[BC] Could our concept of audio be all wrong?

[RichardBJohnson at comcast.net]

Last year I won a photo contest and received a pair of tickets
to see "American Idol" at the DCU center in Worcester. This is
an ice-skating rink used by the Worcester Sharks, a little-
known hockey team.

It has the acoustics of an ice-skating rink, hard concrete reflecting
walls, and the sound of an enormous cave. There were two large horn
clusters hoisted towards the ceiling connected to some gigantic power
amplifiers which filled the cave with the acoustic power of a SR-71
jet engine.

I sat through almost an hour, but had to leave because my nose was
bleeding. I was unable to hear any of the individual words to any
of the songs because of the echo. However, the instruments were quite
audible and seemed to synchronize with this ear-splitting echo which,
if it had not been so loud, would have been fairly entertaining,
sort of like sending the output of a tape-recorder back into its
input.

This is an example of "modern" sound reinforcement. When I worked for
WCRB, which owned MSI (Music Service Incorporated), MSI got the contract
for sound reinforcement at the first Woodstock. I got paid to attend
Woodstock! We set up tape delay machines so that the sound out of each
of the Electrovoice "Sonocaster" speakers was synchronized with the
direct sound. This was manually set up so that any place in the
meadow had clear, clean, echoless sound.

Of course after the rains started and the crowds took down a lot
of equipment, it wasn't quite as nice sounding, but in the
"good old days" rock concerts where handled just like symphony
orchestras and their recordings show it. No recording were made
at DCU because there was nothing to record.

Cheers,
Richard B. Johnson
Book: http://www.AbominableFirebug.com/

----- Original Message -----
From: "Glen Kippel" <glen.kippel at gmail.com>

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Chuck Lakaytis <chuck at akpb.org> wrote:

Yeah.  Ages ago I took the kids to a Rez Band concert.  The sound was so
loud (and we were way in the back) that it was above the threshhold of pain,
and the kids begged me to leave.  So we did.