Tonight I have a little time off, and I am watching a Stanley Cup playoff game between the San Jose Sharks and the Nashville Predators. The game is being played at the SAP Arena in San Jose, CA. The Sharks’ hockey fans love that building. It’s loud and reverberant, with lots of hard reflective surfaces, and virtually no acoustical treatment — perfect for amplifying crowd noise to intimidate the visiting team. The very conditions that make an arena so perfect for hockey games make it an extremely challenging environment for live music shows. The building makes live music sound hard, unconnected and overly bright. It has never been one of my favorite concert venues. Plus, I am a devout fan of the rival Los Angeles Kings.
Much of my professional life has been spent in acoustically unfriendly performance environments — the sports arenas and stadiums around the world — working purposefully through each show and trusting that the knowledge accumulated from experience and the advance of audio technology will combine to help me deliver the best possible live music product to the assembled audience. Okay… that’s the company line. The reality is that every venue is completely different and presents its own set of challenges, and, sometimes, small victories are more achievable than overly optimistic expectations.
Back in the Day
In the 1960s, the popular music business exponentially grew from supporting multi-act concerts that played in theaters to presenting single band/artist tours that could fill larger places of public assembly such as sports arenas, baseball and football stadiums, racetracks and open land concert sites. The indoor arenas had already been home to traveling circuses, ice shows and boxing/wrestling matches. As those forms of diversion began to decline in popularity, it was a natural progression for promoters to include music shows in the rotation.
The large hockey/basketball facilities in major cities offered all-season access, the necessary infrastructure and experienced union crews that that made anchoring major tours in this type of venue both possible and attractive. I have often said that touring industry production crews have more in common with the circus than any other form of entertainment. The parallels are easy to imagine.
Sports arenas make sense as concert venues for promoters and bands because they are able to sell 20,000 (or more) seats for a single performance. Rock shows are also a fantastic source of supplemental income for the arena owners. A professional hockey team or basketball team only plays 41 home games during the regular season. Even the addition of preseason and postseason games only results in about 65 home games at a maximum. Putting on rock shows is a simple and profitable way of filling up those 300 remaining days of the year.
A Different Slant
Here in my hometown of Los Angeles, Staples Center is a unique case. The Los Angeles Kings NHL hockey team owns the arena. Concert promoter/management company/real estate developer, AEG Entertainment, in turn, owns the Kings. The Kings play all of their home games at Staples Center, as do the two NBA tenants, Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angeles Clippers. The home game schedules of these three teams take up approximately half the year. Add in the two weeks that the annual Grammy event takes over the building and the various annual special events, and there is precious little time left for concerts. But when they are performed, AEG promotes the events as well as providing the venue. It’s a cash cow.
It turns out that people will come out in droves to see a popular entertainer — even in conditions that are less than optimum for experiencing a musical production. It is the gathering itself, not the circumstances, that is the ultimate attraction. In fact, many of the world’s arenas are old and dirty with bothersome acoustical properties and compromised sight lines. But still, the people turn out in droves and accept certain compromises to share the experience of their favorite entertainers. And God bless them for doing so! The people who buy tickets are the reason I have a job!
Ideally, the modern coliseums of the world should still only host athletic contests or similar visual spectacles. In a perfect world, a popular music venue would more closely resemble the fan shape of an ancient amphitheater with all seats facing the stage. There are a few indoor venues of this design, but they do not offer the seating capacity of a sports arena. Still, very few arenas possess the particular properties that enhance a musical presentation. The permanent seating is designed to view events taking place on the floor in the center of the building, not at one end. The roofs, walls and floors are utilitarian in design and very seldom enhance a musical presentation. But modern arenas have adapted to music productions and productions have adapted to the arenas. This extremely viable symbiosis has resulted in the creation of a unique art form that has evolved into the modern indoor music show.
Only the large arena design provides a roof structure that can support the massive weight of today’s multiple production components. Modern arenas are equipped with a dense steel I-beam hanging grid that is capable of suspending the many tons of lighting instruments, video screens, audio systems and scenic elements that are common among most productions. Show designers have adapted to these spaces and evolved their shows to utilize the vast amounts of available space within an enclosed arena. Many of these buildings also possess the loading dock capacity to efficiently accommodate the many semi trucks full of the specialized gear that accompany tours.
Touring audio systems have been the slowest to successfully adapt to the unfavorable spaces within an arena. There are a variety of reasons for this lack of accelerated development in the otherwise rapidly changing performance industry. For years, audio design was stuck in the point source array theory. The emergence of the all-in-one, multi-component audio enclosure closely followed the earlier days of individually arrayed component systems from the 1960s. The most successful design in the 1970s and 1980s was the Clair Brothers 4-way S-4 cabinet. The predominance of the S-4 supplanted the original popularity of the Tychobrahe 3-way column design. Popular proprietary designs from Tasco, Showco, Electrotec (TFA) and McCune differed in components but still shared the same array philosophy. Manufacturers including JBL Professional, Turbosound, E-V and Altec also built competing all-in-one designs.
The live audio world was now a monolith moving in only one direction for over two decades. But the point source, multi-component boxes did have significant problems. One was that you would only be able to obtain good results from point source systems if they were set up in smaller arrays with adequate tilt and splay between the cabinets to minimize component interaction. But when these enclosures were combined in the larger, wider and flatter arrays that were necessarily assembled to generate the acoustical power needed for large performance spaces, the inherent problems were magnified on a massive scale. Time smearing, comb-filtering and uneven component coupling created irregular and skewed responses in both volume and frequency distribution. A given seat might sound good, but six seats away, the listening experience would be completely different.
Sound companies had huge amounts of money committed to their chosen cabinet designs, rigging systems, amplifier racks, cabling and case designs. Unlike lighting or video systems, the audio world was completely married to the prevalent design philosophy and steadfastly hung onto underperforming, ponderous and expensive systems. It took the demonstrable success of a small French firm, L-Acoustics, to drag the rest of the live sound world kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. Principal designer, Christian Heil, had begun with the venerable Bell Labs vertical line array principles and created an audio revolution. The L-Acoustics V-DOSC system proved that large curved vertical arrays of identical multi-component boxes could successfully transform the live audio industry.
At first, the old-school designers were hard to convince. But the large vertical line arrays actually produced results that were uniform, predictable and aesthetically satisfying. Audio systems in this century have finally caught up to the other production departments in successfully adapting to arenas and stadiums. Audio crews are now able to deploy systems that not only evenly cover every seat in the audience space, but do so in a way that is both predictable and pleasing. Although modern line array systems can’t make over-sized scoreboards disappear, neutralize flat reflective wall/roof/floor surfaces or remove architectural obstructions, these sophisticated audio systems have resulted in a new standard of expectation for both the production teams and the audience members. The arena itself is no longer the enemy. Advancements in component and amplifier design, coupled with extremely sophisticated computer control systems, have produced results in potentially hostile environments that were unimaginable 20 years ago. Once that monolithic dam was broken, the flood of audio innovation has been nothing short of astounding.
On the James Taylor tour, we have just begun using Clair Global’s revolutionary Cohesion-12 system. This proprietary line array design has already helped us deliver a greater sense of intimacy and realism to the patrons of the arenas in which we have recently performed. I will have much more to say about our current touring audio system in next month’s column. Needless to say, we are already very enthusiastic about the Co-12s.
Safe travels!
