Are Stadium Shows quickly becoming a thing of the past?

Everybody does. That person was a dedicated System Tech, and they're actually controlling the individual levels of groups of speakers.

Everything changed a decade or so ago with Line Arrays.

 

I’d already seen & heard The Wall show in 2011 in Manchester and was blown away then. Unlike yourself, the album itself chimes very deeply with me, so when the Wembley show was announced I had zero reservations about going. Of course as soon as I’d scored a ticket in Roger’s website pre-sale, he announced an arena date for Manchester on the Monday after the Saturday Wembley stadium date. Glad I made the trip down South though.

I’ve never had the ‘pleasure’ of the O2. Getting decent sound at a venue like Manchester Arena is difficult enough unless you’ve got the sound systems of a Waters or McCartney, I can only imagine the challenges of getting something decent sound wise out of somewhere as cavernous as the O2.

 

Wow, looking at a map, you're right. It doesn't feel that way when I drive there - my sense of scale is horribly off. I blame the not-to-scale WMATA rail maps for warping my perception reality. I definitely should've read the thread better though before spouting half-googled anecdotes, my bad.

 

Yeah, I know the venues in the Boston area and their locations - I've been to Fenway, Gillette, TD and whatever they call the shed in Mansfield these days. The post to which I responded confused stadiums with arenas, so I just pointed out the difference...

 

No biggie!

Dunno where you live in the area, but I grew up in Fairfax out near GMU and I'm old enough to remember when the Cap Center - which is very close to the location of FedEx Field - did seem like it was in the middle of nowhere.

Back then, it kinda was. Even though it was only a few miles outside of DC, there was no Metro access - heck, there was no Metro period when they built the place! - and the suburbs simply seemed farther out back then.

Now I actually work in Prince George's County, so I'm out in that area all the time. Strangely, it seems less distant now!

 

It may reach the point where stadium shows price themselves out of the entertainment market.

The number of people willing to pay £100 plus to see an act they may have seen before is surely dwindling.

Of course, young people like spending money on 'experiences'. The stadium music business might sustain itself by marketing itself to young people in this way....

 

There are so many performances there that the major sound companies all know that venue and have a standard approach to doing sound in it. Roger Waters' is using Clair Brothers, in my opinion the very best live sound company in the world.

 

When someone bad-mouthed the audio on the Stones' "Voodoo Lounge" tour, I was going to bring up Clair Brothers and the 1997 "Bridges" tour, 3 years later. At the time, much hype was published about how they had made innovations in stadium sound, and true to form, I didn't hear a bad "Bridges" show in 5 different football stadia (including opening night).

Anyway, those articles seem to be long gone. Found lots of hype about Tait Tower, who I had never even heard of before today, but they are apparently the company that builds the skeletons and stages upon which the big tours strut and fret, and work cheek by jowl with Clair.

Still, nothing is perfect. There are spots in arenas and stadiums where I simply will not sit at any price because of a high probability of problems - usually these days, it's down to echo, which I find intolerable, or loss of the high end which is also pretty bad. So, plunk down hundreds of dollars and say the serenity prayer?

 

The thing about the line array systems used these days is it they have a very wide horizontal dispersion and a very narrow vertical one. There are deployed in tall vertical stacks, and most of them are shaped like a keystone from the side taller the front of the cabinet shorter at the back. This allowed to be hung forming a curve. The speakers at the top of the stack are aimed at the nosebleed seats, the ones that at the bottom are aimed down at the audience.



Here's some Clair speakers hung in different ways. On the left and right are typical hangs the one on the right curved as much as it can. The speakers in the middle are subwoofers. The subwoofer in the middle is reversed, and I believe out of phase, to form a cardioid stack to make the bass more directional.

2 to 4 speakers are driven by one extremely high wattage amplifier (7000 watts!), and each amplifier has remote volume control that is adjusted by the systems engineer.

The mids and highs in each individual cabinet have a vertical dispersion of only about 15 degrees, and stacking them one on top of another reduces the dispersion even more. The idea is that as little sound as possible winds up hitting the ceiling or the floor, is it all hits the audience. This allows them to be less loud overall.

