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The concept of speaker synergy and phase coherency in particular was understood by the early Seventies, and several designers had come up with ways of implementing it. We never had a finished system, because by the time we’d get one near completion it was obsolete in our minds, and we already had a new one on the drawing boards.”Ī drawing of the Wall Of Sound by Mary Ann Mayer. We built a system and scrapped it, built another one and scrapped it. “Those guys were long in the design and prototype area,” Healy explains, “and we were long in the criteria. Healy and the Grateful Dead became willing guinea pigs for John Meyer, then of McCune Sound, Ron Wickersham of Alembic, and others on the scene who were looking for ways to deliver music painlessly and efficiently at the often ridiculously high SPLs of the San Francisco sound and rock music in general. What we needed was past the point where R&D had taken sound equipment.” So they set out to find the answers for themselves. Furthermore, there were no answers to our questions in journals or texts where the equipment ended, so did the literature and research. “It was obvious that there was nothing you could get off the shelf that you could use. “The first thing we did was go get tons of it, only to find that that was only a stopgap measure,” he remembers.
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When Healy and his fellow soundpeople started trying to put better systems together, they found that the hardware available was not very advanced. “And that was far out compared to what was there the week before,” he recalls. The first PA system Healy operated at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco consisted of a 70-watt amp, two Altec 604s, and a two-input microphone mixer. But you don’t learn much from maintaining the status quo, and the Dead has always encouraged experimentation and sought new knowledge in many areas. “We live on the scary side of technology, probably more than we ought to,” guitarist Bob Weir concedes. The Dead’s own people have developed equipment and techniques to improve the state of the sound reinforcement art, and they have invited others to use their gigs as live testing grounds. There’s no place in the world that I know of that would give me this much space to experiment and try new things and also to hear good music.” It’s a workshop and a breadboard, as well as a dream and a treat.
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To Healy, the Dead is “a vehicle that enables an aggregate of people to experiment with musical and technical ideas. What they do musically is improvisational, existential, and not always satisfactory but since the beginning the Dead has been attended and experimented upon by forward-looking sound specialists, always seeking to improve the quality of their live sound.ĭan Healy has been mixing the Dead’s concerts since the band first took to the San Francisco clubs and ballrooms, and he says he’s never been bored. Though their records are modest sellers, and more or less ignored by radio and the “establishment” press, the Dead are consistently among the highest-grossing concert acts in the country. The Grateful Dead have been playing their unique brand of improvisational, eclectic music going on 18 years now. Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the June 1983 issue of Recording Engineer/Producer magazine, the forerunner to Live Sound International.