![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() "A lot of the other sound engineers copied what they were doing or talked to them about what they were doing and how they were able to isolate instruments, and how they were able to combine instruments in interesting ways in the PA, and give a faithful reproduction of what was actually being played." "I mean very early on they got a reputation for having the best sound of any band that was out there touring," Jackson said. Jackson said the Grateful Dead were a band of firsts, whether using stage monitors so singers could hear themselves, to using high-fidelity equipment instead of public address equipment. "And so the idea would be to tune the room flat, and so you would start from there with equalizing the sound system to make it sound perfect to the audience." Dennis McNally, left, former publicist and historian for the Grateful Dead, with Jerry Garcia, right, lead guitarist for the Grateful Dead. "And they used a wave measuring device, which was actually invented to test the harmonic strength of metals, and this would measure the room, and you discover which frequencies would resonate too much, others too little," McNally said. co-founder, but everyone seems to agree that Healy is the one who figured out how to make it work. Band members credit the original concept to Stanley and his Alembic Inc. To get the music playing in their sound systems to come back out of the speakers more accurately, Healy started measuring how individual audio frequencies bounced around different rooms to tune their systems to each venue. He says over the span of the Grateful Dead's career they accomplished this dream with room to spare. Healy's goal was to contrive a live sound system that allowed everyone in the audience to feel like they were sitting in front of their dream stereo systems in their living rooms. They turned to movie speakers because most of the research that had been done for high-power, high-quality sound equipment had been done in the 1920's for the moving picture industry, according to Dan Healy, an audio engineer for the Grateful Dead. ![]()
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