Bob Heil Interview Series #8: The Who Quadrophenia, The "Mavis Mixer", and SUNN Amplifiers

Awesome !!

 

Very nice, Triple U.

 

Thanks again, Dave! Bob's stories are first rate.

 

I knew it, I new it, I new it.....Quadraphenia had matrix/"synthesizer" encoded audio information it it! As an undergrad and grad school college radio DJ and radio show creator (50kW KDVS--the most power I'll ever command with a PTT), I find Bob to be very impressive. Late in Jr. High, "Who's Next" blew me away but "Quadraphenia", was even more incredible, with a consistency and quality in concept, production, and sound that was previously unknown in rock! I own Bob's headphones but I never knew that Bob had a hand in the sound of one of rock's greatest creations. 73, AD8Q

 

wait till he tells ya about the sound system he built for the Greatful Dead and one day ordered 50 Mac 2300 power amps to power his wall of sound! I can imagine Gordon Gows face at McIntosh Audio when they received that order for 50 MC2300!

 

Except, he didn't. That was Owsley Stanley's design and order. These Heil stories seem to have originated at some acid test party.

 

"Dr." Stan Owsley, chief pharmacist/sound engineer for the Grateful Dead. I would guess, "Dr." (Golden throat) Heil, was in attendance at one of Owsley's test parties.

 

Eclectic Stan Owsley, chief pharmacist/sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, aka former callsign K6HEN

Text below from a Wiki link above ,

"Several setups have been reported for The Wall of Sound:

604 total speakers, powered by 89 300-watt solid-state and three 350-watt vacuum tube amplifiers generating a total of 26,400 watts of power.[3]

586 JBL speakers and 54 Electro-Voice tweeters, powered by 48 600-watt McIntosh MC-2300 amplifiers generating a total of 28,800 watts of continuous (RMS) power).

This system projected high-quality playback at six hundred feet (180 m) with an acceptable sound projected for one-quarter mile (400 m), at which point wind interference degraded it. ..."

Truly unbridled ham innovation Expect more may be seen as usual at the upcoming Hamvention too.

 

So many hams these days, will believe anything they read on the internet. I wonder if they will have any new and improved cans of snake oil at the Hamvention this year.

 

From the wikipedia article"
The improvisational rock band the Grateful Dead employed 48 McIntosh MC-2300 amps as the main power source for their enormous public-address system, the Wall of Sound. Designed by Owsley "Bear" Stanley and others, this system...

 

The others, were NOT Bob Heil!

 

Good stuff! Imagine getting a random phone call from Pete Townsend asking you to Come On Over!

 

Although I love technology and innovation, any kind of music other than classical, almost regardless of "genre", can be fun for a short while (the mood is a pretentious animal), but is such an infinitely low level of what man is capable of in the art of music, including so-called musicality, that anything that comes into contact with it automatically becomes a laughing stock in itself, regardless of technique and such. And the decades just made them much worse.

There is almost no sense of proportion in that music, so the "something was designed" or even "tuned by X.Y." on a piece of equipment for listening to music usually doesn't mean anything at all to me. The best they can do is try to keep the results linear; as close as possible to what we would hear with our ears. But the electric instruments do not have a "natural" sound, they lack the amazing richness and refinement of the acoustic instruments, so at this point we come full circle and have to give up all hopes and expectations...

But that is another story, not the quadrophony, I just had to say something on this "cutting edge" thing...

 

Heil had nothing to do with the original wall of sound.

He did build a new one, based upon Fox Theater speakers, and that's what the Dead used afterwards.

"
On February 2, 1970, jam band the Grateful Dead were scheduled to play a concert at the Fox Theater in St. Louis. For the tour they were using a sound system run and developed by "Bear" Augustus Owsley Stanley III. Owsley, who had a pending drug charge for producing copious amounts of LSD, was under orders not to leave the state of California. Owsley had been arrested on February 1 for leaving the state while at a Grateful Dead show in New Orleans, with police detaining most of the Dead's sound system as well.[2]

George Bales, a stage hand at Fox Theater gave Jerry Garcia Heil's phone number, and Heil remembers Garcia calling to say "Hey man, I heard you have a really big PA." Heil had been toying and tinkering with the large speakers that the Fox had replaced months earlier with a new system. Heil, one of the two organists at the Mighty Wurlitzer in the Fox (dating back to 1956) was given their old speakers which Heil built into his new sound system using the massive Altec Lansing A-4 speaker cabinets. Heil replaced the 15-inch speakers with JBL D140s, and added an array of four radial horns and ring tweeters all driven by McIntosh amplifiers. He has stated "That made a huge difference. It was like a big 'hi-fi' system. No one was putting radial horns into PA systems; they were just doing speakers in columns, like the Vocalmaster. The horns are what give the system intelligibility — you can actually understand the lyrics." His stack riggings resulted in an unusual frequency range from below 200 Hz to well over 15 kHz.[2]

Heil also brought in a modified Langevin studio recording console, uniquely adapted for live work. Heil's friend Tomlinson Holman, then a young student at the University of Illinois, had helped with the rewiring. (Holman would go on to create the THX theater sound protocol.) Heil himself created an electronic crossover in the console to control speaker output. Beyond the PA system that night, Heil also supplied the mixers, saying "My two roadies, Peter Kimble and John Lloyd, knew all the Dead songs — they were big fans. So that night they moved the PA, set it up and mixed the show."[2]

Heil also had a unique technique to handle the feedback problems; a small second microphone taped behind each main microphone. He stated, "We would run the microphones out of phase from the monitors, something that nobody had been doing yet. Since they were out of phase with the microphones and the FOH system, anything that leaked in from the monitors would be canceled out. As a result, we could get these things incredibly loud before they would feed back. That's one of the things that Jerry Garcia really loved."[2]

The show was a success, and the Grateful Dead asked Heil, his crew, and his sound system to join them on the road. Heil's setup would later become a template for the modern concert touring sound system.[2]"


This story jives with a story I remember my Uncle giving me when I mentioned I had a Heil mic once. He was close to the Dead, Bob Seger and quite a few other bands from then, he worked as a bodyguard for them for years.

--Shane
WP2ASS / ex KD6VXI