As have been said, small venues with more acoustical music works best. Tracy Chapman, James Taylor, Natalie Merchant all sounded blissful, clean and smooth at the Beacon Theater in NYC or Jones Beach. They both hold maybe a few thousand seats.
Why does rock concert sound suck?
I have been to two rock concert in the past year : Brit Floyd in Bridgeport CT and Eric Clapton at Madison Square Garden, NYC (last Monday)
For Brit Floyd I was about 40 feet form the stage and treble end was an ear-splitting distorted sound - the soprano solo on Dark Side of the Moon sounded like a chain saw running at 5x speed.
For Eric Clapton I was sitting at floor level about 20 rows behind the mixing desk - i.e., the opposite end from the stage. In this case the high top end was not so distorted, but the voices were still very harsh - seemingly a massive response peak at ~1500hz. Imagine AM radio with the treble turned up 20db.
I knew a lot of the words form the songs ahead of time of course, and just about recognized them, but otherwise the lyrics were unintelligible. The only exceptions were when he sang a quieter song - e.g., “Tears in Heaven” . Clapton moved back from the mic rather than place his mouth right next to it. Then the sound was quite listenable .
Of course managing the acoustics in such a big venue is no doubt a challenge — but does it have to be this bad?
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@booman - Porcupine Tree was just here in San Francisco on Wednesday night; a bunch of my friends went but I didn't, as I'm still not going to concerts this year for health reasons. I've seen P.T. and S.W. every other time they've come to town, though and yes, superb sound!! |
I saw the Stones on that same ’81 tour in Dallas and I was very let down by the poor performance... it was not a strong show. Later in ’88 or 89 I saw them on the Steel Wheels tour in Cleveland, and that was a great show, and the sound was good too... in Cleveland Stadium! I saw The Who and Neil Young at that venue I think '89 and the sound in that stadium for both of those bands was good, at least where I was sitting. I think maybe ’81 the Stones were too coked up to care, and they came off as a bunch of posers. I passed on their most recent tour, though, because ticket prices made me sick... |
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