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- [00:00]
Alan Cross
Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music. Early and ad free on Amazon. Music included with prime at the Home Depot.
- [00:11]
Home Depot Announcer
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Audience Member 1
This is awful.
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Audience Member 2
Who's running the sound for these guys?
- [00:49]
Audience Member 1
That guy over there.
- [00:51]
Audience Member 2
What?
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Audience Member 1
The one passed out on the mixing board?
- [00:54]
Audience Member 2
Can't anyone tell? It's too loud and everything's distorted. I can't even tell what song they're playing.
- [00:59]
Audience Member 1
What? I'm trying to figure out what song they're playing.
- [01:04]
Audience Member 2
I think the technology could have reached the point where music can be loud and clear.
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Audience Member 1
What crowd?
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Alan Cross
Beer.
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Audience Member 2
Loud and clear.
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Audience Member 1
Sorry, I've gone deaf.
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Audience Member 2
Deaf? Nah, I haven't seen him.
- [01:20]
Audience Member 1
Damn. He's over at the bar.
- [01:22]
Audience Member 2
Oh, that's it. I'm going home. I'm going home. I'm not coming back until they invent a better sound system. One that doesn't sound like crap rap.
- [01:34]
Audience Member 1
This is a rock show, isn't it? I think. God, this sound is bad. Why doesn't somebody do something about it?
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Audience Member 2
Yeah, you know what? Why doesn't someone do something about it?
- [01:49]
Podcast Announcer
This is the ongoing History of New Music Podcast with Alan Cross.
- [01:55]
Alan Cross
Hello again, I'm Alan Cross. We've all been to shows where the sound has been awful. In fact, I remember exactly the worst concert I ever went to. It was Sunday, Aug. 30, 1978, at the Winnipeg Arena. The headliner was Aerosmith. The opener was AC DC with Bon Scott on lead vocals. That should have been awesome. But it wasn't. The whole night sounded something like this. For more than two and a half hours, 11,000 people were exposed to that blare of distortion. It was so bad that when Aerosmith came on, you couldn't recognize any of the songs. Seriously, people around me were going, are they playing Walk this Way or is that Walking the Dog? I can't tell. Worst concert sound ever. I've never forgotten it. I had some kind of epiphany that night. Why did live sound have to be so Bad. What were the roadies thinking? What was the band thinking? Why subject your most loyal fans to such sonic crud? From that point on, I became a critic of concert sound. I started learning about speaker cabinets and amplifiers, crossovers, subs, monitors, feedback, acoustics, sound pressure levels, the whole works. Today, concert sound is a whole lot better than it used to be. There were still audio disasters that happen, but you've probably also been to shows where the sound has been unbelievably excellent. And once we're done here, I think you'll have a new appreciation of just how difficult making an artist sound good in a live setting can really be. We need to start at the very beginning. And at the beginning, there were no PA systems. You needed to rely on what you knew about acoustics and natural amplification. Some archaeologists think that part of the design of Stonehenge involved creating something that would naturally amplify music and chanting. The Greeks and Romans were into public performances. They built large amphitheaters, which they discovered work better for acoustics if you draped a tent over the top to keep the sound in. The Roman Colosseum had such a tent. Gothic cathedrals were all about acoustics. Stone reflects about 98% of all sound that hits it. So these churches were very echoey, which resulted in music like this. The long notes took advantage of the natural amplification and reverberation of these structures. This also explains why Mass was chanted instead of spoken. Hearing intelligible human speech is pretty much impossible in a Gothic cathedral. Reverb time could be three seconds or more in some of these places. And have you ever wondered why opera singers sing like this? No mics or amps. They needed to project to vast crowds, which is also where the design of opera houses came in. You needed buildings that allowed the natural sound from the stage to flow back over the audience, who were seated in multiple levels. The first true sound guy was Gaspar P. Chotto. He wrote a book on acoustics called Magave Universalis in 1657. And as far as anybody can tell, he's the first guy who took the behavior of sound seriously. He was especially interested in the distribution of sound and how that worked. He took some of the notions of the ancient Greeks