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[Justice C. Bigler]

we are trying to do a music show in a football stadium!
No problem there...

That may be the bigger point of this whole controversy.

I remember earlier in the year, I had friends texting me personally and posting on the Facesphere about how bad U2 sounded when they saw them at the Cowboys Stadium in Dallas (I think I even posted a thread here about that). That was a tour that was widely written about in our own industry trade rags about how super awesome the PA system was and how great it [should have] sounded. But the reality out side of the echo chamber of the industry was that is sounded like absolute crap.

[John Roberts {JR}]

I expected opinions to run deep in this group... I don't care one way or the other, but I generally dislike waste and inefficiency. I haven't been to a live concert (not on the clock) for several decades.

The free market will resolve this too. Free markets abhor waste and inefficiency and scrape it away at every opportunity.

JR

PS: In my judgement live performances are about an event "experience" not marginal sound quality that most in the audience are not very discriminating about. This may come down to economics, one way or the other (ticket prices?).

[Keith Broughton]

PS: In my judgement live performances are about an event "experience" not marginal sound quality that most in the audience are not very discriminating about.

And that, my friend, is the sad truth

[Ivan Beaver]

That new arena in Atlanta is something like 80,000 seats?

The bowl seating is something like 60K something or another.  There are various seating sections they can pull out for special events-but are not normally used.

The additional seats were on the floor/field.

The place is larger than normal, because all of the seats are a couple inches wider than normal-so that expands the cubic volume of the space.

I have walked my share of the 100K college stadiums listening to the speaker system.

Walking this place is MUCH MUCH more tiring.  Maybe I am just getting older

There are some serious acoustical issues that are NOT apparent from photos.

For example, behind the upper seats, there is a HUGE open "void" that the sound gets into and just "rattles around for a bit" before it comes back out.

[Justice C. Bigler]

I have walked my share of the 100K college stadiums listening to the speaker system.

Walking this place is MUCH MUCH more tiring.  Maybe I am just getting older

You should buy a Segway. Seems like it would be the perfect tax write off for jobs like this. 

[Ivan Beaver]

You should buy a Segway. Seems like it would be the perfect tax write off for jobs like this. 

But they suck on steps and going between seats in a stadium

[Jason Glass]

But they suck on steps and going between seats in a stadium

If you have the money, they have your wheels:

https://segway.la/products/x2-se/

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

[Craig Leerman]

The problem with trusting installs is that they can look good on paper but not actually be up to the task.

A good example of this was at Club Kilimanjaro in DC. The bands were told that the club had a state of the art Turbosound system. Maybe it was state of the art 10-15 years before, and NONE of the drivers were original, having been replaced over the years with whatever the audio crew could get their hands on. During the week, DJs filled the space and would blow up stuff and when the weekend bands would come in, parts of the system would not be working. I showed up one night delivering back line and saw a few stage wedges truck strapped to the rig. The sound guy Ed told me that the DJs had blown every horn and that he used the wedges to get some highs in the venue.

Now imagine if you were the band engineer and walked in expecting a state of the art Turbosound rig and were presented a rig of old Turbo cabinets loaded with who knows what, and a few floor wedges truck strapped on top for the highs.

My company just got a gig to fix the audio in 3 nightclubs. One system has very little bass. During inspection we discovered a pair of JBL subs under the stage working fine but instead of the subs being located right behind the metal grills installed that would protect them and let the sound out, each sub was back about 10' from the grills, and extra carpet and padding from the last flooring installation was placed under the stage in between the subs and the grill openings blocking and absorbing most of the low end. The crossover was also not correctly set up resulting in the lack of bass the club was experiencing. The components were fine but the flooring crew coupled with a DJ twisting knobs he should not have touched turned an OK system into crap.

Until every venue starts to care about audio quality, has a good in house audio crew, and the budget to install and maintain the sound system, road crews will usually opt for their own rig.

Craig

Sent from my iPad

[Tim McCulloch]

This right here. ^^^^^^^^

Ivan, for every great install you've voiced and optimized there are 1000 that suck, either from day one or by today.  On a tour we don't have time to figure out what is not working, what is working but wrong, and what is safe to use.  We don't have time to align the portable system and installed kibbles and bits.

And even if it's 100%, if there is any problem of any kind, the tour manager or PM will blame it on integrating with the installed system and likely whoever approved this in the first place will be fired immediately.  You only have one chance (unlike installs) and if the artist or the artist's management is unhappy another provider will be getting the work.  Period.  End of story.

[Ivan Beaver]

This right here. ^^^^^^^^

Ivan, for every great install you've voiced and optimized there are 1000 that suck, either from day one or by today.  On a tour we don't have time to figure out what is not working, what is working but wrong, and what is safe to use.  We don't have time to align the portable system and installed kibbles and bits.

And even if it's 100%, if there is any problem of any kind, the tour manager or PM will blame it on integrating with the installed system and likely whoever approved this in the first place will be fired immediately.  You only have one chance (unlike installs) and if the artist or the artist's management is unhappy another provider will be getting the work.  Period.  End of story.

I totally agree that there are MANY MANY bad installs.  Some of the from the most respected designers, installers and using the most respected gear.  As was to be the case if the MBS had gone with the original design.

But it was proven that design was faulty.

You say you only get one chance.  So what about what happened at the show in question?  If the "design" was faulty, is it just fine to blame the acoustics?

Yes they are tough, but it CAN be much better, as evidenced by the installed system.

Yeah it can be a crap shoot.  You never know what you may run into, and I would agree that is probably "safer" to use what you know.

But there are installs out there that are just fine and will do the job better than the tour system, mainly because they were designed (if done properly) for the specific space.

But just because it is an "installed system" does NOT mean that is not as good as the tour system.

[ProSoundWeb Community]