LONDON – The hand-built quadraphonic mixing consoles used on Pink Floyd's Momentary Lapse of Reason and Division Bell world tours are to be auctioned at Bonhams on Dec. 15, with a percentage of the proceeds going to concert industry charity Stage Hand, the new name for the PSA Welfare & Benevolent Fund.
The consoles to be auctioned are currently owned by Britannia Row Productions, the sound company originally formed and owned by Pink Floyd.
Britannia Row has been independent for the last 26 years. Every Pink Floyd tour since the late 1960s featured quadraphonic sound – one of the many live sound and lighting effects pioneered by the band.
Sound effects included helicopters, the chiming clocks and gongs of Dark Side of The Moon and many more. These were whirled around massive arenas and stadiums using banks of loudspeakers positioned in an approximate diamond layout, with one stack at the rear facing the stage, the two side stacks to either side on a line slightly behind the mixing desk position, with the main left-and-right PA handling the front ‘point' of the diamond. The effects were sent to the speakers using one of the special hand-built quadraphonic (quad) mixing desks.
Only six generations of quad mixing desks or external quad panning devices were made during the band's performing history between 1969 and 1994.
"We have kept these mixing desks on our stock and looked after them very carefully because of their historic place in the Pink Floyd performance legend," noted Britannia Row productions director Mike Lowe.
"With the onslaught of digital technology, the ways to deliver quadraphonic sound has radically improved, and we felt the best outcome would be to offer them to collectors at auction and in the process make a donation to Stage Hand."
Stage Hand (a.k.a. the PSA Welfare & Benevolent Fund) is a U.K. registered charity, supported by the Production Services Association (PSA), a trade body for concert and event crew. The Welfare & Benevolent Fund offers financial hardship support and retraining grants for those in the industry who are unable to work through illness or injury.
"This is a unique and exciting opportunity for a Pink Floyd fan, collector or museum to own a piece of the band's technical heritage," said Bonhams consultant specialist Stephen Maycock. "The desks are hand-built one-offs specifically designed for Pink Floyd's tours, and because the music world has adopted digital technology on a large scale, it's highly unlikely that anything similar will ever be made again."
The Quadraphonic Sound of Pink Floyd: A Brief History
1: 1967 – The Azimuth Coordinator. A quad panning device that featured two panning joysticks in a large metal box, it was built in 1967 by Abbey Road sound engineer Bernard Speight and used for the Floyd's Games For May show at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. It was stolen after the show.
1969 – Its replacement, a second Azimuth Coordinator, was first used at a Royal Festival Hall concert in 1969. It was also used by record producer Alan Parsons during the recording of Dark Side of the Moon (an album which was issued in both stereo and quadraphonic versions). This device is now on display in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
2. 1972 – British pro audio manufacturer Allen & Heath is commissioned to build the MOD1. This quad console was built for Pink Floyd's live use around 1972 and can be seen in their film Live in Pompeii. This was subsequently sold and is thought to have ended up in a storage facility in North London.
3. 1973 – Allen & Heath built a second quad board in 1973. This was used for the 1974 Winter Tour. Its whereabouts are unknown.
4. 1977 – Another British pro audio manufacturer, Midas, builds a pair of mirror PF1 consoles (so called because they exactly mirror each other's facilities). These were based on the Midas Pro4 console design. They had input and output sections and could be used as stand-alone consoles. They fed signals into a central, specially designed quad routing box, and were used on the 1977 In The Flesh tour, also known as the Animals tour.
In 1982, a fire at Alexandra Palace in London, where Britannia Row had set up sound systems for the Capital Radio Jazz Festival, destroyed one of the Midas Mirror consoles.
5. 1982 – In response, Midas quickly built a one-off replacement to feed a quad panner built by Britannia Row electronics engineer Les Matthews for The Wall tour. This was built by and supplied to Pink Floyd by Britannia Row, the soundco that was originally formed and owned by Pink Floyd, but has been independent for the last 26 years.
The original surviving Mirror board, the replacement for the destroyed board and the matching quad router are now on display in a museum in Paris.
6. 1987 – The Les Mathews quad panning device went on to be used for the Momentary Lapse of Reason tour. (The tour was originally planned to last just 11 weeks, but ended up playing to 5.5 million people during 1987-89.) The device is one of the items to be auctioned at Bonhams on Dec. 15.
7. 1994 – Midas XL3 quad console. This was commissioned by Britannia Row for the Division Bell tour in 1994. This is the second console to be auctioned at Bonhams on Dec. 15.
Both of the latter two units have been meticulously maintained in full working condition and the desk that was built for Division Bell has seen occasional use since Pink Floyd's last live touring show on October 29, 1994 at Earls Court in London.
