I remember I went to a "YELLOWJACKETS" concert at the Berklee performance center in Boston 88. They had just released their album "Four Corners". The back up artist was Larry Carlton who played lead guitar on Kid Charlemagne. He had his set up SOO loud it hurt my ears so rather than get a ringing too early in the show I sat there mid 10th row with my fingers in my ears throughout his entire set. His volume just overloaded the hall. The Yellowjackets on the other hand, had their volume set at a lower volume. The drummer was on the back of the stage left side at a 45 dgree angle facing the mid hall with a oriental rug under his drumset, Which I believe helped to soften the kickdrum's reverberation off of the stage and into the hall. All in all the sound was much more evenly balanced. And yes their performance was I thought very close to the recording.
Why does rock concert sound suck?
I have been to two rock concert in the past year : Brit Floyd in Bridgeport CT and Eric Clapton at Madison Square Garden, NYC (last Monday)
For Brit Floyd I was about 40 feet form the stage and treble end was an ear-splitting distorted sound - the soprano solo on Dark Side of the Moon sounded like a chain saw running at 5x speed.
For Eric Clapton I was sitting at floor level about 20 rows behind the mixing desk - i.e., the opposite end from the stage. In this case the high top end was not so distorted, but the voices were still very harsh - seemingly a massive response peak at ~1500hz. Imagine AM radio with the treble turned up 20db.
I knew a lot of the words form the songs ahead of time of course, and just about recognized them, but otherwise the lyrics were unintelligible. The only exceptions were when he sang a quieter song - e.g., “Tears in Heaven” . Clapton moved back from the mic rather than place his mouth right next to it. Then the sound was quite listenable .
Of course managing the acoustics in such a big venue is no doubt a challenge — but does it have to be this bad?