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A
turning point in rock ‘n’ roll was surely
the first time some odd piece of it was
transformed from a practical item to a
priceless artifact that was priced, finally, on
the auctioneer’s block. A plain vanilla guitar
pick used by Eric Clapton went from someone’s
personal treasure to becoming part of
someone else’s memorabilia collection. This
has extended to the technology of record
making as well. For instance, Lenny Kravitz
is the proud owner of the 4-track deck used
at Abbey Road Studios to make the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper.
Quadra-mobilia biz
Plenty of artifacts from the live side of
music have been regulars on the block, from
old Fillmore posters to Eric Clapton’s Stratocaster,
“Blackie.” But rarely would you see
a piece of live sound technology up there.
Well, that changed in December, when the
Bonham’s auction house in London put up
for bids the hand-built quadraphonic mixing
desks used on Pink Floyd’s Momentary
Lapse of Reason and Division Bell world tours.
Britannia Row Productions, the sound company
originally formed and owned by Pink
30
The Biz
On The Block
Floyd, had owned the consoles for the past
26 years.
It seems almost quaint now, but quadraphonic
sound was considered a viable
format in the late 1960s and 1970s. The success
of The Who’s Quadrophenia and Pink
Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon LPs seemed to
indicate that the public was ready to move
on from stereo to one of several competing
technical systems for presenting four
channel sound from a single stereo record
groove, including CD4 and SQ (which had
the advantage that no special needle or
turntable was required to play SQ-encoded
recordings). That surfeit of formats would
ultimately prove to be quadraphonic recording’s
undoing, but while the iron was hot a
number of artists decided to apply the concept
to their live shows as well.
JANUARY 2011 www.fohonline.com
The Power of Four biz
All of Pink Floyd’s tours in the late 1960s
and into the early 1970s featured quadraphonic
sound systems, starting with the May
12, 1967 concert that kicked off the Games
For May tour in London’s Queen Elizabeth
Hall. It used the Azimuth Coordinator sound
What is interesting here is the notion that
live sound gear might actually be acquiring
value as memorabilia.
system, devised by an Abbey Road engineer
and utilizing a unique joystick panning system
that used four large rheostats housed in
a large box, converted from 270 degrees rotation
to 90 degrees, to cover all four quadrants.
(Of the two of those Azimuth systems
built, one survives and is on display at the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London as
part of the theater exhibit.) Sound effects
like helicopters and the famous chiming
clocks and gongs of Dark Side of the Moon
were whirled around huge venues using
stacks of loudspeakers positioned in an approximate
diamond layout, with one stack at
the rear facing the stage, the two side stacks
to either side on a line slightly behind the
mixing desk position, and the main left-andright
PA stacks handling the front point of
the diamond. The effects were routed to the
speakers using one of the special hand-built
quadraphonic mixing desks.
Where Pink Floyd’s consoles used joystick
panners, American PA pioneer Bob
Heil’s designs for Pete Townshend’s plan to
take Quadrophenia on the road instead used
four faders to four discrete output busses
that went to four stacks around the venue,
which Heil says provided an excellent panning
effect between the stacks. “Pete said
he wanted to move Roger’s [Daltrey’s] voice
around the room, and that’s just what we
did,” Heil says in a conversation from his office
and workshop in Aurora, IL.
A total of 28 15-channel M.A.V.I.S. (Musical
Augmentation Voicing Instrumentation
System) consoles were ultimately built, according
to a web posting by a member of
The Who’s tour sound crew, who owns one
of the two used on The Who’s Quadrophenia
By DanDaley
tour. The other now resides in the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, OH. Heil’s is
the only manufacturer brand specifically
represented there as such. Both were used as
the FOH consoles for hundreds of concerts
before being retired, says Heil, but most of
those were for stereo or monaural PA systems.
It became evident fairly quickly that
quadraphonic live concert applications
were a tenuous business proposition at
best. “The format was difficult to handle,
and it wasn’t very rewarding for the concertgoers,”
says Heil. “If you were sitting next to
the rear stack on the left side you wouldn’t
hear what was coming out of the others.
It was a little crazy to make a four-channel
sound system for 20,000-seat arenas.”
Traces of Analog biz
Pink Floyd’s Azimuth Coordinator approach
to four-channel live sound went
through six iterations between 1969 and 1994,
each one a bit more sophisticated than the
previous one. Brit Row actually kept them on
active inventory, though they were not actually
let out. As the few remaining traces of
analog technology left in live sound disappear,
the PA supplier decided to put them up for
auction as collectors’ items, with a percentage
of the sale price going to Stage Hand, a U.K.registered
charity supported by the Production
Services Association (PSA).
Quadraphonic live sound was, in the
end, one of the more gloriously egregious
of the spectacular excesses of the golden
age of rock ‘n’ roll. But it was also a totem of
an era when anti-war activists thought they
could levitate the Pentagon with a combination
of love and blotter acid, when an industry
fueled by sudden, massive wealth, which
thought nothing of private jets and sevenfigure
recording budgets simply figured,
“Quadraphonic? Yeah, sure, why not?”
What is interesting here, though, is the
notion that live sound gear might be acquiring
value as memorabilia. It’s great that the
M.A.V.I.S. is in the Hall of Fame, but it would
be just as fitting to see one in a Hard Rock
Café. Having the guitar, the reel of tape and
the live sound board all in one place would
certainly complete the cycle.
Dan Daley’s e-mail collection is at ddaley@
fohon line.com.
Powered vs. Unpowered Loudspeakers
It is important to understand the advantages and disadvantages of
N different technologies and make the best choice. Damping factor — which
can be affected by the length of the cable used — is a big selling point for
self-powered loudspeakers. Because the amplifier is right inside the box, a
self-powered loudspeaker has a cable length of no more than a couple of feet.
Self-powered loudspeakers also take up less space in the truck because there is no amp to lug around. But
repair techs will tell you that if a self-powered box amp module fails, and the system is flown, you have to get
a lift and replace the module. If a conventional amp fails, you just move the speaker cable over to another
amp rack. Another advantage of conventionally powered loudspeakers is weight. And the initial cost of a
conventional system may be less than a self-powered system, which has the cost of an amplifier in every box,
instead of using one amplifier to power multiple enclosures.
—Brian Klijanowicz, from “Theory and Practice,” FOH Dec. 2010