# Early PA Systems Discussion



## keithb7

I was watching the some utube videos on the Beatles playing at Shea Stadium. I was contemplating how they projected the sound out to the 56,000 or so fans at that time. No sign of much of a PA system. They appeared to be plugged into their amps with mics in front. I have read a few comments from those that attended that the fans could not hear anything over the screaming. PA systems large enough to amplify the band must have been in their developing stages at the time. No subs, no line arrays, no monitors on stage.It must have been very hard for the boys to hear themselves play. I thought I saw a glimpse in a video where I saw tall skinny speaker cabinets lining the edge of the field angled slightly toward the huge crowd. Not sure they could be heard, they appear to have been almost useless compared to today's standards. Did anyone see them perform back in the day? Was it possible to hear them at all?

I read that the early Fender amps of the 50's and 60's had 2 line-in's, one for your guitar and one for your mic. There was no PA and you just sang through your amp. Going back even earlier before Leo built the electric bass, the stand up double bass was played by many in a crazed hectic style. How in the world could anyone hear it over the electric guitars and drums of the day? Imagine seeing Elvis in 1955 and the double bass trying to play over the screaming fans, in some 300 seat Legion Hall in Texas?

Another comment about Woodstock. I read somewhere that some sound guy was instrumental in creating the metal framework idea around the stage, with elevated speakers.Early line array style maybe?

I suppose the sound did not matter so much. Just the atmosphere. Just being there hearing the new music live and dancing by rock stars was all you needed. Whether or not you could hear was not important I suppose.

Comments????


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## mhammer

PA systems of that era would have been very much like what the Shea Stadium film shows, which is columns of a few 8" full-range drivers, maybe 3 or 4 per column. It wasn't until several years later that we would start to see things like the classic EV Eliminator, with a horn for the top and a big woofer in a folded cab.

A quick search brings up this thread, which has some interesting discussion: http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showthread.php?t=589167

One of the more pertinent points raised is that no one assumed you would be miking the instruments. PAs were primarily for voice. And if the wattage of the instrument amps only amounted to maybe 200w onstage, then sticking a bunch of 4 x 8" columns halfway between the stage and audience, with each powered by 30W or so, would be more than sufficient.


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## dwagar

I remember, way back, the bands that could afford them were sporting Sunn Coliseum PAs. They seemed able to keep up with the dimed amps.


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## bobb

When the Beatles played the open air Empire Stadium in Vancouver in 1964, the PA system was a whopping 200w. Stage monitors didn't exist in those days either. Picture trying to hear yourself on stage with a few thousand screaming fans only a few feet away. For reference, in the 80s, most of the local bar bands were pushing between 10-20Kw out the front end.

Paul Revere and the Raiders claimed that as an experiment, they would pick a song and each member played it in a different key to see if anyone noticed over the audience noise. Nobody ever did.


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## Milkman

dwagar said:


> I remember, way back, the bands that could afford them were sporting Sunn Coliseum PAs. They seemed able to keep up with the dimed amps.


Those probably came out around the same time as Altec Voice of the Theatre systems which were basically a 45-60 cabinet with a big horn for high end. They were considerably louder than anything before them and coupled nicely if you had a bunch of them.

I think the next real breakthrough after that was the proliferation of Martin Audio three way systems which was largely influenced by Supertramps use of Martin and Midas.

We've come a long way baby. Now I have a system that I haul around in a 16 foot trailer which is more powerful than the one used by the Beatles at Shea.


Interesting note. The system used at Woodstock was......, yup Traynor.


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## Mooh

Milkman said:


> Interesting note. The system used at Woodstock was......, yup Traynor.


Really?! Far out! I've been a Traynor fan forever.

Peace, Mooh.


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## Milkman

Mooh said:


> Really?! Far out! I've been a Traynor fan forever.
> 
> Peace, Mooh.


I have been misinformed. I'm told by a reliable (if somewhat pedantic) source, that it was A fellow named Bill Hanley using a mix of Shure components who provided PA for Woodstock.

http://www.billhanley.org/projects/1969_08_15-woodstock/

http://www.shure.com/stellent/groups/public/@gms_gmi_web_ug/documents/web_resource/us_pro_m67_ug.pdf


Sorry about that.


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## Mooh

Milkman said:


> I have been misinformed. I'm told by a reliable (if somewhat pedantic) source, that it was A fellow named Bill Hanley using a mix of Shure components who provided PA for Woodstock.
> 
> http://www.billhanley.org/projects/1969_08_15-woodstock/
> 
> http://www.shure.com/stellent/groups/public/@gms_gmi_web_ug/documents/web_resource/us_pro_m67_ug.pdf
> 
> 
> Sorry about that.


No sweat. After all, it was *only* Woodstock. LOL!

Peace, Mooh.


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## shoretyus

Mooh said:


> No sweat. After all, it was *only* Woodstock. LOL!
> 
> Peace, Mooh.


Strawberry Fields was probably Traynor :smilie_flagge17:


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## marcos

*Early p.a.*

Well,back in the sixties we used a Vox Churchill powered p.a. with 2 Yorkville collums with 4 10 in. speakers i think.Cant tell you how it sounded cause i cant remember.All I know is that none of us were miked.Just the horn section and the signers.It must of sounded awfull.


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## shoretyus

marcos said:


> Well,back in the sixties we used a Vox Churchill powered p.a. with 2 Yorkville collums with 4 10 in. speakers i think.Cant tell you how it sounded cause i cant remember.All I know is that none of us were miked.Just the horn section and the signers.It must of sounded awfull.


