Earlier this year, the chattering classes of the media were talking about Coachella’s cultural significance and its position as a political bellwether, with the festival’s owner, Philip Anschutz, taken to task for supporting groups that appeared to be hostile to LGBT rights. Those accusations prompted vigorous denials from Anschutz, who called the reports “fake news” and issued statements in support of “the rights of all people, without regard to sexual orientation.”
But by mid-April, during the first weekend of this year’s two-weekend Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, held in Indio, CA April 14—16 and April 21—23, the talk associated with Coachella turned to something we haven’t seen being discussed by the press too often lately — problematic live sound. Several media outlets pointed out the audio troubles that plagued Radiohead’s set at the event this year.
“In perhaps the worst sound foul-up ever for such a prominent slot at the desert music fest, the sound cut out entirely for large parts of… three of the first seven numbers in Radiohead’s set,” the Palm Springs Press-Enterprise reported. Esquire dubbed the incident “an unforgettable screw-up in Coachella history.” The sound problems drove the band offstage twice before they things settled down.
Just So Much Noise
But what the noise over one band’s sound issues at one gig actually underscores is the fact that, in the last 15 or so years, live sound has become remarkably, incredibly, predictably excellent. To the point that most concertgoers really don’t think about the sound anymore; it’s become virtually transparent between the seats and the stage. We’ve passed almost without notice through an inflection period that has seen the technology of live sound improve exponentially.
The years since the turn of the century have seen an extraordinary assemblage of pure research, innovative product development, and new techniques that have raised the game at the same kind of accelerated pace that the mandate to go to the moon, issued in 1961 by President Kennedy, propelled space travel and physics. In fact, the progress that live sound has seen also has the same kind of clear impetus behind it: concerts and touring are now the main source of revenue in the music business.
It’s arguable that, in a market-driven economy, it was inevitable that the quality of the sound of live music would become virtually as good as it did on records, because those live shows have become like records, at least at the cash register — 43 percent of the entire industry’s revenues now come from concerts, according to PwC research this year, a share that goes up to 53 percent when touring sponsorship revenues are included. Once it became clear where the battlefield would be, the stakeholders turned their attention to it wholeheartely.
Just A Few of the Advances
In the last 15 years or so, we’ve seen a collection of advances that have remade the industry. On the R&D side, manufacturers have been consistently putting more effort and dollars into the basic physics of live sound. That’s resulted in innovative new waveguides as the industry achieved a more detailed understanding of wave propagation.
Everett Lybolt at Sound Image in Nashville points to L-Acoustics’ K series and Vue’s al-12 as examples. The ability to put sound exactly where it’s wanted — and, as importantly, to keep it away from the reflective surfaces, where it’s not — has been taken to a level of precision undreamed of a few decades ago.
Ken “Pooch” Van Druten, FOH engineer on Justin Bieber’s recent Purpose world tour, chimed in from the road before the tour, with more than 150 shows since its March 2016 launch, concluded early in July. “Twenty years ago, I was working on some very good-sounding front-loaded speakers. For the time period, they were state-of-the-art. But now, predictive software, and the ability to adjust angles in order to make speakers more efficient with each other and keep energy from beaming at hard surfaces, [are] the reason that concerts sound the way they do now. The materials used to make the speakers, like the JBL D2 high-end driver, are way more advanced, and the vertical and horizontal coverage of the average speaker has pushed the result to the limits of physics. Now, a record-quality mix can be delivered to every seat in the house.”
Along with the advances in speaker design, there has been a proliferation of software-based measurement and analytics platforms. These are the collateral benefits of the larger shift to digital in the live-sound arena almost two decades ago, but they derived some extra push from more recent shifts to data-based approaches to how work is done. The calculations are deeper, and they take into account historical data that helps inform future performance.
The UIs of these programs have become so user-friendly that positive outcomes are virtually guaranteed, to some extent. Data have also become far more fungible — engineers carry their mixes and settings on thumb drives that can remember what the artist needs and what the venue requires. The starting point for every show is so much further along than it ever used to be, leaving that much more time for fine-tuning the sound and the performance.
On the technique side, the widespread use of the virtual soundcheck might be considered the landmark development of the century so far. Easier, more convenient and more reliable ways to capture multitrack recordings of shows let engineers tweak it without having to ask the drummer to pound out four on the floor for five minutes straight every afternoon.
As importantly, it’s also freed up artists to do more of the promotion necessary to sell tickets as they tour, hitting the local morning shows instead of the stage for a soundcheck. Another way that technology improvements translate into better shows, Pooch points out, are snapshots. “I have some snapshot changes from song to song that easily adjust 300 different parameters in an instant,” he notes. “I could not reproduce that manually. I am able to do things that I never could before.”
Studio On Stage
Actually, you could. But you had to be in a recording studio to do it, and you got as many passes at it as you needed till you nailed it. What’s remarkable about Pooch’s point is that this is now executed perfectly every time — live. Along with the migration of what were once considered studio-only components, such as ribbon microphones, to the stage, and the ability to load the equivalent of an expensive, tube-driven piece of hardware in the form of a $99 plug-in, into an arena or a club, the sonic and experiential equivalent of a record takes place on thousands of stages every night.
Lastly, live sound has a much smarter, better-educated professional class. Ken Porter, president of Nashville-based Spectrum Sound, lays out the timeline: “In the 1970s and ‘80s, I wondered why speakers did not come with an owner’s manual. In the ‘90s, line arrays started training because of the complexity of the systems. In the 2000s, console manufactures had to [learn] to drive the movement from analog to digital.” Now, he says, the shift to formalized live-sound education “has helped drive the entire industry.” Paul David Hager, FOH engineer for Miley Cyrus, Beck and Devo, points out that DIY live-sound tutorial videos are now as ubiquitous on YouTube as their studio counterparts.
Pro audio’s education infrastructure also began to figure out that their students’ careers would more likely be spent on stages instead of studios, and adjusted their curricula accordingly. (Kinda, sorta — that’s another column.) As a result, the knowledge base out there is more astute than it’s ever been. That translates into better live sound.
So, where does it all go from here? The advances of the last two decades will likely transition from broad strides to incremental improvements. And then there’s the fickleness of the market — will demand for live music, which has been the economic foundation for the advances the sound industry has just witnessed, begin to cool? Hard to predict the future, but the trend to high-quality sound has expanded from the concert stage to everywhere else, from malls to churches. Concert sound has raised the bar broadly. Furthermore, even as consumers continue to appear satisfied with $10 ear buds and mono kitchen speakers that play Spotify on demand, they make their feelings about concert sound known far and wide on social media — they will not accept crap sound when they’re paying $150 for a ticket. So live sound, give yourself a pat on the back. Ya done good.
