Steve Bray enters the chat…
Steve Bray Activist Against Brexit +Corrupt Tories@snb19692
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My guess is that it’s got more to do with Jamaican Sound System culture than the Grateful Dead (or at least I hope so, I very much dislike the Dead).
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I kind of want to see if it fits under a certain infamous bridge.
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Melodic ballads of even-tempered lads having good wholesome fun, I bet. Songs welcome to the ears of one and all.
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As someone who’s favorite hobby is listening to audio books while walking my dog I have developed the opinion that there are certainly acceptable levels of volume for music being played for the enjoyment of a single individual or their small group in public spaces. If I’m wearing good headphones and can’t get the volume loud enough to hear the narrator, turn your damned music down.
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That is alot of money to spend on a thing you can take to only a select few places
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It sounds great to the owner, as they have permanent hearing loss, for some reason.
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I would assume so, yes. I posted that pic of the Dead’s “Wall of Sound” because it always struck me as “too much” though it was a unique way to broadcast and monitor your own sound.
(FWIW I have a love/hate thing with the Dead. They were sloppy, noodley musicians (particularly post-1975), but they were not bad songwriters. My biggest gripe with them was their fan base, who were too forgiving of bad performances and aimless/boring improvisations.)
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If you care about that sort of thing (you often don’t, because there’s enough room reverb etc to make it moot) you can use slightly different a delay on each cone so that they effectively act as a single sound source - you just pick a source point driver that plays in real time, then delay the rest of the drivers by the time it takes sound to reach them.
This approach is rarely used on single location driver arrays like shown here, but is common when there are multiple array locations with wide separation. For example, a music festival might have speakers set up 100 yards from the stage, so that people far from the stage can still experience the music at high volume without the volume at the stage front needing to be absurdly loud. But they need to delay the feed to that remote array so that the people don’t hear what is coming from those drivers before they hear the sound coming from the stage, which IS quite disconcerting.
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The “wall of sound” design wasn’t to much at the point when it was designed. Drivers and cones back then had much lower power handling capacity. You could probably create the same output with 1/10th that many drivers today.
A large array like that also has the benefit of sounding (more) equally loud up close and far away, which is ideal for festival style stage performance.
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When I was working the 4th of July concert on the Mall in DC, we had repeater stacks every couple of hundred meters all over the area to play the official soundtrack, and it took a good couple of hours to get them all synced up to the sound engineer’s satisfaction. When the Mall was empty-ish, you could actually hear each remote speaker stack back at the stage with a suitable delay – we had a drummer giving a measured beat, and each time he hit the drum, on the stage you’d hear the live drum, then the first ring of repeaters, then the second, and so on. With all the audience in place it was unnoticiable, but when relatively empty, it was quite noticible.
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That’s a helluva lot of A cells in there!
What? Can’t hear you over this constant ringing in my ears.
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Sligo creek trail, which starts at this park, is literally my stretch of the woods, nice place to walk or bike along. The Takoma Park branch is the prettiest section. Not deep woods, you’re usually within a couple hundred yards of a house.
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In college a friend of mine got me ridiculously high, and put on “Dark Star” from Live/Dead, and for the first few minutes I was totally enthralled (until Jerry’s warbley voice came in and made me laugh)-- years later I picked up a copy of that LP and put on “Dark Star” and. . . wtf? How did I like this?
Oh, right. . . . drugs.
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Too bad they can’t do this with guns 
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If you’re gonna be that obnoxious they might as go all the way. Like do it up full itasha and paint the car in bright neon pink and coved in anime girls and maybe Bobby Hill saying “Keep your hands off my purse.”.
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Of course the Maryland-National Capital Park Police (The police department for the unified parks department of the two Maryland counties that adjoin DC) and the Maryland State Police (the police department run by the Maryland Department of State Police) are not the same thing. .
Edited to add: Of course the local department with the worst reputation for racism and violence when I was growing up was the Prince George’s County Police Department.
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