I mean, I understand not being totally able to reproduce studio album recordings even if the musicians are great. But what I don’t understand is the sheer sound quality of live concerts. Even in big venues with rich famous bands the audio sounds badly mixed at best, or an unintelligible noise-soup at worst.
I assume it has to do with the acoustics of outside with tons of amps vs a closed room with stereo speakers. But idk I just play guitar in my bedroom and I’m genuinely puzzled.
In: Technology
That boggles me as well. It doesn’t necessarily concern just the FOH taps, but multitracks of bigger artists as well, that get a proper mixing/mastering for live version release.
A good thing to understand about live music is that it’s a raw, untreated performance by the artists, that in itself causes a difference in “quality”, and something like a band playing will have different frequencies running through the PA. This frequencies do not spread equally and with the same quality, so let’s say the mix is done by an average that will make the experience good for everybody, but not perfect. The way that sound is mixed is from a place where the house mixing table will be, normally in the middle line of the venue, closer to the back. They mix the sound in prespective the their location, so if you are not close to that place your experience will not be the best. Also, if you are close to a particular speaker you may find yourself listening to a very unbalanced sound, or if you are near the subwoofer you are destined to shake your body all the way through the show, and not earing anything but bass and drum kicks.
Because they’re mixing live in an environment made for things other than sound. Your best bet as a listener is to try to position yourself near the mixers. It also doesn’t help that some singers just don’t enunciate very well and it ends up slurring together.
I think we can break this into two factors, the quality of the performance and the quality of the sound coming out of the PA.
As far as the performance goes, in studio they get another try until everybody is happy about how it sounds. On tour, not only do you only get one try but the performers are doing it night-after-night for weeks or months at a time for hours each performance. It is surprisingly demanding work and some audience somewhere is going to get one person on a bad night at some point.
The PA system at the venue is a more nuanced beast. The band brings their own PA. It is set up in the morning, tuned as best as possible, run for the show and packed up in a truck to do it all again tomorrow. Each venue has it’s own shape and other characteristics that affect how the system needs to be changed but hanging in the same position relative to the stage regardless of the venue, there is only so much that can be done. The EQ is set by an engineer who (in most cases) slept on a bus last night, supervised the hanging of the PA, started tuning and run the show only to stay up past 1 AM only to do it all again in the morning.
The individual engineer has probably been doing this a long time and may not have used good hearing protection over the years. And again, it won’t sound the same everywhere in the arena.
HTH
Since you mentioned you play guitar I assume you are thinking of Arena rock shows. Because in a purpose built music venue you expect excellent acoustics, cough in an opera hall and everyone hears you. So the answer is you are going to watch musicians in a non-music built facility.
A lot of large multi-use entertainment venues aren’t built with acoustic in mind. Which is why there’s a huge difference between listening to a concert at a dedicated performing arts centre versus one at a hockey arena. The former use sophisticated panels and baffling to muffle echos and shape the sound for the best listening experience possible. Television and recording studios will also use similar materials for their studios.
Another thing with a lot of big concerts is they tend to overdrive the audio. People expect rock concerts to be loud no matter where you are in the venue. So a lot of mixers will overdrive the signal. Which certainly makes it really loud, but absolutely kills dynamic range. Peaks of the signal get clipped off, causing the entire thing to sound a bit muffled.
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