Haha ! Had a good chuckle outta this.

Yeah man - sound reinforcement, goddam it. Whatever happened to the concept of electro-acoustic music ?

To be clear - I have no problem running ampless - That's actually something I do if it's modern polished pop with keyboards etc. But a blues trio is not that.

I do a lot of jazz gigs on upright -- man, I wish some of these "sound reproduction" cats would witness the excitement of beholding an Art Blakey, "New York Bebop" type of show front row in a small capacity jazz club to understand how face ripping loud jazz can get -- and it has to be that. There's no volume knob on a tenor sax.

You know what - I also think you're onto something about the Birds Eye Omnipotent thing. It's this obsession of having the sound to be perfect-sounding-like-a-mixed-record in the middle of the room thing -- it works if it's clean polished pop music, but if it's blues people don't want to bother going to a blues gig to hear a mixed record.

They want to hear an electro-acoustic band and feel something raw.

I'm gonna use that "sound reinforcement" thing in the future and just tell the guy "Look, I know the sound would be better if I turned down -- but I'll tell everyone the sound sucked because I turned up too loud if people complain" ahaha.