What's there to fix. Go to concert, look around, masses loving it, you, the audiophile cringing, too bad for you. Live rock concerts and audiophiles hardly ever mix well.
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?
Showing 2 responses by sns
@dpop Totally agree, drives me nuts!. Really crazy how audience behavior has changed over the decades. This as it pertained to rock concerts and personal experience. Early 70's audiences rather reverential in that they were totally engaged with performance, quiet and even sitting in their seats with exception of encores. This behavior was common at indoor venues, outdoor or festival audiences far more rowdy. Over time audience participation increased, I really think Peter Frampton's Come Alive release exacerbated the audience as participant in performance thing, Springsteen certainly added to it.
As far as recent sound quality at shows, I've seen Railroad Earth, Beach House and War On Drugs at same local venue, Railroad Earth best of three. This theatre has pretty bad room acoustics and house sound reinforcement guys have no idea, louder and louder better for them. Railroad Earth saved by being more acoustic based band. Saw Kraftwerk recently at another venue, much better room acoustics here and house sound reinforcement guys controlled volume much better.
The problem largely lies with house sound guys and equipment, you learn some venues never produce good sound. In order to get good sound, very high likelihood band has to have their own sound guys, equipment, and how many bands have the resources or even care about good sound quality to do that.
|