So last Friday night, I went to a concert at Festival Hall to watch RUFUS, a band from Sydney play. As I was listening to their songs, I realised how much effort would have gone into every single piece of audio equipment to make it sound as good as possible. I really liked the arc of speakers set up which let out such a strong crisp sound straight into the audience. After playing around with audio in class, I now have a new respect for the people behind concerts like these as everything needs to be in the right tune, and have the right gain and volume in order for the audience will not be satisfied.  After researching on how concerts work, I learnt that there is a “mixing engineer” who sits in a small booth controlling and mixing all the sounds coming from the stage through a mixing board. The mixing board is where “the engineer has all the instruments laid out on separate tracks. The 12 microphones placed around the drum kit, for instance, might use tracks 1 through 12 on the mixing board. Once all the instruments are mapped to a track, the engineer can then meticulously mix a live sound that is perfect for the venue.” extract from http://www.pcworld.com/article/2000192/how-rock-concerts-work.html  Here’s a little clip.