Maybe when you have to fill a stadium with sound, you have no choice but to turn the amplifiers to 11. Or maybe, as an understandable side effect of their profession, all concert sound mixers are deaf. Whatever the reason, I was dismayed to find the sound of a "history-making" concert a bit like listening to a 100,000-watt blender make automobile smoothies.
Yes, it was a spectacular show. Rock band U2 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California with 96,000 people in the audience. The opening act none other than Los Angeles-based band The Black Eyed Peas. Their surprise guest: Slash, the enigmatic (if only because we never really see his face) former guitarist of another local act, Guns n' Roses.
The 170-tonne set, known as the Claw featured enough lighting and electrical wizardry to be a city in its own right. A 360-degree screen above the performers' heads was able to expand to great size, and also move up and down—drastically altering the intimacy of the setting. Two moving bridges connected the stage to a circular walkway some way into the crowd, allowing the performers to get close to many more fans than a show with a proscenium or even thrust stage could ever manage.
In the end though, this was a concert, and was ultimately about the music. Now unlike my wife, I'm not a huge U2 fan, but two of their songs are among my favourites: Bullet the Blue Sky, and Where the Streets Have No Name, both from the band's The Joshua Tree album.
But I have never liked their sound production; to me, all their albums sound clogged up and over-compressed. At the Rose Bowl on October 25, the sound was an assault. The mid and high frequencies were shouty and distorted, and the bass boomed so badly that much of Adam Clayton's work was hidden behind one throbbing note that we could feel in our whole bodies. Impressive for about two minutes.
Audio snob
At this point, you may be rolling your eyes and thinking "What an audio snob", but the truth is, whether people noticed it consciously or not, the sound greatly affected their experience. Bad sound takes away so much subtlety from the music, robs it of its rhythm, and blunts the little twirls and rough edges that give live performances their vitality.
Live music has an infectious energy that's almost impossible, or at least incredibly expensive, to duplicate on home playback systems. Concerts with good sound and an at least half-way decent band get people moving and enjoying themselves so much that they wouldn't notice the absence of a set with the weight and light emission of a small star.
The sound of just a bass drum on a well-mic'ed drum kit can fill you with joy. It's a deep, but sharp report, totally unlike the muffled, long-drawn boom that most badly designed sound systems reproduce.
But as I wondered earlier, maybe you can't have both in a stadium. Either way, this makes the stadium concert the equivalent of the chain-restaurant—slap it on a plate and make sure everybody, even the people at the very top, get a big helping. Hopefully, the size of the serving will mask its lack of quality. (The one problem with this analogy is that fast-food is usually cheap, and stadium concerts are anything but.)
All of this may not matter any more because it's said that U2 is the last of the bands that can put on a show on this scale. If, when you go to a concert, you expect to hear, really hear, the music, this is good news indeed.
Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.