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
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
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