70's Showco/Clair Festival PA

Just an interesting read:-

Nice racks

Yes, those S4's sounded OK in singles or vertically stacked pairs or triples, but the more you put horizontally in a stack, the worse it got. The 18"s coupled nicely, but nothing else. Close to the stacks was OK, but any more than 10 yards away was always a real mess. "Mushy" was how I would describe it.
And they weighed 30 stone each too...

Robbo wrote: System would not even come anywhere near the Iron Maiden Monsters of Rock Festival at Donnington with 360 blue boxes(mainly TMS3s)which was giving a peak of 124db at FOH mix position 100yds from stage---entire system was 525kw of power and you could feel the kick drum hit your chest up to a mile away from stage. I am glad that I was there to witness it as it will never happen again in UK.

You can say that again John,all the Health and safety and enviromental muppets would have kittens if someone did that today.

The Americans have always had this thing about direct radiating cabinets Chris---and they still do to a certain degree in this modern day.
The only time that they have ever been at the forefront of touring pro audio was in the sixties with JBL and Altec and they seem to have stayed there ever since.
I know when I was doing the really big tours in the seventies and eighties, we always used to look forward to the European gigs because we knew that we would be using the best horn loaded systems that were available worldwide.
When it came to the USA legs of tours which were usually at the end of big tours in those days, everyone would be totally p-ssed off with the sound in large venues over there and the outside amphitheatre type venues were even worse.
It really was bad over there due to touring europe for a few weeks with great sound quality right in your face and then going to the USA and having to work on real mickey mouse rigs that the Americans thought were brilliant and in fact they were terrible and totally unsuitable for the venues---you were always fighting a loosing battle at FOH trying to get a half decent sound.
Since those days, I have always took with a pinch of salt, anything that the americans have said about sound and PA rigs---as I said earlier the S4 cabinets were terrible, especially when squared off in stacking instead of a nice curved array to help things along---even the guys that were supposedly at the top of their profession in live sound over there had not got a clue how to set a very big rig up to get half decent sound quality.

:) Tony, you are adorable. That's exactly how i feel about UK, how behind the times this country has stayed and how that is what i like here. Everything seems to be done "traditional way" and no modern nonsense is accepted. Like proper insulation in the houses, underfrool heating on bathrooms, 2 taps on the sink,  insisting to use land lines rather than mobiles, faxes do exist etc.