"Modern PAs can self-tune the whole system just from playing a short burst of white noise through the system, and listening for the response"
A technology which was developed by/with the Grateful Dead, by the way.
From what I understand they essentially financed the modern PA industry by spending a ridiculous amount of money on sound equipment. People don't realize how much money they made - they were pretty much the top grossing tour band for about 15-20 years, playing about 90-100 shows a year. And they could (and did) use those shows to experiment with sound in a way that probably no other band has done since.
I haven't watched any D&C shows, but I expect their sound quality was just as good, if not better, than the Dead's.
From one of the dead's main sound engineers, Dan Healy, who helped establish this technology (I wasn't able to find any further discussions, but I know I've read a few interviews where he talked about doing this at the soundboard).
"""What tools do modern sound engineers have at their disposal that you didn’t?
Computers and all the things that became possible at the advent of computers. It’s removed the limitations to creativity. Nowadays, in terms of concert sound, you can not only correct the sound for any room, you can ongoingly correct it in real time as the room changes and as the temperature changes and as the humidity changes. We used to do that in the ’80s and ’90s – I had a complete weather station at my mix board and we tracked temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, because they change sound dispersion, sound quality. We corrected the systems accordingly. We did long, long studies and mapped it out, and we had curves so we could predict where the sound was going. We had to do that by hand. Nowadays, it happens all by itself."""
A technology which was developed by/with the Grateful Dead, by the way.
From what I understand they essentially financed the modern PA industry by spending a ridiculous amount of money on sound equipment. People don't realize how much money they made - they were pretty much the top grossing tour band for about 15-20 years, playing about 90-100 shows a year. And they could (and did) use those shows to experiment with sound in a way that probably no other band has done since.
I haven't watched any D&C shows, but I expect their sound quality was just as good, if not better, than the Dead's.