The Wireless Microphone Years

It is the decade of the 70’s, disco, platform shoes and leisure suits. Through junior high and also high-school in Florida, Clint McCowen attended many functions, social, sports, conventions, concerts, ceremonies, churches, media events. He noticed a common denominator in all of them.  The persons speaking to the large crowds couldn’t be heard much of the time. Those who could be heard, were restricted to a stationary position at the podium leaning into a microphone leaving no lenience to stand straight up, because if he or she did stand straight up, it placed too much distance between the speaker’s mouth and the microphone. Most people in the audiences struggled to hear and many feigned to understand the lecturer, although the looks of their faces, one to another in the crowd, indicated otherwise. Oftentimes, the lecturer concluded his or her talk believing that the crowd was pleased with the speech, when in fact, the truth is that much of the speech simply wasn’t heard and the crowd was being polite by offering a thunderous applause at the end – glad that the ordeal of pretending to listen to an inaudible speech was now finally over. To be fair, part of the problem lay in the sound amplification technology of the time and the audio speakers, which by today’s standards, were primitive. However, the distortion of the early audio amps and speakers could be overcome to produce useable sound, at least good enough to be understood by a sizable crowd, if the lecturer remembered throughout the speech to lean into the podium microphone, or hold the microphone consistently close to his or her mouth when speaking – a fact that would influence Clint toward a future solution to the problem. Unfortunately, it was rare that a lecturer remembered and was disciplined enough to do so. Consequently, 50%, 75%, or sometimes 100% of a speech went unheard by audiences – a fact the usually went completely unmentioned to the lecturer out of politeness of not alerting the talker that his or her hour long speech was a waste of time not only for the lecturer, but for the audience. It was a great relief to Clint as well as the audience around him when, for example at Awards Banquets, featuring dozens of persons taking turns speaking to the audience, when a person used the hard wired microphone effectively so that the crowd could clearly hear the words being spoken. Many lecturers delivered favorable speeches, that is, when they could be heard.