I think that McIntosh should team up the remainder of the Dead and rebuild the Wall of Sound for a weekend festival in New York that would feature great bands and would broadcast incredible sound. Even team with JBL as that is the speaker that was used in the original setup. It would be a cool advertising campaign for the brands and a would be an audiophiles dream to go to something like this. There is no way modern PA systems could replicate the true "Wall of Sound". Who else is with me?
I think some things are better left as history and in the past, this would be one of them....
The problem is that the Wall of Sound was designed specifically around The Grateful Dead's setup, it would not suit other bands, and from a musicians point of view, going back to something where you are in front of the main system would be something very difficult for the musicians to deal with.
Although it was innovative at the time, the idea around the vocal microphones for instance were at best a compromise, and if you have seen the Grateful Dead movie, you will hear how crappy the vocal sound was.
They went to painstaking lengths in the movie restoration to try and resolve the awful vocal sound from those crazy B&K microphones, and they did an OK job, but although they had great cancellation and rejection from picking up what was coming from the main system, the quality of the vocal was poor.
I doubt whether the sound would be that incredible, MC2300's are horrendously underpowered by today's standards, and the drivers in the PA system are well behind what we have now in terms of efficiency and performance....
Unfortunately we are accustomed to much better sound reinforcement at concerts today, no matter how much your memory might think how better it might have been back then....
That system was the most innovative approach to live sound reinforcement back in its day, and some of those innovations are still in use today, but to set that thing up now I believe (from 30yrs in Live audio) would be disappointing....
The coverage wouldn't be acceptable by today's standards, it did not evenly distribute audio from 25hz-20khz across the entire venue, you had to be in a position where you could see all the drivers, if you look it up, the engineers who used to run it, talk about the ideal sweet spot.
It would not be acceptable by today's standards....
The Grateful Dead stopped using that system because it became completely uneconomical to use, they were actually losing money in the end.
It took a long time to set up and required an enormous resource and money to run.....
Although it was innovative, if you hunt around on the web, there is a lot of info out there about it, and I am sorry to say, The Dead were not sorry to see it go......
The way to approach it would be to build something which is a modern interpretation of what it was......
But even then I seriously doubt whether any musician these days would have any interest in standing in front of the main PA system to perform....
And the result as I said earlier would be disappointing, too much technology under the bridge.....
It would cost a horrendous amount of money to actually build it and implement it, and for what? One concert of nostalgia, and sub standard sound?
JBL did the cone drivers but the horns were actually Electrovoice....
The problem is, McIntosh are using it as a marketing tool, and it was cool back in '74, but unlike old HiFi gear, it was a Dinosaur.....and should be left in the past.....
There is not the same parallel between old HiFi gear and live sound reinforcement, and this is where the confusion starts....
I know people will jump in and tell us it was the best sounding system they had ever heard, but seriously, it probably was then, but it most certainly would not be now.....
