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"Modern PAs can self-tune the whole system just from playing a short burst of white noise through the system, and listening for the response"

A technology which was developed by/with the Grateful Dead, by the way.

From what I understand they essentially financed the modern PA industry by spending a ridiculous amount of money on sound equipment. People don't realize how much money they made - they were pretty much the top grossing tour band for about 15-20 years, playing about 90-100 shows a year. And they could (and did) use those shows to experiment with sound in a way that probably no other band has done since.

I haven't watched any D&C shows, but I expect their sound quality was just as good, if not better, than the Dead's.

From one of the dead's main sound engineers, Dan Healy, who helped establish this technology (I wasn't able to find any further discussions, but I know I've read a few interviews where he talked about doing this at the soundboard).

"""What tools do modern sound engineers have at their disposal that you didn’t? Computers and all the things that became possible at the advent of computers. It’s removed the limitations to creativity. Nowadays, in terms of concert sound, you can not only correct the sound for any room, you can ongoingly correct it in real time as the room changes and as the temperature changes and as the humidity changes. We used to do that in the ’80s and ’90s – I had a complete weather station at my mix board and we tracked temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, because they change sound dispersion, sound quality. We corrected the systems accordingly. We did long, long studies and mapped it out, and we had curves so we could predict where the sound was going. We had to do that by hand. Nowadays, it happens all by itself."""

(I assume you're aware, but for the larger audience)... the grateful released an album "Two From the Vault" which was a soundboard recording... but the original soundboard had huge phase cancellation errors due to microphone placement. To recover it, some 20+ years later, with digital tech, the sound engineers could recover the original signal using some clever FFT and phasing very similar to what you describe modern secondary arrays use to self-tune.

Ironically i haven't really listened to most of the official live albums much. I tend to just go straight to the board tapes, which often sound better due to having a few decades of technological advancement - many were transferred in the 90s or 2000s. Of course they didn't have then what we have now, but even consumers by then had access to software for things like mastering that would have made any 70's engineer drool - certain kinds of repairs are much more easily done digitally - back in the day cutting out a spot of stactic or a mic pop involved literal tape and razor blades.

Two From The Vault isn't a "official live album", it's a soundboard that was shelved for decades due to the quality of the recording. I got this album on CD when I was in college (early 90s) and didn't have access to high quality taping equipment, and soundboards from the late 60s were very rare. The audio quality is absolutely excellent (I am just relistening to it now, there's only tiny background hiss, excellent clarity on all the instruments, decent vocals, and only a bit of high-volume distortion on the guitar and bass). It's also a nice counterpoint to the original of the "From The Vault" series, One From The Vault, which was recorded years later under ideal conditions and the band had been practicing extensively.

Much has changed from the days when we had to implement balanced binary trees of tapes (analog tape copies were lossy, so you wanted to minimize the total depth of copies).

Oooh, thank you for sending me down memory lane.

(I took part in lots of tape trees back in the nineties -mostly Neil Young, with a good helping of Grateful Dead and occasionally some Phish thrown in for good measure. Then CD-R became a thing and we did lots of those for blanks+postage. Good times! (I even did DAT trees, as I had three (!) DA-P1s gifted from a local radio station going out of business)

I once got called down to the customs authority to explain what I was up to - they noted I got loads and loads and LOADS of seemingly innocent recording media in the mail, only to ship them out again at a later date.

Nothing showed up when they inspected the packages for drugs, so if I didn't mind - would I PLEASE explain what was going on?

> It was totally impractical to tour with and they lost money doing so.

The whole system travelled in two articulated lorries; but it took so long to set up that eventually they used four lorries, and two systems. One set would be for tonight's gig, the other would be on the road to tomorrow's gig, or starting to set up.

I think the mikes for the vocals were three mikes, not two (you can see triple mikes in The Grateful Dead Movie). I can't remember the rationale for using three mikes. The movie also shows the WoS being set up, under the direction of Ramrod, with Garcia gently urging him to get the speaker stacks hauled up higher, because that would be "really cool".

The problem wasn’t so much the raw amount of gear, is that it was bunch of small components that weren’t particularly well integrated. A lot cabling to run every night, etc. They had to more than doh le the size of their crew, Which was the biggest expense.

The reason for three mics when filming might have been this: Two for the PA, and one for recording.

It's still very common to use largely-separate signal chains for the PA, and for recording (and/or broadcast). These days we often do it with analog or digital splits, but analog splits can [still] be problematic and digital splits didn't exist yet back then.

Analog splits might have been particularly problematic when the source is two microphones fighting eachother. And it's often [still] the case that a microphone that works well for PA is not a microphone that is ideal for non-PA use.

(Sure, we like to think of live recordings or broadcasts as being "being there," but that's almost never actually the case. When recording and/or broadcast is involved, those things are often handled as separately as is practical -- often with gear and engineers that are outside of the walls of the venue.

This allows the FOH folks to get it sounding good in the room, the recording folks to get it sounding good on tape/DAW, and the broadcast folks to get it sounding good on radio/TV. They're different goals, and they've each got different approaches.)

> Vocals never sounded great at wall of sound shows

It was Donna.

Harsh

Accurate

hahaha, no better way to be snapped back into reality than hearing the wild calls of a screeching possum

I cannot read this comment without hearing "Playing in the Band". Now that part is stuck in my head all day, thanks.

apologies for the lack of whoaaa yaaa yay ya a trigger warning

lol! This made my day. To be fair, I love a good Donna tune when she sings actual lyrics. Playin' was always an excuse to just be... a screeching possum is the best I've ever heard it. Whatever, it's rock and roll. Not like Jerry Bobby or Phil could sing either :-)

Well, yeah, compared to today it's not great but no one had tried anything like that before. They delayed the sound to distant speakers with tape delay. It's cool as shit and was the groundwork for how we do things today.

It's like saying relay computers were dumb... Boolean logic was new and no one had ever attempted stuff like that before.

No, the whole point of the WoS was that there were no distant speakers. Everything was single sourced, to the point where each speaker only carried a single instrument.

I know you probably know, but:

    each speaker only carried a single instrument.

Each vertical stack of speakers only carried a single instrument; not each individual speaker.

The routing wasn't nessisarily full spectrum though. There were a lot of crossovers in use.

I also believe I heard some of the precussion mics were targetting only one or two speakers.

At least in the case of the speakers for Jerry, they had a a seperate McIntosh hi-fi amp for each speaker, being fed out of a Fender-derived preamp and a many-way splitter. Owsley basically bought the every one that model amp that was in stock at dealers on the west coast. Hundreds of thousands of dollars just on those amps - they were something like 2 or 3k a pop even then.

The only reason they were even able to afford in the first place was that Owsley (Yeah that Owsley, who was also their primary sound engineer) had so much illegal cash from a decade of making most of the LSD consumed in the United States. Band never even paid for most it. It was more this crazy idea Owsley had and mostly paid for that they kind of rolled with.

That sort of thing was more than a bit of a pattern in that camp, and was a large part of the band's downfall. It got to a point where it seemed like half of Marin county was on the payroll, and there was so much money going out that they had to tour constantly, wether they wanted to or not. The heavy touring clearly had a major toll on Jerry both physically and mentally. A two or three year hiatus around '91 or '92 would have done him (and probably some of the other guys) a world of good.

They definitely used distant speakers, but yeah, not part of the WoS. I'm just saying that was cutting edge at the time.

Not exactly: the wall of sound was only set up on stage. However, you could hear the music extremely clearly 1/4 mile away, due to the coherence. The delay towers were used before the WoS.