Was a decent PA possible in 1965?

One of the things that has often been mentioned when discussing The Beatles is that they did not have stage monitors when they performed, and therefore could not hear themselves. Also, for many of their shows, the PA was just their vocal mics fed through the stadium PA system, so no one could hear them over the shrieks. Theoretically, did the equipment exist in, say, 1965 to overcome these problems? The Shure SM-57 was introduced in 1965, so that would have been a good choice for vocals and amplifiers. But what about 16-channel mixers, long-run snakes, 10-band equalizers, wedge monitors, hi-powered amplifiers and stacks of large speakers? Were they available in 1965 at any price? They certainly were available less than 10 years later.

I ask because I fully expect time travel to be possible in my lifetime and I plan on going back and making the 1965 U.S. tour awesome! ; )

j. D.

 

I'd have more important matters to fix if I had time travel......but we won't go there.

But yes, good PA was possible. In fact, there were organizations that had much better PA than what was used by touring rock acts in 1965. Large churches had the best systems both for voice and for the electronic organs, carillions and bell systems then used. The leading circuses did too.

Amplifiers were big enough, although not as big as we think of as being necessary. McIntosh had the MI200 and Altec the 260B and a couple of others. The speakers existed too, you just needed enough of them.


Touring groups didn't yet really understand the problem. Once that began to change, within two or three years the situation changed entirely. Rock and roll was still kiddie music in 1965 as far as even the groups themselves were concerned.

 

My experience -- though I'm not a PA mixer and have primarily done post-production for picture and production recording for dialogue only -- is that PA sound only started sounding really good with the invention of line array drivers about 20 years ago:

http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/...know_about_line_arrays_and_thanks_for_asking/

I noticed a quantum leap in sound quality for arenas and large concert venues around the early 1990s. Sophisticated measurement tools, acoustic design, and computer-assisted sound processing also helped quite a bit. None of this was even remotely possible in 1965.

If you plan to go back to 1965, instead of seeing the Beatles perform, do me a favor and hang around a few more years and instead do four things:

1) stop Martin Luther King from being assassinated in March of '68

2) stop Bobby Kennedy from being assassinated in June of '68

3) stop John Lennon from being assassinated in December of 1980

4) and stop the terrorists from crashing their planes in September of 2011.

Do these four things, and then you have my permission to watch the Beatles all you want.

In answer to your question, though: no, I don't think decent sound performance was possible in (say) Shea Stadium in 1965. Enclosed auditoriums... maybe, but there's too many variables to predict it. Horn driver speakers were all over the place in the 1960s.

 

Touring PA was invented by the Stones and Pink Floyd perfected it
The Dead had a very elaborate system
The Beatles left the road for lack of one.

 

Without derailing this thread into a discussion about more appropriate uses of time travel, I had hoped the winkie emoticon in my original post would indicate that my time travel comment was meant to be flippant. Yes, I would certainly have higher priorities than building a sound system for the Beatles should I ever get access to time travel.

 

The Bob Dylan tour of England 1965, they brought their own pa equipment with them. Possibly/probably the first band to ignore the house pa and reportedly their set-up was the most sophisticated seen in England at that time.

 

IIRC the Remains had access to a superior PA system in 1966, and the Beatles' management worked with them to provide sound for the tour. Is my recollection correct?

 

That would be the solo shows in 1965?. No band was involved with those performances.

If you mean the 1966 "world" tour, with a backing group (The Hawks, later to be known as The Band) that was much more extensive than just playing a few shows in England and also included shows in Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Scotland, Northern Ireland and France.

 

Sadly, I turn this into another thread referencing The Fab Four: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdQh8jol39k

Click "Show More" under the snazzy color picture and read about the set-up provided for sound reinforcement for their show at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Paul even comments "Oooh - it's loud, isn't it, eh? Great!"

 

You sir are correct: http://www.dmbeatles.com/forums/index.php?topic=8989.30;wap2

Check out Barry Tashian's site for more Remains info: http://theremains.com/

 

Yeah, that was getting off on a tangent.

Line arrays existed long before the 90s, and the Grateful Dead showed magnificent sound reinforcement was doable in the early 70s using nothing that had not existed in 1965, or even 1960, except in scale.

