Curt Taipale of Church Sound Check writes a very informative article on where your sound booth should be located, titled Where Should the House Mixing Desk Go? He discusses good and bad locations and also ways to determine the best location. It gets somewhat technical, but for the most part, it is basic enough for most of us to gain some valuable knowledge from it. The big no-no is that your sound booth should not be in the room behind the back wall with an opening cut out. I know of at least one church with this kind of sound booth and I know they are clearly aware of the drawback of this situation, with intentions to make a change. Sometimes it’s difficult to give up the real estate on the sanctuary floor, but it’s almost a necessity to maintain a clean mix.
An interesting point made was it’s sometimes difficult to convince the decision-makers in the church that the sound booth needs to be out on the floor, not up in the balcony or in a separate room. Oftentimes, the soundbooth gets put in a bad location due to this, which reminds me of the importance of relationship and trust between the technical leadership and the administrative leadership. (sounds like another topic in the near future.) The issue is not who will win the battle of the sound booth, the issue is the longterm, ongoing relationship between the players.
However, I digress. Check out this article for some real insight. It concludes with the following:
The bottom line – if the mix ain’t happening, don’t shoot the engineer. It may not be his fault. Instead we encourage you to try to be less concerned about hiding the sound equipment and the engineer, and more ready to equip the team to do the job you’ve asked them to do.