Howard, what’s the worst sound you’ve ever heard?
Well I guess this is a bit tongue in cheek, right? You want to know about audio makers perhaps? Too many frankly. Especially ones that should have known better. Usually from UK based makers that have just four letters in the names. However, non-audio worst sounds that stand out include:
1. Clair Short (MP) giving it some serious verbal as an after dinner speaker at an automotive industry conference in Birmingham in the 1990s. Both the message and the messenger were awful.
2. Anyone playing a recorder (the wind instrument, not a TEAC or Revox) anywhere at any time.
3. By far the most memorable was in an engraving dock in Tilbury when I was a delivery driver being exposed to riveters riveting a ship’s hull. The clatter of the power guns can, even now, 30 years later be easily recalled. Neither they, nor I, were wearing ear defenders.
Now now, Howard. Woman of principle…voice of sanity…
Oh, OK, I wouldn’t choose to spend my evening listening to her.
My own submission: before Xmas as a father’s rite of passage I took my daughters to a Miley Cyrus concert at the O2. 15,000 pre-teens screaming incessantly. The only saving grace was that the acoustics at the O2 were so dreadful that you couldn’t tell how bad the music was.