[HN Gopher] The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound
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The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound
Author : 1970-01-01
Score : 100 points
Date : 2024-05-07 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (audioacademy.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (audioacademy.in)
| stevehiehn wrote:
| 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)
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Must've felt pretty amazing, at least for a little while til
| the injuries started.
| buildsjets wrote:
| 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!
| dekhn wrote:
| I believe most musicians these days achieve this using a
| nearby monitor speaker, for example Trey Anastasio from
| Phish, although I believe he may have adopted newer
| technology (see
| https://treysguitarrig.com/2023/08/31/2023-summer/ for more
| details). He could sustain notes for a long time with his
| custom hollowbody (like, minutes at a time).
| standardly wrote:
| That dude is a wizard. A lot of guitar players look down on
| fancy pedal setups, but watching his rig rundown video on
| youtube was mind blowing. I've heard Anastasio get tones
| and effects you just won't hear anywhere else.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| 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)
| jMyles wrote:
| 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 the Electronic Frontier Foundation
| were all developed by some combination of deadheads and
| musicians and tapers, particularly on an internet service
| called The WELL.
|
| The Green Pill Podcast had an entire episode exploring the
| bluegrass roots of blockchain technology; I was humbled /
| psyched to be a guest and play several of my songs, as well as
| some traditionals that GD also played. It's here if you're
| interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3s9Fu4yu7o&t=2898s
| zer00eyz wrote:
| It's almost impossible to talk about The Dead and not talk
| about LSD.
|
| Owsley (wall of sound engineer) was one of the original major
| LSD manufactures... and a dead show was always where you went
| to score ACID if you lived on the east coast. This remained
| true well into the 90's.
|
| I'm going to guess that all of those early internet pioneers
| that you mentioned also have fond stories of LSD.
|
| The Dead, Bill graham, hells angles, peoples temple, Patty
| Hearst.... There is a continuum of culture that spills out of
| San Francisco to this very day.
| Liquix wrote:
| > I'm going to guess that all of those early internet
| pioneers that you mentioned also have fond stories of LSD.
|
| _What the Dormouse Said_ by John Markoff is exactly that.
| A dive into how psychedelic counterculture made its mark on
| folks at Stanford, folks at XEROX PARC, Doug Engelbart, Jim
| Fadiman, Steve Jobs, etc. Not the most cohesive narrative
| but fascinating stories
|
| https://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-
| Per...
| joezydeco wrote:
| _Is there gas in the car? Yes, there 's gas in the
| caaaarrrr..._
| cccybernetic wrote:
| To add to this, John Perry Barlow, one of the Dead's two main
| lyricists, co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
| scrumper wrote:
| 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 amplified; 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. It apparently
| wasn't quite perfect but was absolutely a lot better than wailing
| feedback.
|
| The thing that made it sound so good was that any given speaker
| only reproduces a single source, but the article touches on that.
| The mic arrangement I described is simply what makes it possible.
| itishappy wrote:
| > 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.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| 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!
| itishappy wrote:
| A very literal phased array!
| bregma wrote:
| When I saw them (back in 83, it's been a long strange trip)
| it looked more like one mic was on top of the other with
| about a 6 inch separation.
| dekhn wrote:
| See https://archive.org/post/256492/the-betty-question-
| answered for more details both on WoS and the microphone
| setup.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Half wave length in what frequency would be the first thing
| that would give me pause to this. I'm reading this after
| your edit, but even before I got to the edit my brain was
| already heading towards nope
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Yeah that asterisk popping up in my head was why I did
| some more digging as well :) thought tbf, the Dead never
| seemed to care much about vocal quality so it wouldn't
| have been crazy for this to work well only for a narrow
| band. I don't have any intuition for exactly how narrow
| that band would be and how that'd sound in practice
| though.
| scrumper wrote:
| 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.
| plussed_reader wrote:
| Since balanced cables predate the GD, this strikes me as an
| acoustic implementation of an EE concept. Neat!
| insaneirish wrote:
| Here's a fun one. I'm involved in maintaining the audio
| system for an auditorium used by a non-profit. After a flood
| and remodel, including replacing some audio components (like
| microphones), it was observed that the microphone on the main
| podium always had a 60 Hz hum. The hum depended on where the
| microphone was facing. Sometimes it was there, sometimes it
| was not.
