The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)
You can see a partial legacy of the "Wall of Sound" at most concerts today - vertical line array speakers.
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/line-arrays-explaine...
For the most part, each performer plugged into the "Wall of Sound" had their own vertical 1xN stack of drivers.
3 drivers in a vertical line away will have less distortion than 3 drivers in a horizontal array; the horizontal drivers will suffer from comb filtering for listeners who are not located dead center at the middle of the array. (This of course assumes your audience is dispersed horizontally as opposed to floating randomly in space)
Modern home loudspeakers hew to this philosophy as well to an extent. As opposed to big "monkey coffin" 70s speakers with a random array of drivers sprayed across the front of the speaker[1], modern tower speakers have a vertical array of 2 or more drivers whose centers are aligned in a vertical line[2].
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[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/BudgetAudiophile/comments/yburht/at...
[2] https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...
For those wanting to listen to free legal taped audio of Dead shows, head over to https://relisten.net/grateful-dead or install Relisten app for iOS. All fan supported and open source.
Th' Dead not only allowed taping, they encouraged it: at the shows I attended, there was invariably a small grove of microphones set up near the soundboard, in the middle of the audience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taper_(concert)
(a disadvantage to too much ethology reading: I can't remember "Bill Graham Presents" without thinking of baboon behaviour)
Dave Rat, of Rat Sound/RHCP/Bassnectar/etc fame, has some very interesting takes on the wall of sound idea using modern equipment.
The core of it is that speakers are bad at polyphony, so if you can avoid it, you can produce something that sounds more natural to human ears, and do so in a larger area. The way to avoid it is more speakers, more stacks/arrays/etc. You don't necessarily need an array per instrument, because modern loudspeaker arrays are indeed much better than they used to be, and modern loudspeaker processing fixes a multitude of problems.
Not be be confused with this other "Wall of Sound": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_Sound
Despite being an insane murderer, Phil Spector was a musical genius.
While the article is interesting, my god is it long and repetitive and winding.
Why does every blog try to write a novel. Please just mainline me information.
But wait, then there wouldnt be room for 700 ads
I remember chatting with a sound technician at a concert once and he told me that putting amplification in front of the performers only started happening in the late 60's (ish). Before that musicians were actually subjected to insane DB's by standing only a few meters in front of the amplification. (Don't take this is as fact, but this diagram suggests that he was correct)
For a somewhat different (more technical) perspective, look up Robert Heil, who died recently.[0]
I found this story [1] fascinating, and really enjoyed this interview [2] where he talks about working with Joe Walsh, a fellow amateur radio operator, and many others. He had a very midwestern modesty.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39573756
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111005221916/http://www.perfor...
Bose sells line array speakers that will happily work if placed behind a standard mic. They are using anti-feedback DSPs to cancel the audio loop this creates. They can be used in a speaker per performer setup.
What is weird is that they don't talk about this. There is a graphic on products that can do this that show the speaker behind the mic. That's it, no text at all. I think the moral of this story is that marketing is weirder than engineering...
Don't care about the grateful dead? Me neither. What you might like instead (as I certainly did) is this one-sided collection of endless forum posts from Stanley about his all meat diet: https://justmeat.co/archives/active-low-carber-forum-posts/
Mandatory comic: http://www.stirlingaudioservices.com/realitycheck.gif
This image, addressing concert PA arrangements, has been floating around for decades, highly influenced by the GD setups.
Am I the only one here to have actually heard the Wall of Sound? I attended two of the 1974 concerts where it was used, at UCSB in the spring and at the Hollywood Bowl in the summer. I was seventeen. I had also attended two shows at Winterland in February, where apparently some the components of the Wall of Sound were used before the full system was rolled out the following month.
One should not, of course, trust fifty-year-old memories, especially about something so subjective as sound quality. But, for what it’s worth, my recollection of the Hollywood Bowl in particular is very positive—clear, solid sound with distinct separation of the instruments, while not so loud that my ears rang afterwards (as they did after other rock concerts I attended in those days, until I started wearing earplugs to protect my hearing).
i found this Wired youtube video pretty similar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c-gD4mwI8A
sound engineer that worked on coachella and they talk about the switch to vertical stacks of speakers
The diagram in the story reminded me of the band Sunn O))) and their stage set up. Certainly a far-flung relation in the same lineage.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/pjeq4/...
Alembic Inc. still exists .
Google Maps indicates it moved from Santa Rosa to Rohnert Park.
Rolling Stone article from a decade ago: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/dead-wood-is-t...
love how i checked HN with 5/28/77's Sugaree playing and come upon this post! love how today you can still see Bear's influence on venues across the world w.r.t the sound setup. here's to Dead&Co's Sphere run, it ain't the same of course but the music never stops (~);)
Web designers really, really need to stop putting light grey text on a white background. Good article though.
Informative article and a good read, although the author clearly has no idea how commas are supposed to work. I had to re-read the very first sentence multiple times to make sense of it, and there were plenty more comma errors throughout the article.
Disappointed that the components were not included in the article. I want to say they used McIntosh hifi amps that were 300 watts per channel. I’m not completely sure however.
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The most incredible sound system to hear a band play out of tune and out of key for 90 minutes.
Article doesn't mention one of the more interesting (to me) aspects which was how feedback was avoided. The solution is elegant: each vocal microphone is doubled, meaning there are two at each position. The phase is inverted on one of them, the singer sings into only one, and both are sent to the speakers via their channel's amp.
The effect of that setup is that only the difference between the two microphones is amplified; common signal in both (i.e. the sound coming out of the speakers) is nulled out, but the difference signal (the voice) makes it through. It apparently wasn't quite perfect but was absolutely a lot better than wailing feedback.
The thing that made it sound so good was that any given speaker only reproduces a single source, but the article touches on that. The mic arrangement I described is simply what makes it possible.