Why did rock concert sound suck, and why is it better?

Cafe Society
1

When I was a wee lad in the 70’s & 80’s, concert sound at big rock shows was hugely dicey, and pretty much sucked at most venues unless you were at a smaller, smarter venue or just damned lucky to pick someplace where the band and the PA operator “clicked” in a good way. Stadium concerts were the absolute pits. Why?

I haven’t seen much live music in the last 10 years, but when I have I’ve been enormously impressed with how well a large venue of the kind that sounded like utter crap 30 years ago sounds really damned good. What changed, and why, and when, to make this happen?

Rephrased: back in the day, a rock band would paste a bunch of Marshall stacks and similar, hundreds of watts of beefy amplification, on the back line as their main guitar/bass sound, and the PA was for vocals/drums. Why is that no longer necessary, and why was it necessary back when?

Is the difference purely better trained sound engineers at the venues, or a technical limitation that’s been overcome to make that no longer necessary, or something else?

2

Several reasons.

First, the equipment used is vastly better. The speakers we used back then were basically piled-up experiments. We’d try different things, but we didn’t really have the test equipment to do proper experimentation. Every sound company basically built their own speaker cabinets, or bought random components from various manufacturers - EV bass, JBL horns, etc.

Current speakers are supplied by manufacturers as complete systems. The handful of sound companies that build their own are so large that they qualify as manufacturers (Clair/Showco). Pretty much a tour can specify a particular speaker system and be able to get exactly what they wish anywhere in the world. And that speaker system is vastly more reliable, as well as vastly more efficient. The days of 20 trucks hauling speakers, staging and lights are long gone. The speakers to do an arena these days are expected to fit on the raised floor portion of a single trailer, aka the “dance floor”.

Oh, and the speakers are far more controllable. During the show, you might notice someone wandering around with a tablet. They are tweaking levels of different speakers in the stacks. It is no longer necessary to blast the folks in the front to reach the folks in the rear - the speakers intended for them are blasting away far above their heads.

Second, in-ear monitors. These are really high-zoot earphones custom molded for the wearer (that can cost upwards of $1000 a pair). These replace the stage monitors. The advantage is that by putting the sound directly into the ear of the performers, they are able to hear themselves and the rest of the band much more clearly. Also, the stage monitors would have to be loud enough to overpower the sound of the main speaker system echoing back to the stage. That set a minimum level of the sound system. With the whole band on IEMs, the stage gets dramatically quieter. Oh, and by the way? Those piles of guitar amps were bullshit. Ted Nugent had fake amps made, and only one pair was real - it was the one that had a microphone on it. The current trend is to lower the noise level on the stage even more by locating the guitar and bass amps in sealed boxes off stage, unless the player uses feedback and needs the cabinet there to play off.

Third, mixing boards have improved even more than the speakers. Virtually all tours use digital mixing boards that allow the sound engineer to save and recall any changes to the board settings. They’ll even record every track of every show to a computer, and play back last night’s show to tweek the sound system - the band is not even needed except to make sure they are happy with their instruments. And the board has vastly more adjustment power than any sound company had back in the day. If you wanted a compressor to control the dynamics of a channel, you had to wire one up. But a new digital board has compressors on every channel that are far better than we could carry. If the engineer has a specific one they prefer, they can buy a software version of it that loads into the board. No loose screws, no ground loops, no bad capacitors.

There are many other things. Digital “snakes” so the tiny voltage coming from the microphones don’t have to travel hundreds of feet to the back of the room. Vastly improved monitor mixing systems so the musicians can hear each other better (which usually means they play better together).

I’m sure there are plenty of others, but it’s late.

3

Awesome post, Gaffa, thanks!

I’m using received wisdom, but I’m pretty sure The Who etc really did have multi-amp stacks on the back line. Am I really that mistaken? When did the fake-amp-schism start, and who got busted first for using cardboard/playschool amps?

4

Great post, gaffa. Let me add something to your list:

Delay speakers. These are small clusters of speakers set back every 30m (100’) or so. Each set of speakers is hooked up to equipment that controls when the speaker reproduces a certain moments sound so that everyone in the crowd hears things at the same time. This also reduces slapback, since the amps don’t all have to be cranked to earsplitting levels in an attempt to move all the air at once. It makes thing sound much clearer at much lower volume. I mean, it’s still loud, but not because it simply has to be.

5

No to mention that, thanks to computers, a show’s sound can be customized to the venue (sometimes months in advance, if the venue’s acoustic signature is known).

6

adding convolution and Realtime Adaptive EQ to the list.

Before the event, convolution testing allows you to model acoustic reflections in the venue, to allow suitable compensation/damping. You pulse the sound system with a burst of noise and monitor the result within the venue - this allows EQ, phase and reverb to be tuned for a better average response for the audience. You can use the standard venue acoustic signature (as lawoot notes above), but you can gather that detail during setup/sound check.

You can monitor the sound within the venue at a variety of points during the performance, and compare that to the mixed output from the desk - the EQ then adjusts to compensate for the environmental factors (as the audience arrives the bodies tend to reduce bass, for example).

With modern digital signal processing equipment, the sound is so much better than it was in the past. I heard the sound engineer for a well regarded christian rock band give a talk - he said that with wireless kit, in-ear monitors and drum shields up, the band members (apart from the drummer) could talk normally to each other during a full on performance. It all helps.

7

Wow, you guys know your stuff!

I guess I’ve been lucky. I can’t recall any sucky sound at any paid event I’ve attended. Even the really cheap ones. So, thanks to the pros for being good at your jobs.

