Value Of Not Knowing (And Saying So) In Pro Audio

Giving Permission

During one of my first visits to an online audio forum, I posted a technical question. I still remember the response verbatim: “I’m not sure why you need to know it at that level.” What’s the point of an attitude like that on a tech forum?

The definition of a forum – “a meeting place for discussion among experts” – shouldn’t inspire visions of a bunch of squabblers who pretend to know everything – the blind leading the blind – but all too often, this is how it ends up

Compare this response to the one I received the very first time I called my (now) mentor, Ethan Winer. I owned his book (The Audio Expert), I’d read his articles, and I’d seen his videos. I was thoroughly convinced he knew just about everything.

My question regarded the phase offset between resistive and capacitive elements at the corner frequency of an RC filter. He said “I understand what you’re asking, but I don’t know the answer.” How unexpected – how could he not know?

The best way to describe my feelings at this point is to compare it to the time I spent two hours etching all of the silver powder off of the screen of my Etch-A-Sketch: “Well, now what?” What surprised me is not that he didn’t know, but that he admitted it so freely.

This was a huge revelation – if subject matter experts can admit when they’re stumped and not burst into flames or turn to pillars of salt, so can I. There’s a wonderful freedom that sets in as soon as you give yourself permission to not know – the path to knowing becomes clear. It’s not about who is right, it’s about what is right. (We eventually got the answer from a professor at MIT, so we both learned something.)

Broader View

So how can we reap actionable benefits from this philosophical approach of being comfortable with the admission that there is more knowledge to be gained in a situation?

I recall a forum thread in which a front of house engineer was complaining that a popular new digital console reacted poorly to rising temperatures at an outdoor festival. As the day grew hotter, he claimed, the console’s sound became “tight” and “pinched,” and had anyone else experienced the same issue?

What followed was much postulating about accumulator bit depths and floating point DSP and fan speeds. All of the console gurus were so eager to appear knowledgeable that every single one failed to realize that they were operating on a very basic and very faulty premise – that the console was responsible.

The real culprit was “power compression.” Also known as thermal compression, it occurs when voice coils heat up. Resistance rises, SPL falls, the engineer pushes the levels in response and generates even more heat. The HF drivers usually get the worst of it, so the system’s response tilts toward the LF. The system sounds like it’s working too hard, which would absolutely cause the aforementioned complaint.

This is a common, well-understood issue, but to get there requires a step back. We must be willing to take a wider view and to seriously entertain the possibility that something we “know” to be true actually isn’t.

I have a theory that “false certainty” wastes a lot of money and time in the production world. I’ve seen a $10,000 lighting console declared faulty when the actual culprit was a polarity inversion in the DMX data cable.

I’ve seen a loudspeaker’s HF driver pronounced blown when the actual issue was that the cable was accidentally connected to the biamp input, leaving the HF driver without any input signal. And the $2,000 condenser mic works fine, but not if your in-line ground lift adapter breaks the DC return path for phantom power.

It’s easy to pronounce gear “broken” when in fact we don’t understand enough about how it works. The number of support calls I’ve taken, for which the solution was to press a button or plug something in, is testament to this. (Of course, sometimes the gear is actually broken.) But I posit that there are precisely zero situations in which our chances of success would not be improved by deepening our own understanding.

Key Q&A

If you’re like me, you laugh at old photographs of big, bulky, totally obsolete audio gear. “I can’t believe we used to do it that way.”

But it wasn’t funny at the time, it was the best they could do. Sure, we can do better now, but I think 30 years from now we’ll look back at today’s rigs and laugh for the same reason. Don’t think for a second that we’ve reached the summit.

The only thing that got us from 1980 to now, and that will carry us any further, is the admission of the possibility that there might be more to learn about this complex, crazy, beautiful field we call live sound reinforcement.

Someone has to ask “Is this really the best way to do it?” And someone has to answer “I don’t know.”