The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

Post by llamaimperative » Tue, May 07, 2024, 7:09 PM UTC

stevehiehn wrote: post #2

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)

Post by plussed_reader » Tue, May 07, 2024, 7:23 PM UTC

scrumper wrote: post #4

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 ampl…

Post by bregma » Tue, May 07, 2024, 7:28 PM UTC

llamaimperative wrote: post #8

itishappy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What drives this? Singers and speakers are both localized sources, so I'd expect the mics to pick up similar phases for each. I bet it's distance! Falloff depends on distance to source, so there should be a larger difference in volume for closer sources.

Yeah one microphone was behind the other, though I was under the impression it was half a wavelength behind and thus created something quite akin to modern active noise-cancellation? Edit: Apparently this is not the case!

Post by zer00eyz » Tue, May 07, 2024, 7:33 PM UTC

jMyles wrote: post #5

082349872349872 wrote: post #3

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)

I'd love to hear more about your experience and observations of taping at the shows. Not only did GD (and particularly Jerry Garcia and John Perry Barlow) eschew the 'intellectual property' model of music, their thought-leadership has lived on to become much of what we today consider fundamental internet technology and methodology. Early decentralized crypto-economics, peer-to-peer file sharing, and the founding of t…

Post by mrob » Tue, May 07, 2024, 7:35 PM UTC

jtriangle wrote: post #13

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, bec…