Music mauled by sound

“BUYEL’EKHAYA takes off – large crowd at the start of 24-hour music marathon” (DD, December 19) refers. It is quite a frustration at festivals as Buyel’Ekhaya to have to listen to such poor sound. On a number of occasions musicians like the legendary Jonas Gwangwa started singing and you could not hear that trumpet, which is what really makes you get onto your feet and dance. As MCs like Putco Mafani were talking, it cut off. Pathetic.

As the evening went on it got worse. Ringo Madlingozi’s first song sounded as if he was just mumbling for almost half of the song and we had to sing by ourselves, until later when the sound came back.

It is really depressing to have to pay such amounts of money only to have music mauled by bad sound.

In as much as we like all our artists and want to support them, we as the audience really do deserve more than what was given to us.

Everybody around us was complaining and only the tipsy fellas did not notice it too much except when it was so totally obvious.

To the organisers of the festival, I’ll say it was night-time robbery and the event left us all unsatisfied. This should not happen in future. Imagine such a large, well-behaved crowd, all the people dressed up and the weather beautiful, yet only the tipsy people were looking happy. As for the rest of us, it was a huge disappointment. Please organisers, pull up your socks next time. – Honey Nombembe East London