Now, some FREE ones, like at a fair or something, I have wondered why do they hate me? For some of those, I wonder how good could they be even if they tried, what with cheap stages, traffic behind them, and a lack of good power options? Any thoughts?

8

They may have been real and may even have been plugged in, but they were not likely to be audible in the back of the venue. A wall o’Marshalls may be there for show, for the player’s ego or a vital part of his “tone”, but it has bupkiss to do with what the audience hears. I saw Ted’s fake amps when I was working on the AFRTS simulcast of his show from Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City in 1979.

The tours I saw that broke new ground back in the day were the ELO “Out Of The Blue” tour, which was the first time a tour hung their speaker systems. Previous to that, speakers were piled up on scaffolding on either side of the stage. Hanging them not only gave better sight-lines, it produced more controllable bass, better vocal clarity and more even levels for the whole audience.

The first time I ever heard a PA that was really “high fidelity” was when Yes played Kansas City’s Kemper Arena in 1978. The sound system was by Clair Brothers, and it let me know how good concert sound could be. Clair built their own mixing boards and speakers and heavily hot-rodded their amplifiers.

9

Gaffa, I attended that concert and agree with you that the sound system was memorable.

I was looking forward to a repeat performance in 1979 but Kemper’s roof collapsed before the scheduled concert date and cancelled the performance.

What I can’t remember in my old age is whether the 78 performance was in the round or if that configuration came later in the 80’s.

10

And my earworm for this morning: Telephone Line

:cool:

11

Another reason is the recent (past five years or so) development of line-array speaker systems.

Back in the day, there would be huge stacks of identical speakers all throwing the same energy and pattern of sound into the room. They weren’t very precise, the idea was just to throw as much sound pressure into the room as possible. If you were in front of the speakers you got pummeled with sound, while in the back of the room, you’d get whatever leftovers weren’t absorbed or reflected by the fans in front of you. There’d usually be a “sweet spot” in the room right in front of the mixing console where it would sound ok.

Line array speakers each have a specific throw pattern (long, medium, short) so that the room is filled more evenly. In the front of the room, you’d hear only the speakers aimed at you, same for the middle, and for the rear. While the sound isn’t perfectly uniform, the “sweet spot” has been broadened to include much more of the room than before.

12

As an example of this I offer My Bloody Valentine. They always play loud, but the last time I saw them, in the same venue I saw them many years before, the sound was both incredibly loud and pin sharp. Before it was just an overwhelming bludgeoning wall of noise (nothing wrong with that, mind), but that last time it was a much more focussed racket, and loud to a degree I didn’t even know existed. Is that the speakers you mention?

13

Phil Lesh’s autobiography - appropriately titled Searching for the Sound - talks about the Dead’s continual frustration with concert amplifiers until they developed the Wall of Sound for the 1974 tour. It was way ahead of its time and also almost impossible to tour with at the time. The sound was perfect but the need for continual touring to huge stadiums to pay for it and the multiple techs required to keep it going almost killed the group.

14

At the time, I was working selling T-shirts and programs at the concert, so I got to see the whole thing get set up and tested. It also featured the first computerized lighting system I had ever seen. As the stage was rotating and the lights were not, the lights were constantly cross-fading from one of the six identical lighting rig sections to the next to follow the musicians. I seem to remember that the sections had alphabetical women’s names - Alice, Betty, etc.

September 27, 1978 from this search. It was a neat setup.

Now this was a long time before reliable wireless microphones, so every one of the microphones on stage was plugged into a snake - a heavy, thick gray cable containing as many as 36 individually shielded wires for different microphones. That means that down below the rotating stage, some poor schmoe spent the whole show un-coiling then re-coiling the microphone snake from around the spindle of the stage. I remember distinctly that the stage reversed rotation direction halfway through the show.

This was the console they were using for the show. It folded up.

15

I never heard it, but while the concepts behind it were interesting, there are good, solid reasons why nobody has ever bothered to duplicate it. I seriously doubt that, could it be reassembled, that it would be a match for any standard system of today.

16

No doubt. I referenced it because it seemed to fit the historical nature of the OP, especially the stadium concert bit. And I wanted to recommend the book for those who were interested in the history of better sound, although it’s a very small part of the book.

17

It’s been referenced in other books on sound system design, but as someone who worked in the field, it was an example of parallel evolution, a bizarre evolutionary cul de sac. The only thing that uses their ideas is the Bose L1 system.

18

I doubt that most of the stacked amps I have seen are cardboard - unless of course the musicians are trained in adjusting their fake amplifiers throughout the show just to keep up the illusion.

19

Huge YES fan here. I have an off of the sound board recording of that tour, from the LA Forum concert in 1978. It was the Going For The One tour, in the round. The Tormato tour in 1979 was also in the round.

Nearly lost the LP to warping. Learned how to unwarp an LP without damaging the vinyl. It held just long enough to record and digitize it.

Remarkable show. :slight_smile:

ETA: One of the few tours where they broke tradition and did not open with the closing measure of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. Instead they used Benjamin Britton’s A Young Person’s Guide To The Orchestra.

20

During that period, I saw every rock concert that happened at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium, Kemper Arena and Municipal Auditorium. The Yes show was one of the ones that impressed me the most, along with the ELO Out of the Blue spaceship and the Who. One of the coolest experiences I’ve had was hearing the tape of the keyboard parts of Baba O’Reilly and Won’t Get Fooled Again being played at concert level in a completely empty Kemper Arena.