and Romans and looked at how sound was amplified and collected and reflected and how it flowed through spaces of different sizes and shapes. As for musicians and performers, well, if you needed to be heard more by a larger crowd in a bigger venue, you had two choices. You either A played harder and thus louder, or B, added More people to your band. Why do you think symphony orchestras grew so large? If you were a singer? Well, you just had to sing louder, like an opera singer. Which explains the techniques used by vaudeville performers. Amplifiers started coming along in the 1920s, but they were primitive things that really didn't have a lot of power. They were reserved mostly for vocalists. And as more people got into big band music, the bands obviously got bigger, partly to pump up the volume for all the people that came to see them. But after World War II, it became awfully expensive to maintain a big big band. So the trend was towards smaller combos of four and five people, and everybody was back to playing harder in order to be heard. This explains the surge in the popularity of the saxophone, which could be heard above the dining. It also addresses drummers and the structural changes to their kits. It also affected the music, how it was written and how it was performed. The beat became bigger and more important, had to be heard over the crowd radio DJ Alan Freed held his Moondog Coronation Ball in Cleveland on March 21, 1952. That is considered to be the first ever rock concert. And the sound was awful. First of all, thousands of screaming kids trying to hear bands who had almost no sound reinforcement. They had their instruments, they had their mics, a few amplifiers on stage, and that was it for the 50s and 60s. There was no such thing as a proper concert sound system. All most people had was a combination mixer amp powering two PA columns on either side of the stage, each containing two 12 inch speakers. That was standard. The columns weren't much bigger than standard guitar amps, and frankly, they weren't very loud or clear. But this wasn't just a problem for bands playing in clubs. When the Beatles played Shea Stadium in August 1965, there was still no proper concert sound for the place. They set up on a small stage and using a bunch of mics and a couple of 100 watt Vox amplifiers, they pumped everything through the stadium's public address system. The same speakers announcers used to tell you who was coming up to bat. It was terrible. Something had to be done. Let's take a moment to listen to some live concert sound. I figured this program gives us an excuse to play a bunch of live tracks. So let's drop in some Foo Fighters. Why foo Fighters from 2013? I'll periodically drop in some live tracks as we continue to explore the history of concert sound. Makes sense, right? Okay, where was I? Oh, Beatles. Shea Stadium, August 15, 1965. Not only could the Beatles not be heard that night, they Couldn't even hear themselves. As a last second fix, one of the road crew flipped over some of their amplifiers and pointed them directly at the band. It was the only way that they could make it through the show. It was a terrible experience and the Beatles were miserable. A year later, they played their last proper live gig and they never toured again. Clearly, with rock crowds getting bigger and with the demands of playing bigger venues and all the money that was at stake, something had to be done about the sound at concerts. Now here's the problem. To make this work, you have to amplify the small sound sources on a stage to reach large numbers of people in a large space with maximum realism and minimum distortion. That's it in a nutshell. And that is hard. The Beach Boys were one of the first to try to do something about it. In 1963, they contacted Sun Electronics and asked them to build what would become the first large scale sound system for use in a rock concert environment. Then Herb Alpert and the Tijuana brass contracted Harry McCune Sound Systems for their 1965 tour. That seems to be the second concert sound system, but that was about it. Most manufacturers of sound reinforcement equipment were very traditional, very conservative. Oh, sure, they would sell you something for your jazz club or your gospel group or your country group, but for rock and roll, never. Some manufacturers even warned that turning their gear up too loud would void the warranties. This was a ploy to keep their stuff from being used by those who played the music of the devil. The first truly massive music event requiring extra special sound reinforcement was the Monterey International pop festival in June 1967 in San Francisco. It wasn't pretty and it sounded pretty bad. Amplifiers and speaker boxes cobbled together to reach more than 90,000 people. But it was a start. It was like, hey, you know what? There could be more of these big festivals. We maybe should invent something that would make them sound good. And if we do that, we'll make a lot of money. This is where we encounter Bill Hanley, the so called father of festival sound. He'd worked