|
| Being a non-profit facility, there are no fancy DSPs to notch
| out the hum or anything like that, so more creative solutions
| were investigated. It was determined through dumb
| experimentation that orienting an identical microphone 180
| degrees to the one with the hum and setting the gain
| similarly would nearly eliminate the hum.
|
| Eventually, the working theory became that a relatively new
| large pad transformer installed across the street was being
| picked up by the microphones. Orienting one microphone 180
| degrees from the other caused the hum to be picked up out of
| phase from the main, and thus could be mixed in to cancel out
| the main mic hum.
|
| Ultimately the real solution was simply buying better
| microphones, but there was a period of some months while a
| microphone sat off stage, pointed backwards.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| It's been quite a few years since I last worked in live
| show production, but on any show at a venue where we
| couldn't be sure of access to clean power, humbuckers (not
| the guitar pickups, a nickname for what I believe was just
| a dumb 60hz notch filter or ground loop isolator inlined on
| house power taps) were a standard pack out in the road kit.
|
| I would have expected that this decades-old and well
| established component of power infrastructure would have
| been commoditized by now and integrated into any dedicated
| AV performance/production space such as an auditorium.
| bombcar wrote:
| Nonprofit and church auditoriums and halls are often
| about fifty years out of date and are somewhat around
| "barely working".
| plussed_reader wrote:
| That is my kind of tickler/teaser. Thanks for the share.
| TylerE wrote:
| 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.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| 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.
| TylerE wrote:
| 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.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| 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.
| TylerE wrote:
| 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.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| They definitely used distant speakers, but yeah, not part
| of the WoS. I'm just saying that was cutting edge at the
| time.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| (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.
| TylerE wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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).
| rnicholus wrote:
| Here is a much more detailed article that covers the mics and
| so much more: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wnnayb/the-wall-
| of-sound
| neckro23 wrote:
| This is very similar to how noise cancellation works on cell
| phones. The secondary mic is typically on the back of the phone
| and picks up the ambient noise to be subtracted from the
| primary mic's signal.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| 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 comb filtering for listeners who are not located dead
| center at the middle of the array. (This of course assumes your
| audience is dispersed horizontally as opposed to floating
| randomly in space)
|
| Modern home loudspeakers hew to this philosophy as well to an
| extent. As opposed to big "monkey coffin" 70s speakers with a
| random array of drivers sprayed across the front of the
| speaker[1], modern tower speakers have a vertical array of 2 or
| more drivers whose centers are aligned in a vertical line[2].
|
| ____
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/BudgetAudiophile/comments/yburht/at...
|
| [2]
| https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...
| dekhn wrote:
| 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)
| bongodongobob wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| Isn't the audio setup in that LED ball in Vegas a bunch of
| beam steering?
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > modern tower speakers have a vertical array of 2 or more
| drivers whose centers are aligned in a vertical line
|
| But you cannot say that on HN. HN is the place where people
| believe soundbars are as good as high-end audiophile speakers!
| jtriangle wrote:
| 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, because modern loudspeaker arrays are
| indeed much better than they used to be, and modern loudspeaker
| processing fixes a multitude of problems.
| mrob wrote:
| Another advantage of individual speakers for each instrument is
| that it allows positioning them without the phase cancellation
| artifacts you get with a stereo setup. It's obvious with some
| sounds, e.g. try playing some mono pink noise on stereo
| speakers and move your head. Then try again after hard panning
| the audio to only one of the speakers. This is why adding a
| real physical center channel makes dialogue clearer in movies.
| amlib wrote:
| 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.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| deal with the phasing over so many speakers?
|
| Each performer had their own vertical stack of speakers. So,
| no phase issues / comb filtering on the horizontal axis.
|
| https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/line-arrays-
| explaine...
| amlib wrote:
| I was thinking more in terms of the Wall of Sound as shown
| in the article. Were they also doing vertical stacks per
| channel/instrument or were they doing arrays of speakers
| arranged in a grid per channel/instrument? From what I take
| it was the later as line arrays weren't a thing at that
| point, right?
