The Auricle

Pros: As far as music clubs go, this one is cleaner and nicer than average. Parking is easy (nothing but tumble weeds blowing through downtown Canton after dark) and there is enough seating for a good sized crowd. Bar is clean, organized and fairly well stocked.

Cons: The primary purpose of the room is to showcase musical acts which means room acoustics are critical. The low ceiling helps the acoustics but there are a lot of hard, reflective surfaces that could be softened up with some treatment. But worse yet, the night I was there the sound guy was making the classic mistake of equating quantity with quality. They need to learn that LOUDER IS NOT BETTER, even with rock music. Once the sound is ramped up over the level of a jet engine, it becomes very difficult to hear instruments in detail, especially the vocals. Sound engineers, if I can't hear and understand the vocals, you are failing at your job and you are not delivering what I paid for...to be able to hear the band and not a mush of overdriven, intermodulated noise. And this is not just an issue of comfort and quality of music, it is a serious health issue because I guarantee you that any human subjected to those kinds of noise levels (110 dB?) is going to sustain short term and possibly even permanent hearing loss. If you ask me, it takes a cruel (or at a minimum a very uneducated) person to rob the long term hearing ability of kids just out trying to have a good time.