The title about says it all. The mother of all personal amplification systems was the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound, circa 1973 where we pushed the individual column concept about as far as it could go...Phil's bass system alone was two columns of 18 15" speakers, each 36 feet tall....

Nice to see Bose following in our footsteps with something that's actually portable!

I could see how the wall of sound is a distant past relative of the modern day PAS.Musicans have always been searching for that clean clear sound.Now we have it and it is all very grand.........
Responding to the Grateful Dead's philosophy of providing as clean a sound as possible to all members of the audience in ever larger concert situations, the Wall of Sound evolved from the practical experience and design ideas of the band's sound engineers, Alembic Studios, and the Bear in the early 1970's. After the Grateful Dead's "hiatus" of 1974/1975, Public Address Systems technology had moved forward and the era of smaller, versatile systems pioneered by Healy, Ultra Sound and Myers began. - Editor, 1998.]
The whole system operated on 26,400 Watts of continuous (RMS) power, producing in the open air quite an acceptable sound at a quarter of a mile and a fine sound up to five or six hundred feet, where it begins to be distorted by wind. A sound system could get the same volume from half as much power, but it wouldn't have the quality.
http://www.dead.net/cavenweb/deadfile/newsletter19wallsound.html

Rick

thanks for writing in and welcome to our forum. I know that you have your own forum to attend to, so we appreciate you taking the time and participating here.

We are certainly aware of the wall of sound and I understand you were intimately involved in bringing this system to live. Would you be willing to share a little more about this extraordinary experience ?

Thanks

Hilmar

Hey, Rick! Good to see you here! You may not remember me. We corresponded many times back when I was using a Highlander pickup & you were getting ready to evacuate out of Topanga years ago with a fire.

There was a big discussion here about the "Wall of Sound" with photos & all last year some time. We all know what a great system & idea that was. We also know what a pain it was to move & set up that system. I recently saw a Dead concert on PBS with the "Wall of Sound." It was pretty cool. The funky double mics were something else too.

Again, it's great to see you here. I hope you enjoy it & like the system.

I'll echo the others - Welcome, Rick and thanks for gracing us with your insights!

Here's that Wall of Sound thread from a year ago. We'd be honored to read whatever you might have to say about it...

Thanks for the welcome.

Tom, that was quite a time. The only way I knew the shop and our home were OK was that I kept phoning and getting the answering machine!

Re. the wall: a lot of the basic physics that went into it were really developed by a brilliant RCA engineer, Harry Olson, in the 1930s and forward from there. The column theory stuff is really basic, and it has to do with the wavelength of the frequencies produced. The idea is to be launching cylindrical wave fronts where the sound pressure decreases as the square of the distance rather than as a spherical wave front (point source) where it is dropping off as the cube of the distance. In practical terms this means that with a line array, the sound doesn't have to be blisteringly loud close in for it to be decently loud farther away. Also by really controlling the dispersion, you are more efficiently aiming the sound at the audience rather than wasting it on the ceiling, back wall, and everywhere where it just turns into reverberant noise and reduces the intelligibility of the system. What Bose has done is to take a lot of these basic physics issues, work with more modern driver and amp technology than we had, and deliver a great system that can give you clarity, intelligibility, and separation in smaller environments than we had to deal with.

BTW, those "funky" mics were Bruel and Kjaer instrumentation capsules at about $900.00 per used in out of phase pairs as differential noise cancelling mics. The pairs were matched to within 1 db from about 30 Hz to 9 K!

I went back to the old thread about the Wall of Sound and I saw that the Bose engineers missed a few of our tricks.

In fact, the vocals were launched by a four way system that had one column of 15s about 36 feet tall crossed over at (OK this was a few years ago!) about 250, then it went to the curved front array of 12s up to about 2 K, then to the curve front array of 5s, and finally to that single row of EV T350s for 5 k on up. So we were stepping down the vertical height of the arrays as the frequencies went up. The goal was to achieve even dispersion in both horizontal and vertical planes of all frequencies...given the reality of what drivers were available and the fact that at that time...1973, there were no horns that didn't have really objectionable throat distortion. That's the non-linearity of compressing and rarefacting air in the tight environs of a horn driver throat. It wasn't until John Meyer figured out how to cancel throat distortion that that problem was solved. Anyway, we liked the low distortion sound of cone drivers and uset them up to 5 K in arrays that did follow the classic frequency/line array formulae. Hey, we actually knew what we were doing!

