Musician vs. Sound engineer

This is a classical problem. A musician is never happy with the sound and a sound engineer is never happy the way the musician is singing into the microphone or playing ! This saturday I had to preform in a well set auditorium and since the sound guys also were from the same place, we went about an hour early. The state of the art was pretty pathetic to say the least (Gosh!! they had like 4 leads all on one side and after a synth, rPad, tabla and violin the rest of the guys had to play on mic...) So in all curiosity, I ask the sound guy about the number of channels he has on this state of the art mixer. The guy with all pride says 16..(Even cheap keyboards come with more lines .. Cool edit has 64!!). I add up the number of lines and come up with other 11. I ask him so we get 11, who gets the other 5? (When you are 15 minutes from start and your instrument is not getting monitored and your skills are not so great and you need a monitor... all these and's make you think out of the box). The dude replies, "Brother, I aint got nothing more..."... Then the flare up.. The composer gets ticked off at this and walks off, the pacification.. man i cannot but remember Smrithi, another show.. where we got a Roland for ourselves ... on the flop side cannot forget Bombay grill where a decent Sony box was abused... or this years India Nite, where despite an acoustically handicapped audi, the sound was way better than it ever has been....

What is with sound guys? All they got to do is get the numbers and get them straight. Especially, when the musician is as talented as Sandeep, the guy we were perfroming with, all you gotta do is stop thinking and start listening.. Well when jerks can screw A.R.Rahman, whaat me? Whaaaat violin....