| JohnBooty wrote:
| The core of it is that speakers are bad at polyphony
|
| You can look at intermodulation measurements for some popular
| and affordable home speakers here. The TL;DR is yeah, you're
| going to go from something like -60dB distortion to -40dB when
| doing synthetic multitone tests, but I would not remotely
| characterize this as being "bad" at polyphony nor the primary
| reason for the Wall of Sounds primordial "one vertical speaker
| array per instrument" design.
|
| https://www.erinsaudiocorner.com/loudspeakers/kef_r5_meta/
|
| https://www.erinsaudiocorner.com/loudspeakers/sony_sscs3_tow...
|
| more: https://www.erinsaudiocorner.com/loudspeakers/
| The way to avoid it is more speakers, more stacks/arrays/etc.
|
| If we're talking about his remarks here I'd characterize his
| take as "more vertical arrays" and not just "more speakers." I
| realize it's a bit pedantic of me, but some people think that
| simply adding more speakers equals more betterer sound and it's
| quite far from the case. In general, multiple loudspeakers
| arrayed horizontally (this includes MTM center channels in home
| theater setups) lead to comb filtering.
|
| I'm sure you know that, just clarifying for others.
|
| If he has written about this elsewhere I'd love to read more!
| jtriangle wrote:
| I'm simplifying things significantly because I don't expect
| most HN'ers to know the ins and outs of pro sound.
|
| Dave Rat has a good youtube channel, he also has some sort of
| insider subscription thing that I've never bothered with. I
| wouldn't say his ideas necessarily translate to every
| situation, but, he really presents these ideas as tools to
| use in a toolbox, not as gospel.
|
| One interesting thing is that, we generally view comb
| filtering as universally 'bad', when, in reality, our ears do
| an excellent job of sorting out comb filtering when it comes
| to natural sounds. In fact, comb filtering is how we can
| locate a sound in 3d space with only two reference points
| (and, if you try, only one reference point moved around a
| little). That's remarkable, and points back to _how_ speakers
| comb filter instead of mere comb filtering itself.
|
| In practice, say you have a rock band, and your sound system
| has two arrays with subs spaced 40ft apart. Now, you're going
| to get a less than ideal pattern from that in the ranges
| where the bass guitar and kick drum live. How do you fix it?
| The answer is fairly simple, you simply run bass/kick in
| stereo, then, you delay the bass on one side by a little,
| kick on the opposite side just a little, then add some kind
| of EQ difference to the delayed side of each, then play with
| the delays until it sounds right.
|
| Why does that work? Or does it really work? It's odd, because
| the math says "no no, it'll sound bad", the reality is, it
| can tighten up that comb to the point you don't really hear
| it and you can get good bass coverage out of a fairly poor
| system design.
| pastureofplenty wrote:
| Web designers really, really need to stop putting light grey text
| on a white background. Good article though.
| gjmacd wrote:
| The most incredible sound system to hear a band play out of tune
| and out of key for 90 minutes.
| owenmarshall wrote:
| 90 minutes? At a _Dead_ concert?!
|
| That's enough to cover a typical Playing>Uncle
| John's>Drums>Space, and probably not get all the way through
| the reprises. You've easily got another two hours of jam.
| STRiDEX wrote:
| i found this Wired youtube video pretty similar
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c-gD4mwI8A
|
| sound engineer that worked on coachella and they talk about the
| switch to vertical stacks of speakers
| stevehiehn wrote:
| Very interesting video, thx
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Not be be confused with this other "Wall of Sound":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_Sound
|
| Despite being an insane murderer, Phil Spector was a musical
| genius.
| block_dagger wrote:
| For those wanting to listen to free legal taped audio of Dead
| shows, head over to https://relisten.net/grateful-dead or install
| Relisten app for iOS. All fan supported and open source.
| switz wrote:
| Hey! I created this website and have been maintaining it along
| with my friend Alec for the last decade. Fun seeing it pop up
| here on HN. Thanks for sharing!
| block_dagger wrote:
| Thanks for your work! I maintain the phish.in API and caught
| a show with Alec over ten years ago. Good times!
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