A Century of Live Sound---McIntosh

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A Century of Live Sound
In July 1973, three supergroups — the Grateful Dead, The Band, and the Allman Brothers — played to an audience of 600,000 at the Watkins Glen Summer Jam, held on an auto racetrack in upstate New York. Due to the crowd’s immense size, a significant number of concertgoers could neither see the stage, nor satisfactorily hear the music coming from it. Additional speaker towers were built, but this required more amplification. Sound engineer Janet Furman (yes, the same person who founded the Furman company that makes the power conditioners we all use) was dispatched by helicopter with six grand in cash to nearby Binghamton, home of McIntosh Laboratories, to purchase five more MC-2300 amplifiers. Although it was the weekend, Janet located the owner at his home, bought the amps off the factory floor, loaded them into the ’copter, and took off to fly back to the raceway.


With their primary focus on amplification power, missing from the sound crew’s calculations was weight. At 128 pounds, each MC-2300 was a substantial piece of gear. With the addition of 640 pounds of amplifiers to Janet and the pilot’s weight, the small helicopter struggled to maintain altitude, skirting high-rise buildings and narrowly averting calamity. But thanks to a combination of luck and persistence, they got back safely and the new amps were rigged into the sound system successfully. The enormous crowd got to enjoy high-quality sound and never knew the difference.
Live music had entered the age of brute force concert sound. It seemed there was no live sound problem you couldn’t solve by throwing more power at it. By December ’73, British prog-rock trio Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s stage setup had grown so massive and elaborate that the band’s Madison Square Garden shows — amplified by a custom 28,000-watt quadraphonic surround system — required five hours of load-in. Although only used for several months in 1974, the Dead’s infamous, mammoth Wall of Sound PA system (see image above) — renowned for its high fidelity, low distortion, and ability to project up to 600 feet without significant sonic degradation — was powered by 48 McIntosh MC-2300s.

Triple-system amplification isn’t perfect, however. Although coverage is generally acceptable, making these three systems work together to achieve sonic coherency remains a challenge. The sound from multiple speakers flooding a venue’s upper walls and ceiling can muddy the front-of-house mix with excessive reverberation. And source localization remains particularly problematic. An audience member hearing, say, a vocal coming from the nearest speaker column — which may be hundreds of feet away from the singer — can be disconcerting. And the powerful guitar amplifiers that proliferated in the late ’60s didn’t help. In addition to overwhelming the front-of-house mix for the audience near the stage, blaring instrument amps tend to make monitor mixes impossible to balance, instigating onstage volume wars (“more me”) among the musicians.

Excess volume is also an issue. Anyone who has attended a large concert (without wearing earplugs) in the last four decades has stood a good chance of coming home with ringing in their ears. So here’s a Sweetwater public service announcement: Whether you’re a music lover or a performing musician, repeated exposure to 120dB sound pressure levels will lead to permanent hearing damage. Full stop. Enter the quiet stage.

*** Racks of McIntosh amplifiers used at Woodstock. Photo courtesy of Bill Hanley.