Arena gigs

[nikkicallaghan]

just watching the ob from Hyde park and I was wondering will the pa be running in stereo or mono as with the vast amount of delay speakers and the spread of the crowd I wondered how it was done

[GaryNattrass]

Or indeed do you big PA guys run a LCR system.

 

When we did The Tube filming over a full year with Dire Straits the late great Peter Grainger told me they ran an LCR system with the vocals exclusively on the centre arrays.

 

I also noticed that the Roland M480 desks I was using at the BBC in Scotland had an LCR output arrangement so I assumed that was also for such a system.

 

[GR1]

Stereo is a construct designed for the domestic high fi market. To work it relies on the listener being pretty much equidistant between 2 sound sources which can invent some spatial differences which may or may not have any bearing on the original sound source. As soon as you try to transpose that model to a live environment it fails to work for more than 80% of the audience most of the time because they can't get centrally between 2 sets of speakers. The solution depends on the gig. Some will have left and right feeds a bit different so there is an appearance of width in the mix, some will have a central cluster to put more spatial info in and some, where most listeners will only listen to one set of speakers, like delays will be in mono. Remember that any instrument fed mostly to only one side of the theoretical stereo will not be heard by almost half the audience so any type of stereo will need to be quite narrow. Realistically there will be lots of different solutions but many of them at arena gigs will involve most people listening in mono.Even mixes in more controlled environments like theatres do not have a very wide stereo spread most of the time.

 

Life is in mono, stereo is made up.

[dsharp7th]

Life is in mono, stereo is made up.

 

Not disputing the inappropriateness of hi-fi stereo for big live shows, but I'm fairly sure the concept of stereo is based on the number of ears (most) humans have.

[MarkPAman]

Sound is coming to me from many, many sources in all directions and I can work tell reasonably well where they are. With two sources and two speakers, I can, to some extent, simulate this, and with more I can do it better. But I can't do this at all if there's only a mono source.

 

I would say "Life is in full surround-sound, stereo is made up".

[GR1]

Humans listen with stereoscopic hearing. The only stereo sources we listen to are made up. Everything in nature is in mono. If you are listening to several people talking you use your stereoscopic hearing to position each of them individually. Each of them is a mono source. If you listen to an orchestra, you hear the sound of the whole orchestra appropriate to the room. The sound you hear is a combination of each single instrument heard directly and by reflections depending on your location in the room and then combined with the same mix of direct and reflected sound for each other instrument. The only time you might hear a stereo source as such would be in a domestic situation or some gigs. After all we don't need 5.1 ears to listen to 5.1 surround sound.

[J Pearce]

We could get into a developed discussion on pyschoacoustics, and how the amplitude based panning of most systems is a fairly poor approximation of how the human ear-brain system decodes and interprets the location of a sound source.

 

Also, despite only having two ears, the brain is reasonably efficient at determining sounds behind us as well as in front, allowing us to hear in a 2 dimensional 360 degree plane. Our ear-brain system provides less detail in the vertical plane, though tilting the head does give some advantage.

 

There are various better methods for preserving or recreating localisation in a large scale mix, the most commercialised of which is probably the TiMax system, and the most famous is probably the Grateful Dead's wall of sound.

 

The only stereo sources we listen to are made up. Everything in nature is in mono. If you are listening to several people talking you use your stereoscopic hearing to position each of them individually. Each of them is a mono source.

 

Sound is produced by a vibrating item, where that item is large compared to the human head it is quite possible for that item to sound "stereo". Take a large gong/tam-tam, possibly up to 36" across. It doesn't behave uniformly, it produces different sounds and tonalities from different parts of the instrument. Thus if I am close enough to it for it to be large compared to my head, it sounds "stereo".

 

Your argument holds true at a molecular level, but not at a physical item level.

[p.k.roberts]

I think the O.P. asked quite a reasonable 'real world' question, but can't help thinking some of the replies are slightly straying into this territory .... ;-)

 

[kitlane]

Humans listen with stereoscopic hearing.

 

No we don't. We (most of us) have binaural hearing. That means we have two ears.

 

'Stereo' (short for stereophonic) means 'creating the illusion of a multi-directionnal audible scene using more than one sound source'. It could be two sources, but it could be more. Quadraphonic or surround-sound systems are also 'stereophonic'. There is nothing about the word 'stereophonic' that implies two sources. A literal translation would be something like 'solid sound'

[alistermorton]

Quite. Stereochemistry doesn't imply two sounds coming from the compounds, or looking at them from two directions - it means the chemistry of the spatiality of things.

[Stuart91]

the amplitude based panning of most systems is a fairly poor approximation of how the human ear-brain system decodes and interprets the location of a sound source.

 

I remain disappointed that we don't have more consoles offering delay-based panning. I can only think of a handful that do, and they're not likely to be cost effective for me to own or use anytime soon. For the majority of venues, where the majority of punters are in a less-than-perfect position for stereo sound, it seems to make far more sense.

[S&L]

I'm not really able to help much with the original poster question either apart from a listeners point of view where I have heard both and even heard delay towers multi tasked as quad for effect (castle donnington 1983).

You have however unearthed a can of worms, to mix in stereo or mono. and it splits engineers.

mixing in stereo for a show isn't like sitting in front of hi fi and it certainly isn't a hi-fi only construct. shows that are mixed in mono can often lack width and depth. over the last few years I have heard some rock shows by high profile acts that sound terrible mixed this way - no space in the mix at all. but then there are plenty of circumstance where you what you CAN do is severely limited.

bottom line is that each audience member hears through two ears and constructs a depth perception from that information - did that sound come more from the left or right? you can create space in live mixes by panning and working in stereo.

one expects to hear something differently in a theatre environment depending on where one is located - it doesn't always matter that person at point one isn't hearing the same as person at point two so long as an otherwise dense mix is spread for clarity at both points.

you get less return for stereo mixing in an arena with line arrays and as a punter I really can only tell whether the mix is good or bad, you aren't really aware of that stereo feild as much as in a theatre.

but you gain something back in large open air areas. the LCR method dire straights were using is the same method for making space essentially, creating a centre channel to run vocals down, which is the same sort of thing you would do with a stereo mix in a theatre - clear a path down the middle to give some clarity and definition to the vocals without lifting level.

[nb705]

I've used several different methods in Arena's, generally at the behest of the touring engineer.

 

I feel the most successful method has been alternating RLRL going from out fills to main hangs and so on. That way everyone gets a stereo (or inverse) image.

 

But running everything mono can work for simple things, and running LCR can work if you have enough speakers to provide multiple hangs to cover each area.

 

As for delays, unless there are multiple sources covering a single area, they will be a mono sum.