When the Beatles played Shea Stadium in New York in 1965, the music P.A. consisted of a half-dozen Shure Vocal Master systems–two columns of 6- and 8-inch speakers fueled by a combination mixer/power amplifier. Thankfully, the miles of Hi-Z cabling running around the stage didn't honk back much telemetry from the then-relatively small number of satellites floating around in orbit.
Looking back, it's almost comical that an event of that historical magnitude had such a puny P.A. system, but that's what you had at the time. The Vocal Master was the apotheosis of what someone could buy off the shelf in terms of a public address system in those days. But there are a couple of trends that make what was the state of the art at that time worth remembering. The Beatles were the leading edge of a wave that transformed the music and entertainment industries. Enough books have been written about that to not go into it here, but what needs to be pointed out is how the ensuing industry of rock 'n' roll transformed the technology of music. There was virtually was no pro audio business to speak of at the time, and even less in the way of live sound–mainly a few key names like JBL and E-V that had grown up with the cinema business, and the microphone and signal path gear makers that centered on the broadcast sector. In 1965, Manny's sold you guitars and drums; in 2005, Manny's (now part of the Sam Ash chain) can sell you everything else.
The second point takes the form of a trend: the house concert. It's mainly an upper-middle-class phenomenon–music-loving homeowners turn their living rooms, parlors, lawns and patios into concert venues. The performers range from someone's ambitious kid sister to some of the most venerable names in folk music, including Tom Paxton, Eric Anderson, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Manhattan Transfer founding vocalist Lauren Massé and Cheryl Wheeler. It's a pool made ever larger by the increased emphasis on acoustic music by shows such a MTV's Unplugged series. (And a surfeit of suddenly agent-less artists.)
A home in suburban Los Angeles, owned by graphic designers Julie and Russ Paris, is typical of the trend: Klieg-type spotlights wash one wall of the 500-square-foot living/ dining area in the 3,000-square-foot house, under which a performer stands with a guitar, poised before 65 guests seated on folding chairs, a few more perched on the stairs. The Parises have no expertise in either the economics of the music industry or its technology. But they have an abiding love of music, all the more so if it's live. The home has no formal stage. Russ Paris says they learned about the equipment as they went along, as performers or friends would bring in sound systems as needed, and from rentals from a local music store. In 2003, they bought their own Mackie 408M eight-channel self-powered mixer running a pair of JBL MP412 speakers on stands, into which a handful of Shure SM58 microphones are plugged. The lights are off-the-shelf track lights fitted with colored gels purchased online from a professional lighting Web site.
This all might fall under the rubric of "cute" if it weren't for the fact that the people in the Paris' house, not to mention the Parises themselves, are not in a club elsewhere–a place that might have spent $50,000 on a sound system and keeps one or two mixers on at least a minimal retainer. Getting people out of their homes is increasingly difficult: Last summer, Business Week reported a 12% decline in concert attendance (cinema box office was down as well–nearly 10%–as were theme parks and major-league baseball games). Small wonder then that in Manhattan, the Bottom Line is gone and CBGB is barely hanging on.
Nor was it surprising when Soundcraft announced their support for CBGB when they loaned the club a new 32-channel MH2 console to replace its aging K3 board. Pro audio manufacturers with large stakes in the live music business are faced with a unique challenge, though one not unfamiliar to the recording studio sector: How do you cultivate the new "personal" markets without alienating the established ones?
This is not to suggest that concerts and club tours are going to disappear. But as with recording and musical instruments, technology is making active doers out of people who were once only passive watchers. That phenomenon has already been extended to live music–portable, self-powered P.A.s like JBL's EON were the PortaStudios of clubdom in the mid-1990s. The difference now, though, is that once people can do it all themselves, they're increasingly reluctant to leave the house to do it.
The trend is not likely to abate–acousticians who have based careers around designing commercial performance spaces are already homing in on the residential concert market, such as Steve Haas at SH! Acoustics, in Milford, Conn., who has adapted his Concertino concert hall processing system for several upscale residential applications. And the artists like it–folk circuit veteran Cliff Eberhardt told me that house concerts fill in early weeknights after college concerts, often for as much or more money, including sales of CDs to house guests. Furthermore, Russ Paris says that many of the artists' agents and managers who once dismissed the idea of house concerts now embrace them as one more set of paying performance venues for their artists.
So will pro audio companies embrace, or even acknowledge, the trend? Those who did so for home recording early on benefited. Live sound equipment makers won't have to completely revamp their business plans, but they'll ignore this trend at their own peril.
And live music venues can learn something from this as well, just as cinemas are learning from home theatre: make the live music experience different and better than what people can devise at home. Compete with it, but don't mimic it. Think of it as bringin' down the house.