Uggg I used a set of those Yorkvilles ....Like signing in a can. Funny I have seen a few for sale lately.


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## GTmaker

Beatles (1966 I think) at Maple Leaf Gardens played thru Vox amps on stage, no monitors and sang thru the house PA system used for hockey games. The speakers/large horns were hung around the scoreboard at centre ice.
I know cause I was there...pretty good show by the way. About 28 minutes ..


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## Wild Bill

Around 1973 or so I was a roadie for a "C" level band, going on the road playing 3 and 6 nighters from town to town, with the odd high school gig in the mix.

I remember our PA. My board was a Traynor YVM-6 and an MX-8 that I had bolted and wired together to give me 14 channels. The YVM-6 had a 100 watt power amp that we used to feed the monitors. We had a Crown power amp of several hundred watts that fed the "out front" speakers.

We were always perfectly capable of being INSANELY loud, even in high school gymnasiums! The reason was the speakers. They were dramatically different from what seems to be the norm today.

On each side of the stage we had a stack consisting of two Altec Voice of the Theatre cabinets, with Altec horns on top of those. If you've ever seen a Voice of the Theatre cab it's about a bit bigger in footprint than the average home refrigerator and about half as high. We had passive crossovers to feed bass to the bottoms and mids to the middles.

When you use a cabinet that large you get efficiency, big time! VOA's were about 33% efficient, meaning that for every 100 watts of electrical power you feed into them you got about 33 watts of acoustic energy out of them. It was common to see only one VOA mounted on the wall of a small town theatre, with a 50 watt driver. Even with the theatre full up with people the sound was loud and clear, with plenty of "earthquake" bottom end.

As a point of comparison, those "girly man" home hifi speakers less than a foot high that are all the rage these days might have an efficiency rating of half a percent! Even those "lollipop" cabs many bands use in bars might be lucky to fall between 10-15%.

It doesn't matter what the actual speakers are inside the cabinets. They can talk all they want about "space age magnets" and "amazing poly cones". All that stuff can do is try to recover some of the tone you tossed away when you went for the smaller cabinet. It has to do with the wavelengths of lower bass notes and the resonance points that can only be achieved with larger cabinets. It's Mother Nature's physics and you just can't argue with Mother Nature. She doesn't care if you have an MBA in advertising.

Moving those vintage speaker stacks was definitely a young man's game. As the 70's wore on the technology of solid state power amps kept improving. This meant that you could get more and more power for less money. So manufacturers took the position that it was easier to sell smaller, lighter cabinets and make up for the efficiency by selling far more powerful power amps!

Any bass player who's ever played one of those refrigerator-sized vintage Traynor twin 15 cabs from the 70's, the kind that are as big as a refrigerator with handles and dolly wheels along the bottom edge knows that with 100 watts from a tube bass amp he can blow the walls out of a high school gym! Give him a 500 watt modern solid state SVT and a modern Ampeg 4-10 cab and he'll have to dime it even in a small club! The poor efficiency of that 4-10 cab is WHY he needs a 500 watt head!

Anyhow, enough said about the out front sound. The monitors were small boxes lying on the stage in front of each vocalist. We were all very impressed that year by Traynor inventing the first graphic eq for PA we had ever seen. It was only $100 (of course, this was when gas was 25 cents a gallon!) so we could use one for the fronts and also one for the monitors, to give them better cut with less feedback.

We never bothered to mic the guitars. Everyone always ran 100 watt heads like Marshalls. My band used Ampeg V4's. A 4-12 cab was the standard. We did mic some of the drum kit, to help the cymbals and the high hat keep up with the rest of the mix.

The biggest problem I had was "stage wash", where we had so much sound on stage that even with no one singing into a vocal mic you could see the VU meters peaked out from the drums and guitars. You could see the kick drum beats coming up the mic stands and maxing the meters with every kick.

Pretty sloppy by today's standards but everyone in the clubs had a helluva good time!:rockon2:

At that time I had read an article about the sound system used by the Grateful Dead. When they did a concert you saw a wall of PA cabs behind the band and no monitors, yet they had no feedback problems! Those vocal mikes were pointed straight back at their out front speakers and it was no problem! It seemed they were using out of phase microphones. This is where you used two mikes for everything, flipping the phase of one of them. You would have one mike pointed up for the vocalist and one pointed away. So both mikes would pick up all the stage wash and since one was out of phase it would all cancel out! When the vocalist sang into just one it came through loud and clear! 

The same principle applied to all the instrument mikes. If you see any video footage of those concerts you'll see right away how there are double mikes on everything, especially the drums.

The Dead eventually struck a deal with ElectroVoice to make them a model of the EV-664 "Hammer" with an extra cartridge inside picking up through a hole in the side, wired out of phase.

I did a simple experiment where I took two Shure SM-58's and did the out of phase wiring trick, mounting them on the lead vocalist's mike stand. It worked fabulous! No matter how loud the stage wash his channel was totally quiet, except when he sang into the main mike! It was sound man's heaven! Nice, discrete channels with no mixing between them!

Of course, that extra SM-58 belonged to the drummer and he didn't want to give it up. No one would kick out the money to buy an extra mike. Typical band politics. Everyone loved the result but nobody wanted to pay for it.

Ah, nostalgia isn't what it used to be!:smile:

:food-smiley-004:


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