1980's local band PA's

[Scarlett Rose]

OK so aside from sound I also play in my own band. And we played last night a small place with a house QSC system, unfortuitly the mixer is on stage and we were not allowed to bring in our console and snake. So I was turning dials while our normal soundman was telling me what needed up/down tinny/bassy etc... trying to get a passable mix.
Anyhow this guy who played in a popular local band 30+ years back is harassing us the whole time about sound.(and continued harassing all night about anything he could think of).
Anyhow this got me curious so I looked him up and found old band photos and of course zoomed in on the PA systems LOL. Was it common place for local bands in bigger venues to grab every mismatched speaker cab on earth and stack it all up?? One photo has mismatched mid horns and high horns with 5x 18" scoops aside(crome dust caps I asume JBL or Guass), but I only see two Crown DC300A's in the rack on the side of it. And another at a field days has an 8ft high wall of about 8 differant cabs from what I can see. looks like maybe a JBL 4520 with a couple other odd ball subs with what looks like a couple Peavey 15 and horn FR cabs with a giant High horn atop that, and other cabs that I cant see in the shadows.
Maybe Im wrong but wouldn't it be better to cover the dance floor in concert quality sound, than to fill the room with high volume phase cancelation and comb filtering? I mean unless each set of cabs is covering a certain instrument or group, but I dont see that many amps.

 

[Riley Casey]

Very few people in the early 80s at least bought complete a PA suitable for any particular venue. Bands in particular might play a 200 seat bar one night, a 2000 person college gym the next night and a show in the park the next night. They also acquired gear as budget and needs arose rather than with an organized plan. When gear was bought over the course of couple of years choices were made by whoever was nearby with some sound skills at the time, again more random chance than organized planning. On top of that there just weren't a lot of people with long experience in live sound at the time and those that were had jobs on the road, not hanging out at the local bar band PA store.

 

[Scarlett Rose]

Ah, I follow that. I mean back when I started playing music I bought a bunch of lowend name brand stuff and mashed it together. Spec sheets...What is that?!?!?!?? But I also didnt claim to be Mr. sound expert either.
As I went along I learned a little bit from musicians, but It was when I started working with a guy who owned a concert system that I really learned. Kinda took me under his wing like Hey Dummy(lol) dont do this/that or buy this or that, get this and explained why and that got me reading up on sound systems. Not that im any kind of expert in anyway shape or form, but i like to think I know enough now to know when to ask for help.
I just thought the one photo i saw was crazy, A literal wall of everything, like everyone just borrowed every set of speakers they could get there hands on.

 

[Paul OBrien]

There was a night club in my small hometown that hosted bands fairly regularly up until about the early '90s, the house system was W bins, front loaded mid horns and big ole HF horns stacked from floor to ceiling on either side of the stage. Apparently the rig was all DIY including some of the amps and was hand built by the older brother of a high school friend of mine sometime in the late '70, and it was probably the best sounding rig in the whole area while he had it. It was sold and installed in this club when the older brother went off to college and by the time I first encountered it there in the mid 80's the rig was down to one DC300 and a graphic EQ powering everything.. somehow. There must have been some passive EQ components added at some point because all the boxes made sound but it wasn't great... even by '80's standards.. no real lows to speak of just lots of mids, plenty loud for the space but not that exciting. I knew the system had potential but the club owner had no interest in upgrading/restoring the rig to it's former glory with a proper active crossver and dedicated amps, so visiting bands usually brought in thier own sound system.
Anyway.. back then the norm for bar bands(and DJs) in my neck of the woods was either a DIY effort or a mixed pile of whatever they could lay thier hands on. Fun times though.

 

[Scarlett Rose]

Some of those old cabs were pretty cool from back then. I got to run an old restored EAW BH800/MH102 rig, pushed with Macrotech amps and it was very nice sounding. They were straight stacked though, I allways wanted to see the 4x bent horns port to port on thier sides making the giant 10ft super bass horn, in person. I actually do like the look of the old ground stack concert systems, just not stacks of 87 differant types of cabs in a pile.

 

[Paul Johnson]

I’m involved with a heritage project here in the UK and we had vintage audio and lighting products at a recent trade show (PLASA) we assume the big name bands had great gear back then but they didn’t. You put vocals, and acoustic guitars through the PA. You only added already loud sources once you had spare headroom. Rock bands with 4 4x12” cabs were the big guys, but it might have been just 4 mics.

 

[Art Welter]

I’m involved with a heritage project here in the UK and we had vintage audio and lighting products at a recent trade show (PLASA) we assume the big name bands had great gear back then but they didn’t. You put vocals, and acoustic guitars through the PA. You only added already loud sources once you had spare headroom. Rock bands with 4 4x12” cabs were the big guys, but it might have been just 4 mics.

Paul,

Your pictures are from the early 1970s, not 1980s.

Once we had seen Woodstock 1969, the rock club/ballroom scene PA market changed from using stuff like the Shure Vocalmaster (introduced 1967, similar to the WEM columns) to massive horn systems pretty quickly. No way a Vocalmaster would keep up with 8x12" stacks.

In the mid 1970s in the Minneapolis/St.Paul, Minnesota area alone there were at least a dozen local/regional bands with 16 channels or more running through the PA. Cascading as many 6 channel Tapco mixers as needed was common, but the higher paid bands had 16 channel boards. Using input "Y" cords to increase channel count was also common.
My custom made 1976 Straight Up Systems (Mark Wingo design) 18 channel stereo mix console had a 5 channel drum submix

Since power was so expensive (one dollar a watt for "Flame Linear" was the best deal going, $5.71 per watt in today's money), large horn systems with upwards of 110dB 1w/1m became common, often using 16 ohm cones- two Crown DC300A could be pushing 16 drivers.

My bar/ballroom system used with the Rockinghorse band back then used four 2x15" "Cruncher" straight horns, 4 mid drivers on 30x60 Klipsch horns, and 4x1" JBL 2410 "Smith" high horns. The PA was four foot wide and deep and eight foot high- and we brought the whole pile in regardless of the venue size.
Before building that system, we borrowed or rented from other bands for the bigger shows and combined them, like the 1975 PA attached- I bought my first 22 channel snake the next year, standing in front of a PA like that was a hearing hazard..

Art

 

[Scarlett Rose]

Cool pile o boxes. That you standing infront of it?

 

[Art Welter]

That's me, with a Rockinghorse T-shirt on, leaning over a Macintosh MC-2300, a 128 pound amplifier that put out 300 watts per side, and cost over $2 a watt back then. Behind is a Sunn 200S tube bass amp we used to power monitors that day.
I had built the cabinets for Mike Justen's company Common Ground, who sold them to two bands, we rented them from the bands for the show.

Mike started Eclipse Concert Systems in 1977, I became a partner shortly after, building most of the cabinets and touring with Sha Na Na.
Here's most of that "Collapsable Cruncher" (the 4' wide horns broke down into four parts) system under Visqueen:


I wish I had used hearing protection building all those cabinets..

Art

 

[Scarlett Rose]

Cool cabs. Speaking of Sunn 200s those are great guitar amps. Kinda wish I was around for the horn loaded ground stack systems era. They do look pretty cool I must say. and I loved that EAW system I ran.