Interesting Woodstock Article about Bill Hanley's Sound System

kevzep

Its all about the Music
I know every time a new thread pops up here about Woodstock pops up here, people like to say "ad nauseam", "flogging Dead Horses", "been done" blah blah blah....
You'll get over it....

We are approaching 50 years since Woodstock, and so I always keep an eye on what people are saying about it around its anniversary each year, and I came across this article.
Its of interest to me as I have been in Live Audio for over 30 years now, and I have seen great technological advances in my time.
But I do like looking back at the origins of Live Audio, and at the beginning, there was McIntosh.
I have a dream of how interesting it would be to assemble the same system, and set it up at that venue and have a listen to it today so we can see how far we have or haven't come.
A lot of people dismiss the system by todays standards, but I can tell you from experience, that even that old system would probably surprise a lot of people, I'd say a fair amount of people most likely had a great audio experience at Woodstock thanks to Bill Hanley, McIntosh, Altec, Shure, Teletronix etc etc...

Lets see how many pics we can plaster over this thread, there always seems to be more pictures I have never seen before coming out of the woodwork!!
I am sure @4-2-7 will lead the charge!!

Here's the link to an article I thought was very interesting.

http://fohonline.com/articles/milestones/woodstock-50-years-after/
 
Great article, I lived about ten miles from the concert site and made it to about a mile away.
My family knew a bunch of the local people involved and my dad’s store was one of the few local ticket outlets - it was crazy.
At the time I was 14 years old so didn’t fully appreciate Woodstock.

Fours years later was the (larger) Summer Jam concert in Watkins Glen NY that I greatly enjoyed - see picture below.


123088F8-A770-4ADA-A3BF-FD731D308AD0.jpeg
 
Watkins Glen NY
Yeah and that one had The Wall of Sound, they even had to go get 4 more MC2300 the day of the show. They made an emergency run in a helicopter to McIntosh and they opened up on Saturday so they could get them and setup for the show.
 
Yeah and that one had The Wall of Sound, they even had to go get 4 more MC2300 the day of the show. They made an emergency run in a helicopter to McIntosh and they opened up on Saturday so they could get them and setup for the show.
It looks like a different configuration of the Wall of sound, like a more conventional Left and Right stack either side of the stage which makes sense if other bands were playing as well.....
 
Great article, I lived about ten miles from the concert site and made it to about a mile away.
My family knew a bunch of the local people involved and my dad’s store was one of the few local ticket outlets - it was crazy.
At the time I was 14 years old so didn’t fully appreciate Woodstock.

Fours years later was the (larger) Summer Jam concert in Watkins Glen NY that I greatly enjoyed - see picture below.


View attachment 1585592
Oh wow, thats really interesting Jim, thanks for sharing, I can imagine the chaos in the surrounding area.....
 
It looks like a different configuration of the Wall of sound, like a more conventional Left and Right stack either side of the stage which makes sense if other bands were playing as well.....
I don't think it ever had the same setup, it was constantly evolving from show to show. What the Dead and Alembic where doing was tweaking on drugs, geeking on electronics, and the dead had the money to play around. :biggrin:

I do have to hand it to them and the drugs, they had vision of what could be. At that time they started to explore because the PA systems for concerts that size sucked. They showed if you care about what the audiences hears in these large venues and your charging them, you need to spend the money on the PA so they can hear it and still have quality sound.
 
I wonder how many monaural line array channels this reinforcement system had.

Lesh had 4, one for each pickup, the piano and vocal had a line source as well as phased array, so would that be 4 more channels. The drum kit?s? had a Mc3500 as did the vocals.....there must have been at least 14 line source speaker arrays....probably need to count them.

This would have been a interesting case study at Syd-Aud-Com. It certainly was not the system they were using at Cobo in 1977 even though there were blue meter eyes staring out at us all over the stage.
 
I wonder how many monaural line array channels this reinforcement system had.

Lesh had 4, one for each pickup, the piano and vocal had a line source as well as phased array, so would that be 4 more channels. The drum kit?s? had a Mc3500 as did the vocals.....there must have been at least 14 line source speaker arrays....probably need to count them.