on the PA for Lyndon Johnson's presidential inauguration in 1965 and was part of the sound team for several Richard Nixon campaign rallies leading up to the 1968 election. When it was announced that there was going to be a massive concert in Woodstock, New York in August 1969, organizers called Hanley. Using what he learned working for Nixon, he made sure that all the hippies could hear what was happening on stage. He designed, built and operated everything during those three days. Plus, he was in charge of engineering the audio recording for what would become the soundtrack to the Woodstock movie. He got an Academy Award nomination for that and he made almost no money. Big strides, yes. But while this system and the new PA systems that followed were quite loud, they weren't very efficient. They required a lot of power to drive them, and they still didn't sound very good. There was little realism in what they delivered during this period, which honestly consisted. Most of the 1970s concert sound systems consisted of horizontal piles of black speaker boxes on either side of the stage. The boxes were aimed haphazardly with little regard to the acoustics of the venue for stereo images or anything that actually might make the show sound better. The attitude was make it loud enough and nobody's gonna care. Let's pause again for another live recording. Here's the Arcade Fire live at an event called fashion rocks in 2005. Mark gave fire, with help from David Bowie at fashion rocks in 2005. All right, let's go back to Bill Hanley for a moment. He became obsessed with making concert sound systems better for both the audience and for the performer. Hanley was the first guy to hoist speaker cabinets from the rafters using chain driven electric motors. This freed up more performance space on the stage and allowed the music to flow out over the crowd rather than down into it. Hanley was the first to employ directional microphones like the Shure SM58 which was introduced in 1966. Mics like that greatly cut down on distortion and feedback. And Hanley was the first to employ those wedge shaped monitor speakers that fired the music back at the performers so they could actually hear what was happening on stage and not get confused by any echoes from the main PA coming back at them. He was inspired by what the Beatles sound guy did at Chase stadium back in 65. Plus speaker and amplifier and mixing board manufacturers were wising up. The rock. Touring business was big and getting bigger. The demand for loud, clear and durable equipment was exploding. Companies like Altec, jbl, Sun, Macintosh and Crown got it. A lot of this could be attributed to the pickiness of the musicians. Artists like Santana and Frank Zappa and the Eagles demanded that they sound good on stage. And this is where we encounter the Grateful Dead. They, or rather their sound people, took us on the next great leap forward. In 1972, the band gathered for a routine meeting in their warehouse practice space in Nevada, California. One of the things they discussed was the band's concert sound, something that many in the organization found to be inadequate. They'd been using a system designed by a guy named Bob Hile in 1968, using some Altec cabinets. This was their famous Voice of the Theater series. Along with some radial horns, which was a first for anyone, some ring tweeters, and then had a custom built crossover to make sure that the right frequencies were routed to the right speakers. It was fine. It was better than most, but like I said, it was lacking by 1972. So they brainstormed about things. Over the next year, their crew experimented with PA gear led by a former ballet dancer from Kentucky turned LSD drug dealer named Owsley Bear Stanley. The result was revealed in 1973. It weighed 75 tons. It stood three stories tall and was 100ft wide. It took four semis and 21 people to transport all this gear from gig to gig. And they called it the Wall of Sound. The wall contained hundreds of speakers, 568 JBLs and and about 50 ElectroVoice tweeters to be specific, along with amplifiers, mostly Macintosh tube amps, pumping out something around 26,000 watts, which was absolutely insane for its day. The vocals went through one set, while all the instrumentation went through all sorts of other speakers. The speakers were stacked in what was known as line arrays. Up and down, collections of speakers all pointing in the same direction and a slight different direction from the neighboring column so that the sound would be dispersed more evenly. It was so loud and so clear that it sounded great at a quarter of a mile. After that, the wind began to interfere, but at the time, that was incredible. The Wall made its debut at the Cow palace in San Francisco on March 23, 1974. Within a year, though, it proved to be too expensive and the band had it dismantled. But once people saw what had been done well, there was just no going back. Time for more live music. Here's Sam Roberts. Sam Roberts live in Montreal.
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Audience Member 1
Thank you.
