We spent ten years researching amplified live music. What we found is that while musicians and music lovers are passionate about the power of live music, they are equally passionate about the problems they say routinely interfere with live performances.

Musicians said they couldn’t hear themselves or each other on stage. They talked about a feeling of utter isolation because what they hear is completely different from what their audiences hear. And they told us about the enormous time, effort, and financial resources consumed by their amplification systems.

Audience members told us the sound was often painfully loud, that lyrics were difficult or impossible to understand and that instruments sounds were garbled or simply missing.
In our research, we worked to understand the root cause of these chronic complaints. What we found is that the amplification systems in use since about the time of Woodstock in 1969, are at the heart of the complaints.

It was the need to entertain very large audiences in places like Woodstock that led to a change in the amplification systems. The earlier original approach of giving each player his or her own amplification system, in use as late the legendary concert by The Beatles at Shea Stadium in New York in 1965, could not possibly entertain very large audiences.

The reason that the earlier approach did not work in large venues was due to a fundamental property of the speakers that were used. Namely, if you made them the right level for the musicians they wouldn’t be loud enough in the audience, but if you made them loud enough for the audience they’d be way too loud on stage.

In an attempt to overcome this property of loudspeakers, another kind of amplification system was employed at Woodstock, one we call the “triple system”, consisting of separate PA, monitor, and backline systems. While originally intended for large festivals like Woodstock this type of amplification system quickly became the standard in the smaller venues that have always dominated the live music scene.

With the takeover of triple systems, however, we found in our research that a number of new problems were unintentionally created – problems that are at the root of the present-day complaints of musicians and their audiences.

Too Much Gear
The amount of equipment, and its complexity, increased enormously. Musicians were suddenly spending much more of their time assembling, transporting, setting up, and debugging their amplification systems.

Eye-Ear Disconnect
Many scientific studies have shown that using eyes and ears together allows us to gain a much deeper understanding and appreciation of what has caught our interest. With a triple system, however, sound doesn’t come from the direction of the player making the sound. We found that this caused a drop in audience enjoyment because listeners had to visually hunt for who was playing in order to use their eyes and ears together. We found the same problem made it harder for musicians to play spontaneously and made it easier to miss musical cues because the sound doesn’t come from the direction of the player.

Lost in the Mix
In a triple system, instruments and voices are mixed together and the sound comes from one direction – the location of the nearest PA speaker for the audience and the location of the nearest monitor for the musicians. In the field of psychoacoustics, it is well known that multiple sources coming from one direction makes hearing those sources much more difficult.

Excessive Reverb
We found that triple system produce higher amounts of unwanted reverberation in many rooms -- reverberation that makes lyrics harder to understand and instruments harder to hear.

Guitar Amp Directionality
Although electric guitar is arguably the most important instrument in many amplified musical styles, we learned that guitar amplifiers are the source or serious problems on stage and in the audience. Guitar amplifiers are highly directional, producing a sharp beam of often painfully harsh sound on axis and a dull sound off the main beam.

Loss of Artistic Control
Finally, we found that triple systems take control of the music away from the musicians. Musicians don’t control how they sound to themselves or each other in their monitors. And yet the person who does control the sound (the sound operator) can not hear what they’re doing because they’re not on stage. Moreover, the sound operator makes changes to the music in the PA mix that the musicians can not even hear.

Musicians Speak
We found in our interviews with musicians that they were intimately aware of these problems and their negative effect on their ability to play and ultimately in the enjoyment of their audiences.

The Bose® Approach
Armed with an understanding of the root causes of musician and audience member complaints, we began to think about how they might be addressed with new technology. We went back to the property of loudspeakers that spawned triple systems – loud enough on stage but not loud enough in the audience, or loud enough in the audience but too loud on stage – and asked ourselves if ALL loudspeakers behaved this way. The answer was YES, all loudspeakers we’d ever used. But a member of our research team, Clifford Henricksen, had the idea for a new kind of loudspeaker, one for which the answer would be NO.

It’s shaped like a flagpole and because of its shape has very unique properties. First and foremost, the sound level diminishes very slowly with distance when compared to a conventional speaker. It also sends sound in a very wide-angle pattern across the stage and throughout the audience. And it sends almost no sound up or down.

If you put a speaker like this behind a musician, then that musician, his or her fellow musicians, and the audience all hear approximately the same sound. And if you put one behind each musician, they all hear themselves and each other with unprecedented clarity.
Think about how a loudspeaker like this can address the problems we uncovered in our research:

• A system composed of these Cylindrical Radiator® loudspeakers represents far less equipment: there’s no PA, no monitors, no mixing console, and none of the wires needed to interconnect a triple system.
• Now audience members and musicians DO hear the sound come from the same direction as the player, and enjoy the deeper appreciation of music that results.
• Now the sound of the voices and instruments does come from multiple directions instead of mixed together, which is known to improve our ability to hear.
• There’s much less reverberation generated because these speakers do not send much sound to the upper walls and ceiling, resulting in significantly higher clarity.
• The problems of directional guitar amplifiers are gone because the sound is now radiated evenly across the stage and throughout the audience with little change in tone or level.
• And finally, the musicians – and no one else – are back in complete control of their music…as they were throughout history until just the past thirty or so years.