For the first year of performing with a microphone, I never once looked at the speakers.
Not metaphorically. Literally. I would walk into a venue, see a PA system of some kind set up in the room, put on whatever microphone was offered, and proceed to perform without giving a single thought to where the speakers were pointing, how far they were from me, or how the sound was distributing across the audience area.
In my defense, it never occurred to me that this was my concern. The venue had a sound system. Someone had set it up. Presumably they knew what they were doing. My job was to perform. Their job was to make sure people could hear me. Clean division of labor, the kind a consultant appreciates.
The problem with this clean division of labor is that it assumes the person who set up the speakers knows what you need. And what a magician who speaks, moves, interacts with volunteers, and creates moments of deliberate silence needs from a sound system is not necessarily what someone setting up for a standard presentation or a band assumes.
The Feedback Lesson
The first time I experienced genuine microphone feedback during a performance was at an event in Salzburg. Roughly sixty people, a mid-sized conference room, a standard setup with two speakers on stands flanking the small stage area. I was about ten minutes in, working well, the audience was engaged, and I moved stage left to interact with someone in the front row.
The shriek was instantaneous and violent. A high-pitched howl that made everyone in the room wince, including me. I flinched, the audio technician scrambled for the board, and by the time the feedback was killed — maybe three seconds later, though it felt like thirty — the spell was broken. The audience shifted in their seats. The energy in the room, which had been building nicely, reset to zero.
What happened was simple physics: I had walked directly in front of the left speaker. My lavalier microphone, clipped to my shirt, was now facing the speaker at close range. The speaker was broadcasting my amplified voice. The microphone picked up the amplified signal, re-amplified it, sent it back to the speaker, which re-broadcast it, and the microphone picked it up again. In a fraction of a second, this loop escalated from inaudible to ear-splitting.
Feedback. The one sound that will destroy an audience’s confidence in your professionalism faster than any other.
The embarrassing part is that this was entirely preventable. If I had looked at where the speakers were before I started performing, I would have known that my movement pattern would take me directly in front of one. I could have adjusted my blocking — my planned movement within the performance space — to keep me safely downstage of the speakers at all times. Or I could have asked the technician to angle the speakers differently. Or I could have chosen to perform from a position that kept me well clear of the danger zone.
But I had never thought about it. Speakers were someone else’s domain.
The Basic Physics You Need to Know
You do not need an audio engineering degree to understand speaker placement. You need to know three things.
First: speakers should always be in front of you, pointing away from you and toward the audience. This is the single most important principle. If the speakers are behind you or beside you, your microphone will pick up the amplified sound, and you are one step away from feedback at all times. The speaker output should travel in the same direction you are facing — from the performance area outward toward the audience.
Second: the further you are from a speaker, the less risk of feedback. Even good modern microphones, as Harlan notes in his theatre lecture, can only get within about six inches of a speaker before feedback becomes a problem. That might sound like plenty of distance, but when you are moving around a stage and focused on your performance, six inches can arrive faster than you think. Give yourself as much buffer as the room allows.
Third: speaker height and angle matter for audience coverage. Speakers on the floor pointing straight out will hit the front row at ear level and sail over the heads of everyone behind them. Speakers on stands, angled slightly downward, will distribute sound much more evenly across a seated audience. If you arrive at a venue and see speakers sitting on the floor or on a table at knee height, that is a flag. The people in the back are not getting the same sound as the people in the front.
The Room Shapes the Sound
Here is something that caught me off guard the first time I experienced it: the same speaker system, at the same volume, sounds radically different in different rooms.
A small, carpeted conference room with low ceilings and fabric-covered walls will absorb sound. The room deadens echoes, and what the audience hears is a relatively clean version of what the speakers produce. This is the easy scenario.
A large hall with hard floors, bare walls, and high ceilings will reflect sound. Every syllable bounces off surfaces and arrives at the audience’s ears from multiple directions at slightly different times. This creates that muddled, reverberant quality where words lose their edges and sentences blur together. I described this effect in my Graz story, but I have encountered it in varying degrees at venues across Austria — old ballrooms in Vienna, industrial event spaces in Linz, hotel conference halls in Innsbruck where the ceilings are higher than the rooms are wide.