And lack of good sound was an unlikely reason for the Beatles to stop touring. They had the money, the contacts, and the example of other groups. Without going on a different tangent it's fair to say it was mostly that they no longer had to continue on and didn't want to. Insane legislation, insane women and insane substances all played parts, but the bottom line is they had solid lifetime incomes and had made their pile and could work with other people as they saw fit.

 

Line source (column arrays,voice only ) existed, but full range line arrays needed computer power ,this was VDOSC and arrived in the mid 90s
The Deads full stage rig was not a transportable solution in 65.

 

The Dead supposedly had an incredible PA system. They had litterally dosens of those ultra-rare high-powered Macintosh tube amps (sorry but I don't remember the model, you don't see these very often) driving some mamoth arrays of speakers.

For their vocals they had a very clever arrangement with a pair of mics for each singer which were taped-together and wired out-of-phase with each other (to cut down on the feedback by having the mics cancel-out most of their signal). They would only sing into one of the two mics so that their voices didn't cancel-out as well. I saw a picture of the system once. It was amazing for the time.

 

The problem with approach is a) it looks really ugly, and b) if you get an inch or two off-axis, it sounds like crap. It's great if you can hold your head in a vise; not great if you're a blitzed-out rock star.

Singing into a shotgun microphone would work just as well. Realistically, a hypercardioid would make more sense as a stage mic. The mics and speakers that Bob Heil eventually came up with for the Dead were phenomenally good for the time -- but not available in the 1960s.

 

Which is part of the reason that the Dead also started their own trucking company.

 

AFAIK they used the MC2300, the first production solid state high power McIntosh amplifier. There were tube high power McIntosh amps, the MI200 and the MC3500/MI350, and some OEM models but I don't think they were used.

 

Yes it was possible in 1965 , as The Beach Boys had a custom made PA rig made for them and they carried this around with their own personal sound man on their tours.

 

Charlie Watkins (WEM) had multi 1Kw line arrays for Stones in the Park,but for voice only

 

Did any of these early PA systems have stage monitors? The biggest complaint that The Beatles had wasn't so much that their fans couldn't hear them but that they couldn't hear themselves, which they believe was contributing to a decline in their musicianship.

J. D.

 

Ah! Thank you! "The Beatles' only visit to Atlanta lasted around 10 hours, but was remarkable for one key reason: monitor speakers on the stage allowed them to hear themselves play - a rarity during the whirlwind of Beatlemania."

J. D.

 

There's a scene in the Monterey Pop Festival (1967) movie where David Crosby is listening to the PA and remarks something like this..."Wow...finally a really good PA !"...

Here's photo's of it, 1967, while Janis and Big Brother were performing....even appears to be a monitor of sorts...



and Ravi Shankar from out front...



I can't tell what's over there....Voice of the Theatre, Altec Lansing ?? Anyone ?

 

I think you mean the '66 tour? Bob's '65 tour of the UK, as documented in Don't Look Back, was acoustic, unless I'm mistaken. It would have been the '66 tour with the Band where they would have brought their own PA, I think.

I recall reading in one of the Who biographies I have read that the Who were the first band to attempt to go beyond the Vox AC 30 with no monitor stage setup that was the norm in 1964/65. I believe they were using Marshall amps as early as 1965, and also had custom PA equipment for Roger's vocals (so that he could be heard over the Marshall guitar amps) as well.

In this documentary footage from early 1965, Townshend appears to be using a Fender head on top of a "stack," although not yet a Marshall stack. But I think the Who were the first band to really push towards the stage volume revolution that we associate with Hendrix and The Cream in late '66/early '67.

By 1966, we see Townshend using two stacks on stage, with Marshall heads, although I believe that at times some of the speaker cabinets were dummies, just for show, another innovation that Townshend pioneered. Even with the horrible sound on this YouTube clip, you can hear that Entwistle is getting a bass sound light years beyond what Paul McCartney was getting out of his Hofner bass during the Beatlemania touring years.

 

One more Who live clip from 1966. Again, even through the horrible YouTube recording, you can hear that they have taken stage volume to the proverbial next level, compared to, say, the Beatles' Budokan show of the same year.

 

Yes Voice of the theatre. But wow talk about woefully underspeakered.

Ive been to venues that had literally speaker stacks with what looked to be about 40 speakers on each side as big as those altecs.

Things have radically changed sound wise.

I remember seeing Radiohead, from a distance of a couple hundred feet and feeling the sound through my whole body, like I was in my living room at full blast.