{"id":203179,"date":"2026-03-04T02:45:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T02:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/203179\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T02:45:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T02:45:12","slug":"some-club-darc-attendees-want-their-money-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/203179\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Club Darc attendees want their money back\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Club Darc was billed as the hottest new electronic music scene in town. The EDM series, from Coachella promoter Goldenvoice, launched Friday night at Shed A, a cavernous warehouse inside Pier 48 in Mission Rock. The lineup was ambitious: Chris Stussy, DJ Tennis, and DJ Seinfeld, all of whom have huge followings. Excitement was high. Mayor Daniel Lurie, a major EDM fan, was \u201cthrilled (opens in new tab)<\/a>\u201d about it. Tickets were sold out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

By Saturday morning, everyone was talking about the party, but not in the way organizers hoped. The consensus? The sound sucked.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The scene inside.<\/p>\n

People\u2019s voices carried in the space.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t remember when I was so disappointed at any event ever,\u201d said Lukasz Jagiello, who left after about an hour because of the audio issues. \u201cIt was like a mix of loud noise of a crowd with some bass in the background, and that\u2019s it. There was no way you could hear vocals. I\u2019m standing in front of that main DJ booth, and I don\u2019t hear what the music is playing.\u201d<\/p>\n

He compared the experience to listening to a concert from blocks away.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe funny part is, I don\u2019t think I ever have expectations for the sound,\u201d he said. \u201cI just assume that portion will be fine. You can have expectations about the line or restrooms or drinks. But not about the fact that you cannot hear the music. That is bare minimum.\u201d<\/p>\n

His bottom-line review: \u201cThat was basically a money grab.\u201d<\/p>\n

Experts caution this could just be first-night sound calibration issues. But many first night attendees were left disappointed.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou couldn\u2019t even hear the music,\u201d said Jordan, who declined to share his last name. \u201cThe bass was nonexistent. The highs were piercing, where it actually hurt your ears. The mids and a lot of the music were completely drowned out. It was a wash of noise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jordan and his friends left 30 minutes after Stussy took the stage. They felt the sound issues were disrespectful to the artists.<\/p>\n

\"AChris Stussy was the biggest name on the first-night lineup. Photo by Claire S. Burke, Courtesy of Golden Voice.<\/p>\n

\u201cI made out one song over the course of two and a half hours,\u201d said Caleb, who also declined to share his last name. \u201cEverything else was just beats.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was so chatty in there,\u201d he added. \u201cWhen people are locked into good music, they shut up and dance.\u201d Instead, voices layered over the muddy sound, turning the warehouse into a wall of chatter. His group also left 30 minutes into Stussy\u2019s set.<\/p>\n

Many took to social media, comment-bombing Club Darc\u2019s Instagram page. \u201cYou won the worst show,\u201d said one. Others pressed Goldenvoice to adjust the sound before the next event. The series runs to mid-May, and many people purchased tickets for more than one night. \u201cFIX it,\u201d wrote one commenter. On Reddit, people announced that they were seeking refunds. Tickets for opening night ran roughly $70 to $80.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Caleb, who has tickets to Club Darc\u2019s April show with Prospa, plans to sell those and to email organizers to request a refund for Friday. Jagiello, too, has tickets to several Club Darc shows, including Peggy Gou and Armand Van Helden on Saturday, and an April event. He plans to sell them all if he can; he says he\u2019s been having trouble listing them on the official AXS resale platform.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A Goldenvoice representative declined to comment.<\/p>\n

Gavin Smith, a Bay Area audio engineer, said these kinds of complaints are not unusual for concerts at a large warehouse venue being used for the first time. And they are not unfixable.<\/p>\n

A warehouse presents some of the most difficult acoustic conditions for live electronic music, Smith said.<\/p>\n

\"AExperts say this kind of warehouse setting presents a tricky acoustics challenge. Photo by Claire S. Burke, Courtesy of Golden Voice<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people think you put a great sound system in a space and have good artists, and you\u2019re bound to have success,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s a lot more difficult than that, because a sound system and a room go hand in hand. It\u2019s a relationship between the two.\u201d<\/p>\n

Large industrial buildings like Shed A\u00a0 have highly reflective surfaces \u2013 concrete floors and walls and metal ceilings \u2013 that can cause sound to bounce unpredictably. When that happens, Smith said, listeners can lose the ability to clearly distinguish the elements of the music.<\/p>\n

\u201cIntelligibility, being able to understand the different aspects of the music, gets kind of lost, because everything is reflecting all over the place,\u201d he said. That was the chief complaint of Club Darc attendees Friday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Smith said it doesn\u2019t necessarily mean the engineers didn\u2019t tune the sound system ahead of time, but they probably need to tweak it to account for the effect of so many people in the space. \u201cYou might nail the tuning before people are there,\u201d he said, \u201cbut it\u2019s different when there\u2019s a crowd of 5,000 and all those bodies and sounds reflecting in different ways. It complicates things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith said opening-night issues are part of the \u201clearning curve\u201d at a new venue.<\/p>\n

The situation reminded him of the first year of Portola, another Goldenvoice festival in San Francisco, which also faced sound challenges at warehouse-style venues.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose types of warehouses are hard to get right,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like being in a cave \u2013 you clap, and you hear all that echo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jordan said the experience echoed another recent San Francisco spectacle, the Red Bull F1 showrun along Marina Boulevard.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt felt very similar to how the F1 race was promoted by the city and then how that all went down,\u201d he said. \u201cMy expectations were up here for SF finally being back, and then it was kind of a letdown moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

But unlike that stunt, Club Darc has time to fix the bug. Smith said audio engineers typically learn how a venue behaves and make adjustments.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt should get better and better,\u201d he said. \u201cA company like Goldenvoice typically puts on really awesome shows. I\u2019m sure they\u2019re taking account of people\u2019s reactions and trying to improve.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Club Darc was billed as the hottest new electronic music scene in town. The EDM series, from Coachella…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203180,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[636,22907,1103,330,143,145,144,94148],"class_list":{"0":"post-203179","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-daniel-lurie","9":"tag-electronic-music","10":"tag-mission-bay","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-oakland","13":"tag-oakland-headlines","14":"tag-oakland-news","15":"tag-portola-music-festival"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}