From around 40 listeners in an enclosed room, or outdoors as a rule, you need a microphone, or the back rows will lose every other word. Below that, your own voice is usually enough, provided the room isn’t extremely reverberant or noisy. A simple test beforehand: say a sentence at normal speaking volume from your actual position while someone listens from the back row. If that person has to ask you to repeat it, you need amplification, however small the room looks. The equipment itself isn’t a side issue: a mic that crackles, a projector that won’t start, or feedback mid-sentence cost more concentration than any stage fright. The good news: most of these problems can be ruled out beforehand with a few simple checks, rather than improvised live.
Handheld mic and headset: grip and choice
Hold a handheld microphone about a fist’s width from your mouth, upright, not angled off to the side. If the distance drifts while you speak, the volume becomes uneven for the audience, louder and quieter by turns, without you noticing. Speak into the capsule, not past it, and don’t let the mic droop the moment your mind wanders. A reliable trick against that: hold the mic at a slight angle in front of your chest rather than your stomach, so your hand only starts to droop from fatigue much later. A headset mic solves this problem entirely, because the distance to your mouth stays constant however much you move or turn your head; it’s worth using for speeches with a lot of movement or gesture, a presentation with walking to the screen, say. A lapel mic is the most discreet option for formal occasions, but has one drawback: turn your head to the side and the volume audibly changes, because the distance to the capsule grows. Clip the lapel mic a hand’s width below your chin rather than right at the collar, or fabric will rub against it with every movement and produce a scratch that sounds louder over the speakers than any word.
Feedback: what to do when it screeches
Screeching feedback happens when the speaker’s sound loops back into the microphone and builds on itself. The fastest instinct helps the least: don’t turn the mic away from you or cup it in your hand, which often makes the problem worse. Instead, take a step away from the speaker if you can see where it is, and briefly signal the volume, with a glance towards the sound desk, say. With a lapel mic, it helps to increase the distance to a nearby speaker, stepping sideways if need be. And if it does screech: pause briefly rather than talking louder over it. A technician in the room usually sorts it within seconds, once they see you’re not the cause. The most reliable prevention: stand exactly where you’ll be speaking during the soundcheck, and have someone set the volume from there, not from wherever the mixing desk happens to be.
Room size and audience numbers: the rules of thumb
Up to around 30 to 40 people in a normally insulated room, a living room or small hall, say, your own voice carries, as long as you deliberately speak louder and slower than in conversation. From 40 people, or in a room with a high ceiling and hard surfaces such as stone or glass, a microphone becomes necessary, because the reverberation otherwise swallows syllables. A different rule applies outdoors: there are no walls to bounce sound back, so you’ll need amplification almost always, even for a modest twenty listeners, the moment wind or traffic noise joins in. Stand with your back to the wind direction too, not facing into it: headwind carries your voice back towards you rather than out to the audience. At a product launch with a corporate audience, the rule is usually simple: as soon as a room has rows of chairs rather than tables, a microphone is planned in, even if the room looks small. In a club room with maybe 25 people present, your own voice is often enough instead, as long as the room isn’t open to one side, through a serving hatch to a kitchen that swallows the sound, say.
Soundcheck minimum: three sentences at real volume
A soundcheck is the only reliable way to know how you’ll sound in front of the audience beforehand; it’s no extra just for professionals. The minimum: three sentences, as loud as you’ll be for the actual audience, not at a hushed test-whisper. One sentence to check the baseline volume, one sentence with the lowest and highest notes in your voice, one sentence with a deliberate pause, to hear whether background noise comes through. Speak from the position you’ll actually be standing at later, not right at the mic stand, since many speakers step back a pace during the speech and only then notice the volume drops off. At an annual general meeting with several speakers taking turns, the soundcheck pays off especially, because every voice carries differently into the room and the previous speaker’s setting rarely fits.
Light, glare and projector traps
Spotlights shining straight into your face can blind you so badly that you can no longer see the audience and automatically look down, right at the moment eye contact matters most. Test it beforehand: stand at your actual position before the event and look into the light; often the angle of a spotlight can still be adjusted. Presentations with a projector hide a different trap: the laptop screen often shows a different aspect ratio from the screen, and speaker notes vanish the moment the second display isn’t recognised properly. Test the connection at least fifteen minutes beforehand, with the actual presentation file, not just the start screen. Bring the right adapter cable too, HDMI and the common USB-C adapter, since the adapter available in the venue tends to fit every laptop except your own.
Plan B: the speech with no technology at all
Technology fails. That’s not the exception, it’s the default you should plan for. So keep a version in your head for handheld mic, projector and music that works without them too: the speech a little shorter and with a stronger voice of your own, the presentation as a brief spoken summary with no slides, the music simply dropped if it has to be. Anyone who’s thought this Plan B through beforehand doesn’t panic when the failure actually happens, just switches to the other version. When hosting an event with several segments on the running order, this matters even more, because a technical failure there often hits several items in a row, not just your own.
From finished text to a confident delivery
Technical mishaps can be prepared for; the text itself shouldn’t add to the difficulty. eloqole writes you a draft that carries even without a mic and projector, because it’s built from clear, short sentences rather than nested constructions that get lost in poor acoustics. In the built-in teleprompter, you can rehearse exactly this text aloud at the volume you’ll actually use, not just quietly at your desk, and notice beforehand which passages come out too quiet or too fast in the real room. More on preparation overall is in the guide to overcoming stage fright.