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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?

oliver_reid

Showing 2 responses by mitchagain

mitchagain
414 posts
 

The larger the venue is, the worse it will probably sound. When you add in the stratospheric prices at most of the larger venues, this is not a good mix.

Learn where the good sounding venues are in your area and support them. In the past year I've seen King Crimson, The Ocean Blue, Gang of Four, Steve Hackett, Joe Jackson, China Crisis and Norah Jones. All of them were in good sounding venues and the cumulative ticket price of those shows was far less than what a ticket would have cost me to see Elton John or Van Morrison when they recently passed thru town

mitchagain
414 posts
 

After attending a couple of terrible sounding shows at an outdoor venue in San Antonio, I swore I'd never attend another show there. That is until Steely Dan was booked. I figured if their sound guy couldn't tame the sonic issues there, then no one could.

Sure enough, it only took him about 5 songs into the opening act (Michael McDonald) for Steely Dan's sound guy to dial in the sound. So, as has been mentioned numerous times, the sound guy has a huge influence on the issue of good or bad sound. 

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