Sir – The organisers of the Oxford Jazz Festival took the very logical decision to base one of the main days of the festival in the Town Hall.

It is the ideal venue in many ways, it is central, has both large and small performance areas and a further space in the Assembly Rooms for people to collect information, meet up before and after performances and to enjoy refreshments supplied by the festival.

It was also a very brave decision as the Town Hall has notoriously bad acoustics. So bad that very few musical events of note take place there. This a very regrettable situation. If the city council look back at a feasibility study carried out, at considerable expense, some years ago by architects, Berman Gueddes Stretton, they will discover that the one part of this very ambitious plan that is perfectly affordable is the optimisation of the acoustics in the Town Hall’s main hall.

Nothing more than the use of curtaining along the sides and behind the stage to cut down the echo that makes musical performances presently so difficult to enjoy.

If this small alteration were to be made we would then have a desperately needed concert hall in the centre of the city from which the council could make a steady income in these austere times and music festivals would not have to scrabble around the city trying to find suitable venues. We know the council is never going to put up the money for a purpose-built concert hall, but a small investment could and should be made to vastly improve what they already have.

Paul Medley, Oxford