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The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

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Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#21

Post by dekhn »

JohnBooty wrote: post #6

You can see a partial legacy of the "Wall of Sound" at most concerts today - vertical line array speakers. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/line-arrays-explaine... For the most part, each performer plugged into the "Wall of Sound" had their own vertical 1xN stack of drivers. 3 drivers in a vertical line away will have less distortion than 3 drivers in a horizontal array; the horizontal drivers will suffer from…

Many of the ideas here were explored and commercialized by Meyer Sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_Sound_Laboratories (the founder also helped out with the Wall of Sound)

Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#22

Post by amlib »

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…

I wonder how do they deal with the phasing over so many speakers? Wouldn't an array of speakers require you to do something about that? Specially so if you are stuck with 70s tech.

Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#23

Post by scrumper »

itishappy wrote: post #7
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…

> 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.

Yep, you sing into one but not the other, so there's a big difference in the vocal signal, whereas spill from the speakers is going to hit both mics pretty well evenly.

Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#24

Post by buildsjets »

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)

Some techniques require this. Ted Nugent wouldn't have gotten the crazy howling feedback out of his semi-hollowbody Gibson Byrdland had he not been standing directly in front a pair of Fender Super Twins pushing 4 15" drivers.

If it doesn't make your pants flap in the breeze, turn it up!

Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#26

Post by bongodongobob »

JohnBooty wrote: post #6

You can see a partial legacy of the "Wall of Sound" at most concerts today - vertical line array speakers. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/line-arrays-explaine... For the most part, each performer plugged into the "Wall of Sound" had their own vertical 1xN stack of drivers. 3 drivers in a vertical line away will have less distortion than 3 drivers in a horizontal array; the horizontal drivers will suffer from…

Another cool thing you can do with line arrays is beam steering, you can direct the sound to a certain extent. There are tradeoffs, but I always thought that was pretty damn magical.

Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#27

Post by cccybernetic »

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…

To add to this, John Perry Barlow, one of the Dead's two main lyricists, co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#28

Post by TylerE »

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…

While it's true that they did that and why, I'd ultimately chalk it up as more of a flaw than a feature. Vocals never sounded great on wall of sound shows because they could never sing perfectly into one mic. This can be confirmed by listentng to soundboard tapes of the shows, and comparing them with ones a year or two either side - the full on Wall was only used for about a year.

While the WoS laid much of the groundwork for how modern PAs are designed and operated, it was more of a white elephant than anything, and many of it's actual ideas were discarded. It was totally impractical to tour with and they lost money doing so. The only real technical legacy it has is of using coherent phased line arrays.

Really it's whole reason for existence (getting a coherent, in phase, non-canceled signal at an extended distance from the stage) isn't even relevant, as these days secondary speaker arrays with delay lines (to sync them perfectly with the mains) is almost childs play. Literally plug and play. 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.

Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#30

Post by bongodongobob »

TylerE wrote: post #28
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…

While it's true that they did that and why, I'd ultimately chalk it up as more of a flaw than a feature. Vocals never sounded great on wall of sound shows because they could never sing perfectly into one mic. This can be confirmed by listentng to soundboard tapes of the shows, and comparing them with ones a year or two either side - the full on Wall was only used for about a year. While the WoS laid much of the groun…

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.

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