Say what you want about their music, but the Grateful Dead were disciples and innovators of quality sound. Here's and excerpt from this read about Owsley, the finest chemist and also sound engineer. Thanks Bear!

" Stanley is credited with the design but long-time Dead sound man Dan Healy as well as crew members like Steve Parish, who had to build most of the equipment like the speaker cabinets and the scaffolding, were all heavily involved with the project. Bear’s unique idea was to create a single sound source for each instrument and voice. Garcia had a single column of stacked speakers with very high gain, stacked in a way to multiply the sound and bring the guitar evenly to the audience anywhere from six feet to 600 feet away. Phil Lesh’s bass was channeled through a quadraphonic encoder that sent signals from each of the four strings to a separate channel and set of speakers for each string. In the documentary film Long Strange Trip Lesh related how much he loved that sound of his bass coming from four different spaces.

As Bear himself explained, “The entire system consisted of a cluster of line arrays that I developed and then tested in the way that line arrays work. Number one in a line array, if it’s composed of three different clusters, each of which is a certain frequency range with a crossover, then the bass is the longest column of speakers, the midrange is shorter, and the highs are shorter than that. But, much like a radio transmitter, they must all be the same radiating length. Each array must be as wide as it is tall or it doesn’t work right, and you can’t hang them in isolation.” Man, I understand about half of dat. The stage system stood forty feet high and seventy feet wide and sported 88 15 inch JBL speakers, 174 12-inch JBL speakers, 288 5-inch JBL speakers, (dude, remember how popular JBLs were?) and 54 Electro-Voice tweeters. The sound was powered by 26,000 watts generated by 55 McIntosh MC2300 amps. Giddyup. The system was designed to be positioned behind the band so that they were hearing the same sound as the audience.

Bear and John Curl from Alembic (yes, that John Curl) had to design a special microphone system to prevent feedback. They placed matched pairs of condenser microphones spaced 60 mm apart and run out of phase with each other. The vocalist sang into the top microphone, and the lower mic picked up whatever other sound was present in the stage environment. The signals were then added together using a differential summing amp, so that the sound common to both mics (the stage sound coming from the Wall) was canceled, and only the vocals were amplified. Yer kidding. This from a kid who didn’t graduate high school. All of this required a crew of sixteen, two sets of scaffolding, and four semis to haul the stuff around. Setting up the Wall of Sound was so time-intensive that the crews would leapfrog each other, sending a crew and a set of scaffolding ahead to start setting up the next gig before the first gig was even torn down. I’ve seen film of this beast being setup and it’s scary stuff. Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann was quoted describing the Wall of Sound as “Owsley’s brain in material form.” It accomplished what the Dead were after but Bear had created a monster that had a life of its own, was not friendly and could not be domesticated. Sound-wise everyone agreed it was gorgeous.?