A turning point in rock ‘n' roll was surely the first time some odd piece of it was transformed from a practical item to a priceless artifact that was priced, finally, on the auctioneer's block. A plain vanilla guitar pick used by Eric Clapton went from someone's personal treasure to becoming part of someone else's memorabilia collection.
This has extended to the technology of record making as well. For instance, Lenny Kravitz is the proud owner of the 4-track deck used at Abbey Road Studios to make the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper.
Quadra-mobilia
Plenty of artifacts from the live side of music have been regulars on the block, from old Fillmore posters to Eric Clapton's Stratocaster, "Blackie." But rarely would you see a piece of live sound technology up there. Well, that changed in December, when the Bonham's auction house in London put up for bids the hand-built quadraphonic mixing desks used on Pink Floyd's Momentary Lapse of Reason and Division Bell world tours. Britannia Row Productions, the sound company originally formed and owned by Pink Floyd, had owned the consoles for the past 26 years.
It seems almost quaint now, but quadraphonic sound was considered a viable format in the late 1960s and 1970s. The success of The Who's Quadrophenia and Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon LPs seemed to indicate that the public was ready to move on from stereo to one of several competing technical systems for presenting four channel sound from a single stereo record groove, including CD4 and SQ (which had the advantage that no special needle or turntable was required to play SQ-encoded recordings). That surfeit of formats would ultimately prove to be quadraphonic recording's undoing, but while the iron was hot a number of artists decided to apply the concept to their live shows as well.
The Power of Four
All of Pink Floyd's tours in the late 1960s and into the early 1970s featured quadraphonic sound systems, starting with the May 12, 1967 concert that kicked off the Games For May tour in London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. It used the Azimuth Coordinator sound system, devised by an Abbey Road engineer and utilizing a unique joystick panning system that used four large rheostats housed in a large box, converted from 270 degrees rotation to 90 degrees, to cover all four quadrants. (Of the two of those Azimuth systems built, one survives and is on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as part of the theater exhibit.) Sound effects like helicopters and the famous chiming clocks and gongs of Dark Side of the Moon were whirled around huge venues using stacks 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, and the main left-and-right PA stacks handling the front point of the diamond. The effects were routed to the speakers using one of the special hand-built quadraphonic mixing desks.
Where Pink Floyd's consoles used joystick panners, American PA pioneer Bob Heil's designs for Pete Townshend's plan to take Quadrophenia on the road instead used four faders to four discrete output busses that went to four stacks around the venue, which Heil says provided an excellent panning effect between the stacks. "Pete said he wanted to move Roger's [Daltrey's] voice around the room, and that's just what we did," Heil says in a conversation from his office and workshop in Aurora, IL.
A total of 28 15-channel M.A.V.I.S. (Musical Augmentation Voicing Instrumentation System) consoles were ultimately built, according to a web posting by a member of The Who's tour sound crew, who owns one of the two used on The Who's Quadrophenia tour. The other now resides in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, OH. Heil's is the only manufacturer brand specifically represented there as such. Both were used as the FOH consoles for hundreds of concerts before being retired, says Heil, but most of those were for stereo or monaural PA systems. It became evident fairly quickly that quadraphonic live concert applications were a tenuous business proposition at best. "The format was difficult to handle, and it wasn't very rewarding for the concertgoers," says Heil. "If you were sitting next to the rear stack on the left side you wouldn't hear what was coming out of the others. It was a little crazy to make a four-channel sound system for 20,000-seat arenas."
Traces of Analog
Pink Floyd's Azimuth Coordinator approach to four-channel live sound went through six iterations between 1969 and 1994, each one a bit more sophisticated than the previous one. Brit Row actually kept them on active inventory, though they were not actually let out. As the few remaining traces of analog technology left in live sound disappear, the PA supplier decided to put them up for auction as collectors' items, with a percentage of the sale price going to Stage Hand, a U.K.-registered charity supported by the Production Services Association (PSA).
Quadraphonic live sound was, in the end, one of the more gloriously egregious of the spectacular excesses of the golden age of rock ‘n' roll. But it was also a totem of an era when anti-war activists thought they could levitate the Pentagon with a combination of love and blotter acid, when an industry fueled by sudden, massive wealth, which thought nothing of private jets and seven-figure recording budgets simply figured, "Quadraphonic? Yeah, sure, why not?"
What is interesting here, though, is the notion that live sound gear might be acquiring value as memorabilia. It's great that the M.A.V.I.S. is in the Hall of Fame, but it would be just as fitting to see one in a Hard Rock Café. Having the guitar, the reel of tape and the live sound board all in one place would certainly complete the cycle.
