Ayone know the wattage used at a Rock concert?

I remember doing shows with as little as 1000 watts, and that's including the monitors !!! Most "good sized" venues will be running somewhere between 2500 - 6000 watts rms of amplification. On a big tour of big halls, 10K is nothing at all. Most all of it sounds like crap though because the guys working the boards are clueless and so are the guys designing the PA cabinets. When you start playing outdoors and want to generate "thunder" you've got to have REALLY big power.

As far as the Grateful Dead sound system being discussed here, John Curl designed much of that. They used Macintosh amps the system was too costly to transport due to size and weight, so it didn't last as long as most of the fans would have wanted it to.

Part of the reason why this sounded as good as it did was that they actually used midrange drivers. Most PA systems are built around large woofers crossing over to horns. Trying to get natural sounding mids / upper mids out of a large woofer is ridiculous to say the least. Cone break up and dispersion are facts of life that we have to deal with, yet most PA designers / operators aren't aware of the laws of physics or that things could sound a WHOLE lot better. Sean
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While i think that The Who still hold the record according to the Guiness Book, Manowar is definitely a band that plays on "10". No real man would play any other way : ) Sean
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I don't doubt that there are bands that are playing louder than the Who did way back when, but whether or not they make it into Guiness is another story. I also have to question how the spl measurements were taken, the distance from the stage, the size of the venue involved and the amount of bodies in attendance. All of these things will drastically alter the results of any type of measurement. Sean
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