My own role, aside from just being there with a trained set of ears, having toured and mixed front of house for them, and being respected for that, was that I came up with the 1/3 octave wave length formula for cabinet dimensions for the sealed boxes for the JBL drivers. The idea was to spread any standing waves in the boxes 1/3 of an octave apart...and to then damp the innards of the boxes with horsehair carpet padding.

BTW, there was no PA mixing console. Each mic had a volume control on it. In the first version, there were no monitor speakers; the band heard what the audience heard. And I've never heard a big system that sounded better...to this day. Closest in a big system is the newer JBL line array systems I heard at MerleFest last Spring.

So for small and medium sized gigs, I have a lot of respect for what these guys are doing here at Bose. Good show!

Hi Rick, I have a Guild prototype that I think was built by you back in the late 70's - early 80's I bought new from a little music shop in PA. It has some crazy split pickup stereo configuration (Alembic I think)where you can get the top three strings thru one channel and the bottom three strings thru another I was wondering if you remember anything about it or if it was you who built it. If I remember right it had some hand written schematic or sketch signed by you.

RE: The wall of sound. That image has to be burned into the memory of every soundmans "and who can forget...) category. What an awesome site.

Hi Rick;

I've played with a couple of guys that own your guitars and love'em, Steve Ramirez (bassist) and David Gans. Must say I like'm too, but haven't gotten myself one just yet. It'd be interesting to see you take the PAS and come up with an acoustic guitar pickup for my J200 that would make my fingers play all by themselves.

I remember a photograph of Jerry Garcia standing in front of eight billion speakers and thinking, "I don't want to stand in front of all of that!" Three or four nights of that aural assault could probably turn a normal person's bones to dust.

Hey Rick,

I've gotta add a "cool, Rick's on our board" to the mix. How did you find us?

I'd love to have one of our field guys give you a chance to noodle with one of our speakers if you have not had the chance already.

As you've mentioned, it's the advances in amps, speaker designs and dsp that make the Cylidrical Radiator(tm) speaker a possibility today. Though I wasn't there, I'm certain that the work you guys did back then influenced our team in development of our new speaker.

Let me know if we can arrange a try-out for ya,
Steve

As you Bozers know, I've now been living with a PAS for a few weeks and loving it. There is definitely a kind of ambience and naturally enveloping thing about the PAS that is reminiscent of the Wall. Like the Wall, the Bose system never drills you in the ear; it just provides a kind of sound field that is wonderfully inviting to a musician.

I went for two subs, Rick. How about you?

quote:

Originally posted by Rick Turner:
As you Bozers know, I've now been living with a PAS for a few weeks and loving it. There is definitely a kind of ambience and naturally enveloping thing about the PAS that is reminiscent of the Wall. Like the Wall, the Bose system never drills you in the ear; it just provides a kind of sound field that is wonderfully inviting to a musician.

I remember getting a letter from the Dead saying that they were going on the road with a 25kw rms, 600 or so driver system and thinking that alas; they’d finally all lost it. I saw this wonder of the sonic world at Colt Park, in Hartford Connecticut some time around ’75 or ’76 (I’m going by who my girlfriend was at the time so it’s all a little fuzzy) any how, I’ve long asserted that it was the single best sounding system I have ever heard. I, concur that the PAS has much of the same philosophy that drove Alembic et al to use eleven discrete systems for one band. It was nearly perfectly clean. It also had the unusual combination of headroom and horsepower to go from the quiet, subtle musings of space to one of the loudest crescendos I have ever heard… and I am old enough to have actually been at concerts where Page used four 100 watt Plexi’s with their associated full stacks “turned to 11” .

Over my vacation last week, I read Phil Lesh's excellent autobiography Searching for the Sound.

Phil talks for a few pages about The Wall and why it had to be quickly retired. They (mostly) loved the clarity and the single sound field for band and audience, but the whole thing was financially impossible. According to Lesh, they needed two systems leapfrogging because of setup and teardown time.

Ken

I will reveal my age by noting that I attended 2 Grateful Dead concerts during 1974 and 1976. The Wall Of Sound definitely made the listening experience far better than anything anybody was touring with at that time. "Headroom" that's what I'm talking about and it does make for a remarkably clean sound that you can feel! Club owners nearly [edit] their pants when we walk in with our 3KW sound system. It's only for the clarity of the headroom you can build with it. By nights end they say "Yeah, you got it right!" and they are talking about controlled volume and balance. I hope Boss isn't suggesting that their little marvels compare with that kind of power and headroom of the Wall Of Sound! However, when enough of my current system is ready for replacement I may try a pair of these instead of spending the money with my orthopeodic surgeon!

