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JCurl, any corrections would be even more fun to read.
God, those guys were the best.
rhyno
Follow Ups:
Thanks for the post, a good read and history. I am in my 50's and have been to a few dead concerts at the Garden in the late 70's and 80's. Don't know if it was the sound system or Acid, but they sounded great.
The only thing that caught my attention in the article is that the MC2300 are Solid State not tubes. I don't know of the MC3500?
That is Correct, the 2300 was SS, the MC3500 was all tooby, a 350 watt mono bloc. In the early 70's everyone was getting out of their Mc3500's for 2300's you could purchase a mono bloc Pr for less than( I did) one stereo 2300 , a lot less, if you heard the difference you would die. JC had explained to me it was about reliability, they could never get the SS to sound like the MC3500 tooby's, obvious if you compared the two.
Regards...
The WOS was only used for a short time - too labor intensive and expensive. Late 70s/early 80s would have been something else, maybe a Meyer system.
:)
In my opinion, one of the critical, and possibly the most important, factors which made the "wall of sound" concept possible was the microphone setup designed by John Curl. Without it, feedback would have been a constant and overwhelming problem. The vocal mics consisted of two matched B&K omnidirectional precision measurement microphones, spaced a more-or-less ideal distance apart vertically, going into a differential summing amplifier, with a control for the musician to control his volume level, all designed by John Curl.
It's both funny and sad to read comments on various audio forums where people take guesses at why there were two mics. One of my favorite moronic posts (on gearslutz.com) is that one mic was used for the main PA, and the other was used for the monitors. LOL
:)
I worked on the differential mikes, but I did not invent the concept or its final construction. Ron Wickersham did most of the final construction.
You're too modest, John.Everyone knows that you designed the entire WOS one day during lunch.
Thanks for the correction.
:)
Edits: 07/16/15
Yes... let's!
;-)
too bad the WoS was chockablock with JBL & EV drivers -- I think that the acid must've cooked their collective brains in the interim...
(I'm kidding! Honest I am... well, mostly)
all the best,
mrh
You put that phrase in quotation marks, as if you're quoting someone. But, you're the only person who wrote the phrase.
"(I'm kidding! Honest I am... well, mostly)".
Now, I AM quoting YOU. Which part were you NOT kidding about?
in context:
""There was no technology for electric instruments," Lesh told Rolling Stone in 2011. "We started talking about how to get around distortion and get a pure musical tone. [Bear] did some research and said, 'Let's use Altec speakers and hi-fi amps and four-tube-amps, one for each instrument, and put them on a piece of wood.' Three months later we were playing through Bear's sound system.""
... but in fact, Bear and the Dead moved away from the Altecs pretty quickly -- and (as the article notes) the drivers used in the WoS were JBL and EV. I attributed the switch to acid burn-out, facetiously, because I am an Altec fanboy and rather less so of the other two marques.
There's a good book on the Dead's gear (instruments and electronics) that is cogent to this thread. I recommend it.
all the best,
mrh
Was never a big fan of EV stuff , JBL yes , Altec , was OK , but nothing like JBL ....,
The E-V T350 tweeters that they used are killer.
I use them in my current speakers, and dread the day when one of them fails.
:)
...back in about 1971 when I was in college there was a speaker company in Boulder that used E-V drivers and their crossovers.
A buddy of mine and I listened to them and really liked the 3-way but couldn't afford them.
We discovered they sold the drivers and crossovers in kits so we went in and took measurements of their cut-away speaker cabinet on display.
My buddy built a pair in my basement and they sounded pretty good.
Ah, I see. Sorry, I've read and have been told so much about the WOS that I only skimmed the article and read pieces of it in detail.
If I can find the printed article from 2-3 decades ago, I'll scan it and post it.
:)
Thanks for the link , JC had talked about his dead days to lenght before , truly interesting times ..
Regards
Interesting article.
I heard the Dead play once through that PA. It was in the old Charlotte Coliseum (now Bojangles arena) sometime in the early 70's.
I though it sounded awful. The balance was good, but halfway back into the room, the vocals were lost in a sea of reverberation.
It was one of the events that got me into the live sound business. I knew I could do better. Later, I got lots of experiences mixing in that room. I got to find out what they were dealing with. It truly is an awful room, made for basketball and not music. The only descent results I have gotten in that room have been with acts that played at very low volumes.
I'm glad to read that you 'came around' from your initial comment that it sounded awful, and realized that the problem is the room. There's not a lot that a sound system designer can do except try to control the speaker directivity and put as much of the sound as possible into the audience instead of all over the walls and ceiling. Humans are good wideband absorbers.For ANY band which tours, it's impractical to use different large scale sound systems in different kinds of venues. And keep in mind that the WOS was a giant step forward in large scale live concert reinforcement back when they were designing it in 1973. Imagine how bad it would have been using the then-common left and right "stacks". Yikes!
:)
Edits: 07/12/15
Absolutely the room. If they had the technology back then to fly it, they could have angled it down at the audience, instead of shooting it over their heads where a lot of it becomes useless reverberation.
indoors. Nor why they would try to use them....outdoors they shined, sounding just like the Altec Voice of the Theaters A-7s in my front room at the time...only louder!
An outstanding article- rhyno.
I very much enjoyed the article and especially the embedded sound clips. Thanks for posting about it and for the link!
to behold. I thought it sounded best at about 60 feet out....Crystal clear and coherent, nothing more was needed.
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