Unnecessary amplification can degrade rather than improve a live talk

Evidence

I attended a campfire talk in one of our national parks when the visitors, on the first occasion I was present, waited more than half an hour because the voice amplifier was out of order. The folks who attend these campfire talks, I have found, are very patient and grateful for the interpretation offered them; so they were on this occasion. I went to the same place on the following two nights, because each program offered was interesting to me. There was the same mechanical trouble; the same delay. It occurred to me then that actually the amplifier was not needed at all. The circle was small. The amplifier, when it did operate, was badly adjusted and unpleasant. Any one of the speakers I heard (and two of them were uncommonly good, with well-selected slides) could have made himself heard perfectly without resort to a mechanism. We cannot too much stress the fact that any amplification is at best a necessary evil, and that the average speaker with a minimum of proper training can make himself perfectly intelligible without unusual effort where the space is not too great. — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 575

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s listening-observation-as-method thread and to One Square Inch of Silence’s acoustic-environment concerns — the soundscape is altered by needless electronics. — connects to: Unserviceable interpretive technology harms visitors more than its absence does — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 571
• CANDY: A nice anecdote: an amplifier that repeatedly broke wasn’t needed at all because the circle was small enough for unamplified voice.