I know for sound guys in church the volume issue and complaints is a bit of an open wound. I have tasted more than my fair share of church politics on this issue. There are some things you need to think about:
1. Style IS an issue, swollen-ankle old lady organ music doesn’t sound good at 107dB. Rock music doesn’t work at 88dB either. I went and saw Avatar in IMAX 3D, and the volume had to be triple digit sound levels on C-weighting, and yet everyone was captivated by the story and the experience.
2. Consider A-weighting vs. C-weighting. If you run low-frequency heavy mixes, C weighting will probably not be as accurate as a heavy kick drum or bass note will cause the needle to gyrate even on the slow setting. And usually flipping between A and C there is a difference in how loud it measures by anywhere from 3dB to 10dB depending on the mix.
“Swollen-ankle old lady organ music does not sound good at 107dB!”
4. No matter where you mix at, someone will always think it’s too loud. There are days when, for no apparent reasons, I think 92dB is too hot for my ears, and days when 95dB just isn’t enough.
5. This issue IS political:
Back in the summer of 2008 I was hearing about complaints and that the worship was getting too loud. So I quietly devised a plan to do a study from September to January 1 of how loud we were running worship. I told my volunteers that I just want to serve the congregation’s needs and find out over a long period of time what the volume trend is. It was pretty simple, I asked our guys to look at the dB meter (set to C-weighting, slow) once during each song and for each service, and simply write down what they saw on the production sheet. I would collect their production sheet at the end of Sunday, and enter it into an Excel spreadsheet to create a few graphs, because I like pretty pictures. Not entirely scientific, but pretty effective.
Then about a few weeks in, word somehow got out and I was told that I had to email how loud Sunday was to [staff member's] or myself and the worship pastor would get in big trouble. Did I mention that I’m a volunteer? This story is about 5 blog posts in length. So, long story short, it was very ugly and even after I created the graphs above that shows the volume from each Sunday and the relationship between volume and negative comment cards, myself, the sound team and even a few musicians (all volunteers) were accused of disloyalty to the vision & mission of the church, subversion, and intentionally skewing the data by the 2 staff members who are in senior leadership positions. I was also told to continue taking sound measurements of worship indefinitely. And in that moment I came as close as I hope I ever will, to reaching across the table, crushing a person’s skull, incinerating the body, and destroying all the evidence. Translation: I was pissed.
Why did all this happen? Because [staff member/elder’s wife] rallied a group of people to stand in the hallway during worship in protest of the volume and to find other people to join her cause that, as a result, created disunity in the church.
Makes you cringe, doesn’t it? That’s the sugar-coated version. UPDATE: I had to edit this post twice after posting it this morning because some people think the sugar coating is too thin.
6. I made a survey you could take to find out how loud most people run worship services, you can still go take the survey. The results are posted above