Edit: Keeping it clean as per the Terms of Service

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Forum-Admin,

Hi Gator,

Quote: " I hope Bose isn't suggesting that their little marvels compare with that kind of power"

Your'e right, - no comparison.

I didn't believe hardly any of the claims of this Bose system until I actually took my regular set up and favorite guitar and went and played through the thing.

It's not 3k or anywhere near but for any bar that I've played in and even some oudoor gigs this Bose system provides a detailed and even sound coverage better than anything else for the price. And as you say, it's pretty light as well!

The only way is to test it out for yourself and hear what you think.

I have played several joint gigs with a local band that has a 3k pa system. They are all really good players and what a waste of talent! Every time they insist on playing everything way too loud so after a few minutes most of the crowd has backed off from the stage to try and find some kind of comfort zone.

OK, they can make a lot of noise but is that really what music is about? The end result of a night's music surely should be based on how the audience feels when they leave. They are the sponge that is being asked to soak up whatever is fired at them and if they end up trying to escape then this must be seen as a minus reaction to the music.( Even though the actual playing might be really good stuff).

There is a definate learning curve and some adjustment needed for most players/vocalists when they are open-minded enough to at least give it a try. My only advice would be to give it a chance and after this initial adjustment period playing in a live situation becomes a whole new experience and a lot more enjoyable for the musician and the audience.

All the best, Gordon.

Indeed! And part of being a good player is understanding volume and balance. The audience allows us to do what we do. We are only as good as perceived by the audience. If you've sent them out the door (for ANY reason) how good does that make you? The hardest person to hear onstage is yourself. Some people have this syndrome so bad, it's a wonder they even had enough of an ear to learn to play. When the entire band suffers this syndrome, the race is on, then it's rediculously loud. Take the time to stand out front and listen. Once balance is achieved, nobody touches anything. Just smile and play knowing that it's wonderful out front. Rooms containing many hard surfaces (tile floors, glass fronts, etc.) will ring like mad. How do you make it sound good? Kill the dominant frequencies with EQ and turn everything DOWN! All of a sudden there is balance. I actually had to sign a waver in a club one night. If they get ticketed for noise ordinance, the band gets the ticket. I smiled, signed and during break the servers said they could hear drink orders. (One rule of thumb I use, can I hear conversations in the crowd while playing. Not make out what they're saying, but can hear their voices and see they are not shouting in each others ears at point blank range.) At this particular night's end, the juke box was playing louder than the band did all night. The law walked in the door, saw that the band was tearing down and approached the bar. Who do you think got that ticket? I love that story!

Hi there,

No problem. All I was meaning in my last post was that the band who I have played alongside on several occasions have this 3k pa system and sadly they don't seem to have your experience in getting what we might call a pleasing sound.

They seem intent on using most of that power just to achieve a volume level which to most folks is way over the top for the room and like I said before, by doing this any musicality seems to disapear out the window,(and a large chunk of the audience out the door - or at least around the corner somewhere).

I play through one Bose L1 with two B1 bass modules. I play anything from ZZ Top, U2, but mostly one-man reggae using a looper and Digitech pedal. I have never so far played anywhere where this system was lacking in Ooooomph! or overall volume.

I admit, - I'm not a full rock band and I have not as yet heard a real tight, heavy rock band using these L1's as they are designed to be used, that is one per person. I am only going off my personal experience and I would recommend at least giving one a try just to see for yourself if they do as they claim.

Cheers, Gordon.

Hey Gator,

I forgot to mention that the whole idea of this Bose system is that once the musician whether it be bass, vocals, guitar, whatever, - once their ideal sound is dialled into the system then that exact same sound is sent out all across the room at a suprisingly even volume from front to back and side to side.

This is the part that I found hard to believe when I first read about it. But, sure enough, it's true - it works. Unlike a regular guitar amp which is really directional and might sound amazing, usually from where the guitarist is standing, this system allows everyone in the room to hear the same sound as the player. This means there are no more worries about what it sounds like out front because you are hearing pretty much the same thing as everyone else.

This is what sold it to me anyway, the fact that I can play at lower volume levels and still reach the back without deafening the good folks at the front. Plus the ease of transporting and setting up/taking down.

Well, I'm starting to sound like a sales guy here but I honestly am very impressed with this Bose system. It may not be everyone's cuppa tea but it sure works for me. Gordon.