Most attendees at rock concerts in the U.S. probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about audio quality – after all, you just plug in the mics and guitars and crank the amps up to eleven, right? Actually, there’s a lot more to it than that, and George Varga writes that some of his most recent experiences suffering through concerts that “sounded as if they were either being performed from inside trash compactors in overdrive or through a giant car stereo with busted woofers… are symptomatic of a troubling decline in audio quality at concerts across the nation – a trend made more annoying by the concurrent rise in ticket prices.”