OK, I admit the subject line is redundant, because anything Bear said seems to be provocative.
Now that that's out of the way: I stumbled upon a recent biography, Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, by Robert Greenfield, published November 2016. Plenty of stories and info there. In Ch. 17, "Bear's Dream," he says: "...I know you cannot use a line array by itself. Two strings of speakers, one hanging down on each side of the stage, sound like dog shit. No matter how hard you try, you simply cannot ever make them sound right."
I'm not an audio engineer. I'm simply a guitarist and fan of the Dead who always appreciated that their shows sounded better than any other bands. I've also been to several concerts in the past few years with line array systems that sounded terrible (Brad Paisley in Salinas was painfully distorted, which I kind of thought was antithetical to the whole goal of a line array in the Wall of Sound tradition). Even at last weekend's Dead & Co. show, I had seats on the far right near the back of the lower section, with (what I call in my ignorance) a "fill" array pointed right at us, and the sound was not clear---hardly heard Bob all night. Admittedly, I was pretty far to one side.
Anyone care to contribute thoughts, experiences, insights? Is Bear essentially "correct"?
Now that that's out of the way: I stumbled upon a recent biography, Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, by Robert Greenfield, published November 2016. Plenty of stories and info there. In Ch. 17, "Bear's Dream," he says: "...I know you cannot use a line array by itself. Two strings of speakers, one hanging down on each side of the stage, sound like dog shit. No matter how hard you try, you simply cannot ever make them sound right."
I'm not an audio engineer. I'm simply a guitarist and fan of the Dead who always appreciated that their shows sounded better than any other bands. I've also been to several concerts in the past few years with line array systems that sounded terrible (Brad Paisley in Salinas was painfully distorted, which I kind of thought was antithetical to the whole goal of a line array in the Wall of Sound tradition). Even at last weekend's Dead & Co. show, I had seats on the far right near the back of the lower section, with (what I call in my ignorance) a "fill" array pointed right at us, and the sound was not clear---hardly heard Bob all night. Admittedly, I was pretty far to one side.
Anyone care to contribute thoughts, experiences, insights? Is Bear essentially "correct"?
Last edited by nopunin10dead on Sun Jun 11, 2017 4:28 pm, edited 3 times in total.