One big thing that was behind the wall was attempt to deal with intermodulation distortion, which was more of an issue back then with the more primitive electronics and speakers. So, each string could get assigned to a half stack. The way the amps were set up was that there were two 40 foot stacks of 15" JBLs. There was a routing matrix (all the knobs along the top) that allowed Phil to assign each string to a portion of his amps. The deal with the bass is that it's quad in the sense that it had a pair of regular pickups as well as a quad pickups that sensed each string separately. The pictures were taken by Richard Pechner, and you can view more images of The Grateful Dead and their Wall of Sound on his website. You can read more about it here and here, which has mostly the same info but different pictures. The Dead only used it for a single tour because it was unusually costly to transport and very labor-intensive to set up, but it's something to marvel at even today. The reports were that the system sounded incredible and was insanely loud and clean for the time, so it garnered nothing but raves.īack then this system was light years ahead of any other sound system on the planet, and in many ways, it's never been duplicated. This meant that anything coming into the mic other than a vocal sung very close to one mic would cancel out, so you'd only hear the vocal in its particular sound system and nothing else from off the stage. They put two directional mics out-of-phase with each other and spaced them 60mm apart as on the left. The crew came up with an innovative idea for vocal miking using differential mics that really made the whole thing work however. The individual systems were powered by 300 watt per channel McIntosh amps, which were always noted for excellent sound and about the most powerful amp that you could get at the time. Each system was placed behind the player so they could hear it, and since each system was made up of multiple speaker cabinets, could be directed so that most of the sound was aimed directly at the audience instead of bouncing around the venue. There was one system for the vocals placed in the center, one for each guitar, one for each string of Phil Lesh's bass (yes, you read that correctly), one for the piano, one for both drummer's bass drum, and one each for the rest of each drummer's kit. The "Wall of Sound" was actually comprised of 11 independent sound systems, as you can see from the picture on the left. This is what prompted the Dead's sound crew and Alembic to come up with a way for the band to not only hear themselves, but to give the audience the best possible listening experience as well. Plus, on-stage monitoring was still in its infancy, so every artist had a difficult time hearing themselves.
The systems were tiny by today's standards, with a lot of non-matching components used by PA owners just to be able to cover the audience. Since the band only used the system briefly, not many people know about it, but it certainly was very forward thinking in so many ways.įor as good as recording was in the 60's and 70's, live sound system technology had really only started and lagged far behind. I can across this page recently about the incredibly innovative "Wall of Sound" sound system used by the Grateful Dead for their 1974 tour.
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