In reverberant rooms, speaker placement becomes even more critical. You want the speakers as close to the audience as practical, because direct sound (the signal coming straight from the speaker) is always clearer than reflected sound (the signal bouncing off walls and ceiling). The shorter the distance between speaker and listener, the higher the ratio of direct to reflected sound, and the clearer the voice sounds.
This is also where Harlan’s advice about echoing venues becomes essential: slow down between phrases. In a reverberant room, your words need time to decay before the next words arrive. If you speak at your normal pace, the end of one sentence is still bouncing around the room when the beginning of the next sentence leaves the speakers, and the result is an overlapping wall of sound that nobody can parse.
I have learned to test this during sound checks by speaking a few sentences at my normal performance pace, then walking to the back of the room and listening while someone else speaks from the stage. The difference between what it sounds like at the source and what it sounds like at the back of a reverberant room is educational, to put it mildly.
The Two-Speaker Trap
Most small to mid-sized event venues use a standard two-speaker setup: one speaker on each side of the performance area, on stands, pointing outward toward the audience. This works well for most situations, but it creates a specific problem for performers who move laterally across the stage.
When you stand center stage, equidistant from both speakers, the audience hears a balanced mix from both sides. Your voice seems to come from everywhere — or more accurately, from you, which is the ideal. But when you move to stage right, you get closer to the right speaker and further from the left. For the audience, your amplified voice now seems to come more from one side than the other. The spatial mismatch between where they see you and where they hear you creates a subtle but real dissonance.
More importantly, as you approach one speaker, the feedback risk on that side increases. And because the other speaker is now further away, there can be a noticeable volume drop for the audience members sitting on the far side.
My solution, when I have any input on the setup, is to ask for the speakers to be positioned further forward than the performance area — ideally in front of me, at the edges of the audience rather than at the edges of the stage. This means the speakers are always ahead of my position regardless of where I move, the feedback risk drops significantly, and the sound distributes more evenly to the audience because the speakers are closer to them.
Not every venue can accommodate this. But I always ask. And I am surprised how often the answer is yes.
What to Do When You Cannot Control the Setup
The reality of corporate events, private functions, and keynote situations is that you often have no control over the sound system. The venue provides what it provides. The event organizer has made decisions about the room layout, the equipment, and the technical support based on factors that have nothing to do with your performance. You are a guest in someone else’s production.
In these situations — which, honestly, are the majority of my performing situations — the best you can do is adapt. And adaptation starts with awareness.
When I arrive at a venue now, before I unpack a single prop, I walk the room. I look at where the speakers are. I note their height, their angle, and their position relative to where I will be performing. I identify the danger zones — the areas where walking will bring me close to or in front of a speaker. I note whether there are any hard, reflective surfaces directly behind or beside the speaker positions that might create problematic echoes.
Then I make my plan. If the speakers are positioned in a way that restricts my movement, I adjust my blocking to stay in the safe zone. If the speakers are too low, I ask if they can be raised. If they are angled wrong, I ask if they can be tilted. Most venue staff are happy to make minor adjustments if you ask politely and explain why.
And if nothing can be changed — if the setup is fixed and immovable — then I know what I am working with. I know which areas of the room will have better sound and which will have worse. I know where the feedback danger lies. I know whether the room is reverberant and whether I need to slow my speaking pace. I know, in other words, the environment I am performing in, and I can adapt my performance to fit it rather than discovering the problems live.
The Consultant’s Instinct
I will admit that my approach to this is probably shaped by my consulting background. When I walk into a client’s organization to analyze their operations, the first thing I do is understand the environment. What are the constraints? What are the resources? What are the things I can change and the things I cannot? Only after I understand the environment do I start developing the strategy.
Sound setup is the same exercise. The room is the environment. The speakers, the microphone, the acoustics, the layout — those are the constraints and resources. Understanding them before you start performing is not being obsessive. It is being professional.
And it prevents the Salzburg situation from ever happening again. I have not had a feedback incident since I started consciously tracking speaker positions. Not because the equipment improved. Not because the venues got better. Because I started paying attention to a variable I had been ignoring, and it turned out that variable was one of the most important ones in the room.
Your voice fills the room through speakers. Know where those speakers are, and half your sound problems solve themselves before you say a single word.