When the Rolling Stones converged on Soldier Field this week, they had the steady Charlie Watts pounding the drums and 360,000 watts powering their brand-new, state-of-the-art custom sound system.
Though raw numbers are hard to come by, it’s likely the Stones had more power at their disposal for two Chicago dates than they used on all of their first-ever U.S. tour. They also boasted an arsenal of computerized technology that would have seemed like so much science fiction back in the British Invasion days. Lighter, more compact and capable of handling 96 microphones and instruments, the new system even has a name Darth Vader would have loved: “The X-Array.”
But for the “Bridges to Babylon” tour, the sonic show of force is about bringing crisp audio quality to stadium shows, not cranking the decibel count. “It’s a whole new technology designed from a clean piece of paper,” said Harry Witz, managing partner of db Sound, the Des Plaines sound company that helped develop the new system. “It’s not perceived as very loud, though it’s more powerful than anything we’ve had before.”
A Stones concert without the amps turned up to 11? Bear in mind, this once-raunchy band has cleaned up its act. Sweating to the oldies like “Satisfaction” and “Start Me Up” on stage, Mick Jagger now practices a fitness regimen straight from the Richard Simmons playbook. True, Keith Richards avoids even an occasional jumping-jack–but for aging groups on tour, those excesses of sex and drugs no longer go hand-in-hand with rock ‘n’ roll.
Neither does ear-splitting volume.
The Soldier Field concerts were loud enough to kick out the jams without jamming up the ears. This is a fine line to tread, for rock concert volume is like rock concert beer–what feels good one minute can be unhealthy, dangerous and a pain in the head the next.
That goes for the performers as well as the ticket-buying public, for there are two sides to how rock concerts are heard. The first is behind the mixing boards, where swarms of technicians strive to make the concert sound great for the band as well as the fans. Each Stone and backing musician has a customized sound mix spread out over 100 speakers–and that’s just on stage. The logic is that if band members hear themselves and each other well, they’ll put on a better show.
The other side is in the audience, where subtle factors like seating distance and angles of sound reflection interact with each unique listener. And while the Stones claim that their new system marks a quantum leap forward, there’s no electronic gadget that can measure the human factor.
In general, rock fans love their music loud–perhaps not at levels in vogue during the Woodstock era, but definitely louder than those who dig jazz, folk, New Age or classical. Listeners on the quieter side might well scratch their heads: If the music is loud enough to hear clearly, why jack it up any higher?
The answer, experts say, is that loud music feels good. Pass a certain threshold and your favorite music produces a sensation akin to a bungee-jump rush, triggered as low sounds boom against the body. Even fans of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra know the kick of a good crescendo when they feel it.
“The fact is that loud sound activates the peripheral nervous system, and that causes a lot of excitement,” said Michael Koss, president of the Koss Stereo Headphone Corp. “It causes adrenaline to be flushed into the blood, it activates the fight-or-flight mechanism, and when that happens, it really accentuates what your body feels in terms of stimulus.”
But too much of this good vibration has its down side. Ask a Stones contemporary, The Who’s Pete Townshend. The onetime poster child for world-record decibel levels is now mostly deaf and plagued by tinnitus, a painful, permanent ringing in his ears.
“I’d play a show with The Who, blow my brains out on stage, get drunk, and come home and play for another eight hours with the headphones on making demos in my studio,” Townshend told the Tribune in 1989. “I went to an ear specialist in the mid-’70s with my manager and the doctor said, `My advice to Mr. Townshend is to learn to lip-read, because at this rate he’ll be completely deaf by the time he’s 40.”
“We’re seeing more clientele who are in the music business, who notice that they have greater communication problems,” said Christine Hoffman, an audiologist with the Ear Specialty Group in Springfield, N.J. “Each person has their own threshold of how much they can endure before they bounce back. The risk is, we don’t know what that threshold is.”
Musicians pay Hoffman about $110 to get fitted for customized earplugs, which reduce the volume without muffling sound the way foam plugs do. As for the old bar trick of wadding up toilet tissue, Hoffman said, “The problem with cotton or napkins in the ears is, can you get it out again?”
As sound levels go, a whisper registers at about 25 decibels, normal conversation at about 60 and a bustling restaurant at about 80. The risk begins at 85 decibels, the noise level that prevails in the average industrial factory. Federal health safety guidelines say people shouldn’t stay in 85-decibel environments for more than eight hours at a stretch.
Even a hack heavy metal band in a local club can hit 120 decibels, the same noise level produced by sandblasting or a stuck car horn. Specialists say that without protection the human ear shouldn’t be exposed to sound at this volume more than 15 minutes a day.
Even in this day and age, acoustic engineers who labor to turn outdoor spaces and indoor halls into fit venues for listening to music sometimes do so in vain. Navy Pier’s Skyline Stage and the New World Music Theatre in Tinley Park have gained national reputations for their clear-as-mud sound quality.
Sound systems as concertgoers know them today didn’t exist in the early ’60s, when bands would make do by singing out of small amplifiers meant for guitars, or through public address systems at theaters and auditoriums. That in large part explains why The Beatles stopped touring in 1966; the stone-age sound technology was no match for the lung capacity of thousands of screaming girls.
Think of it this way: Those souped-up car stereos that rumble down Rush Street every weekend have up to twice the power The Beatles had at their disposal for their largest outdoor shows.
Dan Healey, who once mixed a Beatles concert at Candlestick Park, recalled the setup. “It was a ring of speakers outside the stage, each one maybe 3 feet high,” Healey said. “The whole thing was maybe 1,000 watts, max. They had no stage monitors at all. And they had eight microphones.”
Compare that to the 25 microphones Healey used two years ago on a single drum kit while working with the Grateful Dead, a band known for its crystal-clear concert sound. Over a career that spanned three decades, Healey either helped innovate or witnessed many of the breakthroughs that brought live concert sound from inaudible to laudable.
On a challenge from Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, Healey built the Dead’s first sound system for a Fillmore show in 1966, using speakers and equipment he cobbled together from three sound companies. In 1971, Healey introduced stage monitors to the band, those on-stage speakers that allow the musicians to hear what they’re playing. And when the Dead played Soldier Field in 1990s, Healey used a computer that utilized architectural blueprints to plot out the strategic location of speakers.
“I could build the stage and the sound system in my computer, and work it out until I got perfect sound in the place,” Healey said. “It was long past the days of, `Oh, I’ll put that speaker there, and this here.’ It wasn’t guesswork by any means.”
