Acts tend to hire young people to do their sound, as a distrust to
anybody older. This usually results in, 1. recreational
pharmaceutical style financing for sound guys.
And 2. 48,000 watt speaker stacks driven stop to stop.
Before I worked for the university, I was in the laser show
business and I was exposed to a third thing, deaf old stoner sound
guys who have too much money from the practice of 1 above. One, doing
a big show for a city riverfest, decided they needed 10,000 watt
stacks ran off three phase every 200 or so feet to play Polka. A riot
nearly happened as many angry people in tuxes and evening dresses
thought those of us in the laser booth were the ones blasting them in
a confined space with 5 kW of Frankie Yankovic polka. They ended up
cutting one of the feedback cables (4 wire system) to the stack and
that took it to full power and max distortion. Imagine 400
executives and their wives eating dinner on top of a 200 foot tall 4
lane bridge either trying to kill us, destroy the speakers, or run
off the mile long bridge. Sound guy was two miles away and we were
screaming on the radio to kill the audio, and of course he could NOT
hear his radio. I finally turned down the breaker on the genny
powering the bridge, terminating our site as well. The next night we
had double fencing around the laser booth and our own sound feed.
When confronted about the incident later, the sound guy said Whattttt?
I cant hear you.
The next night hit hit me with 10 KW of white noise in revenge,
while I was walking about 10 frofoot in of a stack. While doing
that, he fired every site along the 2 mile event with white noise.
At 11 Pm at night (3 day weekend event) that didnt make the apartment
dwellers along the river very happy. My cowokers claimed they hear me
scream in pain above the stack.
We had to have federal permits and eye exams to work with lasers,
and we always thought that there should be a license, proof of common
sense, insurance and and drug and hearing tests to own a speaker.
It is a real problem
Steve Roberts
