Talking Dark Side of the Moon PA with Mark Radcliffe and Chris Hewitt

Really interesting stuff! I was a component level audio electronics engineer all my working life, over 50 years, and grew up with all the names and equipment on this video. When the trend swayed towards high power amplifiers in one box, HH Electronics came up with an amplifier model S500D which we used a fair bit back in the day. They were used in an industrial application for vibration testing aeroplane wings! As any technician out there who knows his stuff can tell you, there is always someone ready to make the idiotic comment of "blimey, only 100 watts? I've got !K in my car!" The drivers in those boxes were so efficient, 100watts RMS gave rise to a lot of SPL. E.g. the Marshall 50 and 8 x 10" Celestion rig, they were absolutely deafening with slightly less than 50 watts RMS of power.

Fantastic!

I remember the saturday afternoon rock show..Fluff played the first ever play on radio before the album was released..He played 'Money'

For an old Floydian relic like me, that was magic. Thank you 👍

The DC 300A is about 150 watt per channel but we used them to drive 3 8ohm 15" speakers in parallel

Saw that tour in Newcastle in 1974, not in the City Hall, Floyd knocked it back as unsuitable for the new PA so they did the gig in the nearby Odeon cinema. Class.

Another great talk! So great to hear the behind the scenes stuff

Empire Pool, Wembley - November 1974. The same running order described by Mark, and certainly good value for £2.20.

Fun fact: you can actually see the newer cabs in the Pompeii film. During Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, when the camera pans away from the band, you can see them.

This is interesting. I was a roadie on the April 1973 DSOTM show in St Louis. We rebuilt the entire PA after it blew up in Detroit the night before. Anyway, I have called the PA crew Britannia Row in the past because that's who I remember them to be. But I couldn't find evidence that they were indeed the same guys who were on that early part of the tour. It's good to hear that that was indeed who they were. I spoke with Roger Waters about all this about five years ago when he did a rehearsal session at the studio I worked at in DC.

When I was at uni, I had a summer job at the research institute there. The first time I walked in, I saw someone wheeling a Crown M600 amplifier down the hallway. Yes, they really were used in laboratories! My own Phase Linear amplifier, a 200, survived shipping cross-country, but not the trip back. So I bought a DC-300A myself.

It's incredible how far we have come. Parraflex rigs with 10k Powersoft one RU amps.

Really interesting stuff, great video!

Excellent stuff! 👋

Charlie Watkins really was the Father of modern large scale P.A. (Public Address!) sound systems at least on this continent -even today's Line Array systems use the same principles as a WEM Column speaker. Bless ya Charlie! Equally John Lenard Burnett-Lenard Audio in Australia-to be fair-a great innovator-still going! And for me James Bullough Lansing in US-of course-started in Cinema sound-all greats!

According to wikipedia "Pink Floyd 1974 tours" page, under "1974 British Winter Tour" Pink Floyd played The Palace Theatre in Manchester on 9th and 10th of December 1974. The band lineup doesn't mention a second guitarist, however, and Snowy White didn't tour with them until the Animals "In the Flesh" tour of 1977.

Yeah black boxes prevail in pa It’s great when you have space but if you are a bit savvy you can get a really good sound out of two boxes aside bass/mid and mid/tops and a couple of lab gruppen amps

was this part of the rig that they uesd at knebworth?

Interesting doc

Phase Linear, the early brand name of Bob Carver’s audio equipment (later just branded as Carver). Local to Lynnwood, Washington, near where I grew up. I still use the Carver amp I bought in 1992 to power my main speakers (used to be Dahlquists, but recently replaced with Martin Logan ESLs). I never knew the Pink Floyd connection, but knowing Bob Carver it’s astonishing that he never capitalized on that.