This would have been a interesting case study at Syd-Aud-Com. It certainly was not the system they were using at Cobo in 1977 even though there were blue meter eyes staring out at us all over the stage.
Bear was a hoot to chat with about the WOS. I sure wish I'd of archived that convo. He explained to me that he was at his best when he could see the sound coming out of the speakers while baked on acid. He was convinced of it.
 
I have a different view about the drugs sorry to say.

Yes, its proven in these artistic areas that drugs can alter your mind to reveal an idea you would not normally have thought of or see things from a different perspective, and that is so true for songwriters and in this case, the idea of an awesome sounding system, but thats where the buck stops.
Its why certain things only go so far, to go any further towards what systems eventually became, clear minds using structured thought processes are the way forward.
I hate drugs, I hate what they do to people and I feel very very strongly about it having watched friends and others go down the black hole and ruin their lives and their health, marriages, friendships, and awesome people become retarded losers after having successful intelligent lives.....However to be fair, there are others with stronger constitutions that managed to rise above and get through those years without too much damage.
Okay, rant over.....

The Wall of sound was incredibly innovative and many of those theories were developed further and are in use today.
It was well ahead of its time, and i would have liked to have heard it.

Bill Hanleys system was a more generic approach, and what became the norm was a combination of some of the WOS technology with the Bill Hanley deployment and certainly using a Front of House mix position.
The WOS idea was a bit too specific to be used for other bands, so in this situation at this festival it looks like they set the system up in a more convention manner to allow other bands to use it as well.

@4-2-7 Yes the WOS was always evolving, but I believe from my own experience in the music industry and how things work at festivals, that they set the WOS in a conventional manner to allow other bands to play through it, it could have never worked for other bands set up they way it was for Grateful Dead only shows.
 
This was before the Wall became the Wall. The PA didn't go behind the band until November 30th, 1973, when they showed up at the Boston Music Hall with the configuration that is basically seen in the Watkins Glen show and realized it wouldn't fit on the stage. So, they put it all behind the band for the first time. It wasn't until the following March that the Wall as we know it was unveiled at the Cow Palace. From that point on, it stayed more or less the same with refinements in each section along the way.

Here's a shot of Phil Lesh surveying the Music Hall arrangement.19731130_0983.jpgWOS19731130.jpg
 
This was before the Wall became the Wall. The PA didn't go behind the band until November 30th, 1973, when they showed up at the Boston Music Hall with the configuration that is basically seen in the Watkins Glen show and realized it wouldn't fit on the stage. So, they put it all behind the band for the first time. It wasn't until the following March that the Wall as we know it was unveiled at the Cow Palace. From that point on, it stayed more or less the same with refinements in each section along the way.

Here's a shot of Phil Lesh surveying the Music Hall arrangement.View attachment 1598062View attachment 1598063
I like that shot, oozes early beginnings of what would ultimately become the wall as you say....MC2300's nestled among the speaker arrays......
 
I see in the Lesh picture that they are not using the B&K microphones but what appears to be a pair of EVs? wired to cancel.

All the disjointed line arrays must have made for some nasty comb filtering, I am sure there had to be some large dead spots out in the crowd.

The arrays as used in the later setup for vocals and piano, had to be much more uniform and certainly seem to be far more sophisticated.
 
I see in the Lesh picture that they are not using the B&K microphones but what appears to be a pair of EVs? wired to cancel.

All the disjointed line arrays must have made for some nasty comb filtering, I am sure there had to be some large dead spots out in the crowd.

The arrays as used in the later setup for vocals and piano, had to be much more uniform and certainly seem to be far more sophisticated.
What may be happening with those arrays dotted around the place is they may well have had different sources running through them in which case you wouldn't get comb filtering to the extent you would if they were all running the same source.
 
It has been a long time since I designed with EASE a reinforcement system but the concepts still intrigue me. Spending a week at SydAudCom at EAW didn't hurt either.
 
It has been a long time since I designed with EASE a reinforcement system but the concepts still intrigue me. Spending a week at SydAudCom at EAW didn't hurt either.
Things have become more streamlined, accurate, user friendly.
We have a program which is made by the speaker system manufacturer, you can import .dwg or draw the venue yourself. Then place the system, you can map the venue after deploying the system and doing your angles and system design.
Once you enable 3D mapping, you can assess the SPL coverage and then make adjustments as necessary, if adjustments are to be made, you have to leave the mapping mode so it doesn't recalculate every time you move something.....
Sample 3D map and then the operations window showing the available parameters which can be adjusted.