Inevitably, there's going to be some terrible places for listening to music in an arena or stadium - the places just aren't built for music, and in fact they're often designed to be reflective to amplify the sound of an audience of sports fans back at themselves. Sound engineers really do work as hard as they can to deliver good sound, but they are fighting architecture and physics everyday.

 

You are talking about the old stadium, correct? So that would be the Born in the USA tour? That was nearly 35 years ago; things have changed considerably. Floors are just better equipped, better organized and easier to navigate in the US these days. I would say there is a zero possibility that you will see people relieving themselves in the dugouts at any reasonably organized stadium show in the US today. Sound is much better. Echo is still a problem in certain locations in any venue, and is a major problem in certain stadiums, mostly those with “hard roofs”. For example, if they close the roof in Seattle or Minnesota, sound might be pretty bad. But, they are making improvements all the time.

Transportation logistics can still be a nightmare.

 

I think in the past, that would have been the case. But, looking at fan interviews, it seems they attract a huge multi-ethnic crowd that doesn’t even need to understand Korean. Amazing. And it’s truly a global phenomenon. They have stadium shows scheduled in South America and Europe as well.

Well, if there is one thing I know about the young female demographic, it’s that no one can predict what they will or will not like. But, this one is genuinely baffling.

 

If the young girls of their grandmother's generation could understand Liverpudlian accents, anything is possible.

 

A young singer-songwriter who plays one-man shows. I saw him three years ago when he was a guest at an Eric Clapton show at the Budokan (they both rep Martin acoustics). Most of the audience had no idea who he was. He’s exploded since then - his current tour has a chance to overtake U2 360 Tour as the highest grossing tour of all time. Again, almost impossible for anyone to have predicted that a chubby kid without classic “idol” looks, playing an acoustic, would be a stadium act.

As I said, you never know.

 

Stadium shows always have a fair # of "cheap seats", too.

You can't really sell 70,000 tickets if all are $100+...

 

Even the cheap seats ain't that cheap anymore. It can easily be £60 here for a seat right at the back of the venue.

 

Yeah, and imagine his net touring stadiums as a solo act with just an acoustic guitar and a looper!

 

There are more shows being booked at 79,000 seat capacity Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City in the past five years than ever before, including Kenny Chesney multiple times, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, U2, Guns and Roses, Rolling Stones, and One Direction.

Also Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City had not booked concerts for years by choice but hosted a Billy Joel concert last year .

 

Quite right - no pesky musicians and less smelly roadies to eat into Ed's precious profits! And from the looks of things, he isn't spending a lot of money on stage clothes.

One day, Ed Sheeran is going to be richer than HM The Queen hereslf.

 

Sad but true, almost.

 

One can only hope.

Easily the worst shows I've ever seen are the few in stadiums. The last one was the Stones in '89, which was really more like an event than a concert, and in that regard was a lot of fun. Outside of that one, the shows that are the least memorable are inevitably stadium shows.

 

Yeah, Rog does not mess about when it comes to sound. Here is an interesting article on the Hyde Park setup, for those who did not know:

Martin Audio on a High in Hyde Park - ETNow.com

 

That's true, but it's relative. In 2014, the Stones played Rich Stadium in Buffalo, New York. They played to 50,000 and the box office was $8.6 million - average ticket price was about $175. Not cheap, to be sure, but compare their arena statistics. In 2012, the Stones played the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. The box office was $7.3 million (so a little less than the revenue in Buffalo), but only 14,471 attended the arena show - making the average ticket price $504! Obviously, with an average price of $500+, young fans (other than those accompanying their wealthy parents) are priced out of the market. For this reason, I actually prefer the atmosphere at stadium shows.

 

Not sure which I like more - Sheeran's white t-shirt or Clapton's sweat pants.

 

Yeah, you're right about that! Some pretty awful seats are still relatively pricey, given how far from the stage they are!

 

Baseball stadium shows have surged in popularity in recent years. They used to be fairly infrequent, but then artists thought it'd be fun to play the legendary venues - Fenway, Wrigley, Trop Dome - so they've shot up in bookings within the last decade...