Reply Posted by Gary Miller on February 08, 2002

I'm not sure as to the BIGGEST system out there but I would imagine Iron Maiden has to be up there somewhere! The last I heard (through word of mouth) was that Manowar held the Guiness world record for loudest rock concert. Please update me if I'm wrong! GM

Reply Posted by Mikael Holm on February 10, 2002

I've got the information from around april 1994 in Düsseldorf (Germany). But that was soundcheck... I remember that very well, because the very same day i saw that on MTV Europe, Die Krupps played at my used-to-be-hometown ;-)

Miffe

Reply Posted by michael on February 10, 2002

Isn't that the band made up of guys who are pissed at their cappucinno machines?

Reply Posted by MIKE on February 08, 2002

ROLLING STONES STEEL WHEELS

Reply Posted by Ian Hasell on February 08, 2002

Hi

The biggest I heard of (and was written about) was for Prodigy about 2 years ago, with 200 SB850 and 100 KF850.

Have fun

Ian

Reply Posted by rick brown on February 08, 2002

Some how i remeber the giuness book having a thing about the GREATFUL DEAD..loudest pa..biggest pa??this was obviously back in the '70s..seems to me there was a picture of what looked like a huge pile of indivdual speaker stacked for days.. ( this is befor flying......speakers that is)
lots of things are a blur from that time

Reply Posted by J Real on February 08, 2002

It's interesting to hear what cabinets were used in the 70's but what were some of the amps that were used back then and what rating did they have?

Joe Real

Reply Posted by Mike G. on February 08, 2002

The Dead sysrem of which you speak was the wall of sound I'm sure. I dont know too much about it except for---Macintosh amps( the old theatre amps with the big transformers on the back something like 250 watts a side) EV-t350 horns, 5" and 15" drivers. According to my father who is pretty well versed on the subject, It was like line arrays side by side.

They were trying to increase the vertical q so the sound would blow past the band into the crowdie; the wall also then serving as the monitors. No, I dont know how they kept it from feeding back with the mics 15' in front of the thing. One thing for sure though, it looked alot better then it sounded.

Reply Posted by Charlie Escher on February 09, 2002

Depends on which configuration you heard, and in which venue. The whole setup in a place like the Boston Music Hall was pretty amazing. The drawing referenced in this thread only shows one of a few different setups I saw them use. Lesh actually had four bass stacks, and full quad sound (1 stack pre string !)at at least one show I saw, unless the Kool Aid factor was greater than I think.

Reply posted by Bob G on February 08, 2002

Oh? Macintosh tube amps and JBL's in closed cabs = giant hi-fi. And it did look neat too, especially with the tye-dyed speaker covers.

Reply Posted by Kevin Macaulay on February 08, 2002

Was that "Bagend"? That looks like the old "Bagend" biodgradable speakers. Any one out there know for sure?
Kevin

Reply "alembec and bagend" Posted by Bob G on February 08, 2002

It was Alembec(not sure of the spelling), or what was to become Alembec that designed the 'Wall' I believe... BagEnd patterned their stuff after the Alembec stuff.

Reply Posted by Al Limberg on February 10, 2002

Legend has it that Stanley(Ithink that was the first name)Owsley, a rather prominent advocate and purveyor of lab quality acid bank-rolled the Wall of sound system. Perhaps he made his fortune while it was still legal. As far as the feedback concern goes, each vocalist was outfitted with a pair of matched vocal mics mounted one directly above the other and wired with reverse polarity - Voila! perfect cancellation of any common input. Then it was simply a matter of singing in very close proximity to only one of the mics!
hmmmm one pill makes you larger..................