This program is specific to the Speaker Manufacturer, the speaker systems use proprietary amplifiers which are made by Camco in Germany, there are 4 different amp models, and you can choose which ones and how many elements one amplifier is running....its quite an involved process, I do this for every show we do as every system is slightly different, the venue drawings stay the same obviously.
Things have changed somewhat since these early beginnings, but they did pioneer the way to where we are now....
Demo System.jpeg Demo system 2.jpeg
 
If I remember correctly the EASE program was written in East Germany on smuggled in 386 Intel based computers to help design the accoustics of the East Berlin philharmonic concert hall.

It was then distributed by Renkus Heinz here in N. America.

I would build in my Toshiba 486 laptop the church sanctuary or venue then load the completed venue layout into my desk Pentium based computer.

Almost all the speaker manufacturers would offer performance data for their speakers in compatible data downloads (phone modems back then) or on floppy that we would get in notebooks.

Plug in the speaker data in the afternoon and let the computer churn overnight and by the morning you might have a completed run. Research the results, start formulating possible alternative speakers or locations, plug those into the computer and run the program.

Then go pick up Wilma, get a side of Brontosaurus ribs at the drive in and when back at the office the next day check the new results.

Then aiming of the horns was always interesting as we would make the spot on the floor and then the guys in the rafters could use a laser pointer to adjust the rigging we had preset in the shop to fine tune the aiming.

The program worked remardedly well. Certainly a lot less time consuming than detailing out the math for a 3d expanding propagation patern by hand. And then educated guessing for the time delays.....

I have often wondered if such modeling could be used for the home enviroment; most likely the speaker manufacturers would be petrified to allow end users to actually see what their beloved home speaker propagation patterns actually looked like.

I ran into that with Richard Vandersteen years ago, not that that California cowboy was scared of anything, he did consider that end users just would not understand.

I think I did see recently that his latest greatest speakers do incorporate DSP processing though.
 
If I remember correctly the EASE program was written in East Germany on smuggled in 386 Intel based computers to help design the accoustics of the East Berlin philharmonic concert hall.

It was then distributed by Renkus Heinz here in N. America.

I would build in my Toshiba 486 laptop the church sanctuary or venue then load the completed venue layout into my desk Pentium based computer.

Almost all the speaker manufacturers would offer performance data for their speakers in compatible data downloads (phone modems back then) or on floppy that we would get in notebooks.

Plug in the speaker data in the afternoon and let the computer churn overnight and by the morning you might have a completed run. Research the results, start formulating possible alternative speakers or locations, plug those into the computer and run the program.

Then go pick up Wilma, get a side of Brontosaurus ribs at the drive in and when back at the office the next day check the new results.

Then aiming of the horns was always interesting as we would make the spot on the floor and then the guys in the rafters could use a laser pointer to adjust the rigging we had preset in the shop to fine tune the aiming.

The program worked remardedly well. Certainly a lot less time consuming than detailing out the math for a 3d expanding propagation patern by hand. And then educated guessing for the time delays.....

I have often wondered if such modeling could be used for the home enviroment; most likely the speaker manufacturers would be petrified to allow end users to actually see what their beloved home speaker propagation patterns actually looked like.

I ran into that with Richard Vandersteen years ago, not that that California cowboy was scared of anything, he did consider that end users just would not understand.

I think I did see recently that his latest greatest speakers do incorporate DSP processing though.
The first incarnation of this 3D sound mapping software was a bit like that, go have a coffee, in fact go to lunch, or maybe, if it was a big system, leave it running over night......but then of course it would often crash!!
Thankfully its not like that now....
You can calculate the delay times required, Voice/EQ the system, all in this program, the wonders of modern computing power!!
Ew, dirty old RH, well, to be fair, some of their products were OK, we had some in our inventory in the late 80's up to the mid 90's....Their horns were pretty nice sounding to be honest. A little fragile, but pretty decent all the same, they'd have better top end response and a more linear performance than their JBL counterparts.
 
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