Is sound reinforcement/live sound still on topic?

Question

On Audio/Video Production, Sound Reinforcement was extremely on topic, however recently, it has come up for debate whether this is still on topic for the site. Is sound reinforcement/live sound still on topic or has it been abandoned by the community?

In particular, the most recent form of the debate began from this post.

Answer 1

Yes, it should still be on topic. We have a pool of resources who are excellent at it and the concerns are similar enough between live and recorded that many of the design questions can be relatively closely related to both. There is no good reason to abandon the live audio portion of the community in favor of restricting ourselves to a small portion of the population of the original community that was brought together.

Answer 2

Yes - live sound, or the production or recording of live sound feels very on topic.

That said, I would regard questions asking for product recommendations as being off topic. So the post you linked in the question should be on topic (in my opinion) except for the piece asking:

Could I eventually use TASCAM DR-05 as a pre-amp?

Answer 3

Sound design is not live sound. It is that simple.

If this is what this forum is for, then you cannot call this site Sound Design. Just because people have crossover skills in this area doesn't mean these questions should be on-topic.

Answer 4

No it should not be on topic, because there is a big resource online already for this type of questions. Sound Design however does not have this big presence(besides a defunct mailing list on yahoo and some generalities on filmsound.org). Furthermore the questions so far are on a very basic level, compared to the sound design questions. Of course sound reinforcement is a sound field that has mutual technical issues as sound design, however it never becomes an artistic issue (so far).

The focus of this website is blurred, with possibly any question regarding sound 'on topic'. This makes it an open invite to one stop shoppers that only drop a question here (and elsewhere) but don't help build the community. Having sound design and sound reinforcement together turns out to not exactly be helping getting a focus, it seems to me.