- [17:08]
Alan Cross
When we come back, more on the development of the concert sound system. Where did things go in the 1970s and 80s? That's next. We're tracing the development of concert sound systems, the gear we all hear when we go to gigs. It's been a long, long trip. By the time we got to the 1970s, the size and number of concert tours had multiplied exponentially. Artists and audiences demanded bigger and more impressive stage presentations. New skills were needed to build and operate massive sound systems. Most still covered hundreds of square feet on stages. I've heard them described as piled up experiments, hand built systems that weren't really properly tested for performance before being sent out on the road. Companies who supplied such gear often used a mix and match approach, using random components from a variety of manufacturers. Not good, really, but it was all a big work in progress for everyone. But to performers like David Bowie and yes and Supertramp, getting concert sound right was very, very important. So they pushed sound companies to get better. Another new trick was quadrophonic sound. Pink Floyd were pioneers at that. This meant more sets of speakers, front, left, and right, and rear, left and right. And then for outdoor festivals, we began to see delay towers. These were secondary sets of speakers placed where the sound from the primary speakers began to weaken. This meant that people near the back of the field could hear almost as good as those near the stage. And it also meant that the sound you heard matched up with what the performers were doing on stage. That fixed the old problem of those who were far back seeing something on stage happen before they heard it. Sound travels slower than light, right? So delay towers fixed that. But more and more of these speaker systems were being hung from scaffolding or the roof. This would become the trend of the future, and it's something that we see today. The trick was to hang them just right. PA techs learned that organizing speakers into semicyndrical vertical clusters produced the best results. It was better, but still not anywhere near to being perfect. People were still learning about the physics of sound. When it came to arenas and stadiums and fields, each presented its own problems and challenges. It took until the 1980s for there to be a major change, and these changes related directly to speaker arrays hanging above the audience. Companies began to match speaker components properly. Amplifiers got better and cheaper. And on the road, techs began to finally get it when it came to how sound actually worked in a building full of people. When you turned everything up, here's something that you may not have realized. Plenty of shows are not mixed in stereo. They're mixed in mono. This is because sound that seems to come from a single source has less distortion. Less distortion means better fidelity, so you can't have stereo. But if it means better sound. By the middle 1980s, almost everyone was moving their sound systems from the floor to the ceiling. Some were set up on either side of the stage, while others preferred an evenly distributed approach from side to side above the front of the stage. Both sound setups meant more room for stage setups, transforming the spectacle of the rock show even more. Hey, remember those semi cylindrical clusters I mentioned earlier and how they were a thing for a while, but it was soon discovered that you could only make these things so big before an unacceptable amount of distortion set in. Hang on to that thought, we'll get back to it later. But despite hanging these things from the ceiling, the stage still could be a crowded place. In addition to all the instruments and props, musicians still needed to hear themselves in real time and not any echo coming back from the venue. That was the purpose of those wedge shaped speakers on the floor that pointed back at them. Some setups also had side fill monitors, big speakers on either side of the stage pointing towards the middle. So there would be no place you could go on stage without hearing yourself. Now all these monitors had to overpower the sound of the main pa, which meant that the stage needed to be a very, very, very, very, very loud place. No wonder so many musicians went. Oasis, a band that liked to play very, very loud. Oh, which reminds me, what's the loudest a band has ever played? For the longest time, the record went to the who. On May 31, 1976, they were clocked at 126 decibels at a show in London. That's right in the area where pain begins. Later, it was claimed that Motorhead hit 130 decibels in 1986. That gig actually caused structural damage to the Variety Theater in Cleveland. Oh, and speaking of damage, the electronica band Left Field caused plaster from the roof of the Brixton Academy to fall when they were clocked at 137 decibels. That's like standing next to a jet aircraft at full thrust. But still not the loudest. The loudest band ever measured hit 140 decibels 1998. Would you like to guess who? No, you're, you're wrong. That's when Hanson, yes, Hanson pegged a decibel meter. They may have been even louder, but the meter didn't go any higher than 140. That's not just turned up to 11, that's like 21. And by the way, Marshall once sold an amp with the volume control. Went from 0 to. To 20. Just saying, we're looking at the history of those sound systems that we see and hear when we go to concerts. We're now up to the 1990s. This is where things began to get really scientific. The big development was line source systems. These are single rows of speakers hanging from the rigging of the rafters. And it's actually the oldest kind of PA system setup. But up until the 