;o)
Al

Reply "Alembic" Posted by Timothy J. Trace on February 08, 2002

Reply "YEP THATS IT!!!! THATS IT!!!!!" Posted by rick brown on February 08, 2002

Reply "Wall of sound Why it didn't feed back..." Posted by Bob G on February 08, 2002

Mike,
The ‘Wall Of Sound’ was in reality a gigantic MONITOR system. It was flown BEHIND the band in an effort to include the band in the sound power that the audience enjoys. Hi vertical ‘Q’s’ were employed to lower the SPL at the stage. The reason for the double mics on the vocals is to reduce feedback (since the system was behind them). The mics (matched, of course) are connected as a differential pair, that is, one is out of phase with it’s mate. The same theory is used in a ‘CB’ radio mic to cancel noise. If the source you want to cancel is equidistant from the mics, then +2 plus -2 = 0, thus canceling the source. In the ‘Wall" the vocalist’s mouth (or source) was very close to only one mic, about half an inch, and six inches away from the other. Do the math: log (.5/6) 20 = -21.6 db (20 is the multiplier since we are working with SPL). So the ‘out of phase’ signal is at least 20db down from the main signal, which means they will not add appreciably, hence there will be no differential affect on the vocal (If you need the math to prove it, I’ll post it). This works quite well for low frequencies, but once you get to the higher ones, that whole differential thing turns into a ‘bag of worms’ with upper frequency ‘comb’ filtering (in the Grateful Dead's case the differential mic was placed below the vocal mic so the vocalist’s chest would have blocked some of the H.F. background diminishing some of the comb filtering’s disastrous effects). It cannot be remedied with delay lines. It’s a physical placement thing so you REALLY have to know your ‘Q’s’. Definitely something you should not try at home (by all means DO try it at home first, before you subject your audience to it).

Reply Posted by Michael Praushn on February 11, 2002

It runs in my mind that this system was even featured in Sound System Engineering by Don and Carolyn Davis, one of the audio texts for anyone designing sound reinforecement systems...usually in fixed installations, but they still featured the Dead system, because of the interesting theory behind it;

-Michael

Reply Posted by Michael Arnold on February 08, 2002

Bob,

I have done much reading about this rig. It was truly a wonderful concept in audio design. Correct me if I am wrong, but weren't the different areas of the PA designed to reproduce different parts of the bad. IE, a vocal PA flown center for voice...another part flown behind Keys specifically for keys? What a wonderful way to truly represent the imaging of the band. The keys really sound like they are coming from the keyboard player, not because you pan them there, but because that is where his source is. Pan in a stereo system is not a true indicator of real world location, as we hear not 2 sources at different volumes, but a mono source at different times. I really wish I could have heard this tour...but it was a little before my time.

Incidentally, have you ever heard about the guy who does mono field recordings that have true depth of placement? Listening to these recordings on headphones is an amazing experience...you can truly place location in a "room" of the various instrument, and the entire thing is recorded on a single microphone.

Any more thoughts you have on the Dead rig would be greatly appreciated. Maybe even educational...

thanks
-Milk

Reply Posted by Lee Brenkman on February 11, 2002

I was a "wall" of individual systems. Each instrumentalist had his own system. Nothing was "mixed" in the conventional sense except the vocals, which came from the curved array of 12s, 5s and EV tweeters in the center of the wall, and the keyboards which had their own smaller array on the keyboard side of the wall. Stacking a whole bunch of 15s in a vertical "line array" certainly DID make the bass guitar sound more well defined in an arena than I had heard up to that time.

What killed the Wall of Sound more than anything else was the cost of setting/stacking it up. I took a full, pre show day to raise the scaffolding and stack all those individual components. Coming at the time of the OPEC imbargo/oil shortage AND at a time that promoters were starting to take a much closer look at labor related show costs, it was doomed from an economic basis.

It also was a "Deadicated" one band rig, it would have been pretty difficult for an opening act to adjust to all of the "special" techniques neccessary to play with/through the Wall of Sound.

As a noble experiment and a gutsy approach to try a wild and "left field" approach to concert audio, a tip of the hat to the "Wall". But the Meyer MSL3 bases system that replaced it was a lot more efficient, both in terms of amount of sound for a given amount of amp power AND a lot faster to load in and rig.

Cheers,
Lee