1990s, speakers and amplifiers weren't efficient enough to drive the kind of sound that was required for a large crowd. But by the 1990s powerful amps were easier to find and were much, much cheaper. And companies figured out efficient and safe ways of hanging these speaker arrays. They were easy and quick to set up and easy and quick to tear down. So great. We finally have excellent concert sound. Well, no. The concert industry had long come to the conclusion that a certain level was good enough for the audience. After decades of being subjected to poor concert sound, most people expected the sound to be reasonably lousy and distorted. Now, there do remain exceptions, of course. The best sound I ever heard at an outdoor concert was Pink Floyd main man Roger Waters, who took his Radio Chaos tour on the road in 1987. That was the cleanest, purest sound I'd ever heard of a concert. Not even a buzz from the pa. The other awesomely great concert sound I've heard was craftwork, both in 2004 and 2014. It'll be hard to convey this through the radio, but trust me, it was like listening to an extremely good stereo system. Here they are live in Stockholm. You'll see what I mean. Kraftwerk live in Stockholm. They've always taken amazing care when it comes to their live sound. As the 1990s passed, the up and down line arrays developed a slight curve. This allowed for more clear, more focused sound without the kind of interference found in earlier systems. Because of their highly directional nature, little amplifier power is wasted. Broadcasting sound to the ceiling or the walls or the space above the heads of the audience. This technology is now dominant throughout the concert industry. And remember those wedge shaped monitors and side fill speakers for performers? They've largely disappeared and have been replaced by what are essentially earbuds. If you look closely, you'll see performers wearing something that looks like a hearing aid in both ears. That's how they hear their personal mix of vocals and instrumentation. While they perform these wireless in ear monitors shut out all the extraneous noise, tone down the volume, and allow them to hear exactly what they need to hear without blowing out their eardrums. The inventor was a guy named Jerry Harvey, a sound engineer who worked with Van Halen. When drummer Alex Van Halen started to complain that the constant onstage volume was killing his hearing, Jerry decided to do something about it. He sourced some tiny components from Japan, including a speaker that was originally designed for a Hart pacemaker. Everything was fitted to Alex Van Halen's ears with wires leading down to a transceiver on his belt. They worked perfectly. So well that Jerry founded a new company called Ultimate Ears and started making these things for everyone. They cost between 700 and $900 a pair. But it wasn't the cost that scared people away. Jerry had a hard time convincing performers that, no, no, no, it's not going to look like you're wearing hearing aids. That's actually going to help you. Usually though, when a performer tried out a set, the difference was so dramatic that they never went back to using stage monitors ever again. Ultimate Ears and similar systems really started showing up around 2000 and were originally called something like ear worn monitors or something similar. One complaint was that these devices cut down on crowd noise, something that performers felt they needed to hear, but that can be fixed. Next time you go to a show, look for a couple of microphones on or near the stage, pointing out towards the audience. They pick up your cheering and they cycle it into the earpieces of the performers. That's how they know you're having a good time. Meanwhile, Jerry Harvey is doing very, very, very well with his in ear monitor company. If you see the name JH Audio anywhere, this is who we're talking about. Every Muse live at Wembley Stadium. Matt Bellamy couldn't possibly run around as much as he does without in ear monitors. And that is a short history of concert sound. We'll revisit this topic sometime in the future when we'll talk about such things as backing tracks and the various systems the bands take with them. On the meanwhile, we really do need to keep in touch. You can email me anytime@allinalencross ca. I would love if you could check out my website, which is ajournalofmusicalthings.com There's a newsletter that goes with it every weekday, which you should sign up for. It's absolutely free and it always comes with good stuff. Plus there's always Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Google. I do all that. And like I said, I would love to connect. Tactical Productions by Kyle Taylor. Talk to you next time. I'm Alan Cross.
- [28:45]
Podcast Announcer
You've been listening to the ongoing History of New Music podcast with Alan Cross. Subscribe to the podcast through itunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, and everywhere you find your favorite podcasts.
- [29:03]
Alan Cross
Something terrible has been happening to all the people I've slept with.
- [29:06]
W Network Announcer
New on W Network.
- [29:08]
Alan Cross
It's me. I'm killing people.
- [29:10]
W Network Announcer
Breakups.
- [29:10]
Alan Cross
They died in the order you slept with them.
- [29:13]
W Network Announcer
To die for.
- [29:14]
Alan Cross
Your life is in danger. What?
- [29:16]
Audience Member 1
What?
- [29:16]
Alan Cross
Jesus. I will solve this.
- [29:19]
W Network Announcer
Starring Academy Award nominee Stephanie Shue.
- [29:22]
Alan Cross
Dating is already impossible and now people are dying. It's like, can you. I cannot.
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Laid All New Mondays only on W Stream on Stack tv.