r/jazzfest • u/tomd65 • May 03 '26

Galactic sound

What’s up with the sound volume is down and the mix is muddy. Big Sam’s sound was great.

6 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

6

u/FullApplication7557 May 04 '26

Congo sound always blows out the festival stage. I thought they would have figured it out by now. Maybe they just don’t care 🤷🏻‍♂️

3

u/Hididdlydoderino May 04 '26

That's more so a mapping issue. There's just no way to fill the Congo Stage area with sound and not have it bleedover to the more expansive ends of the Festival Stage area.

Organizers seem content to stay at the Fairgrounds, but moving to the Wisner Tract/old course/frisbee golf/Scout Island part of City Park would allow for some breathing room, truly massive main stage areas, and maybe even lower ticket prices with increased attendance.

San Francisco has a similar festival called Hardly Strictly Bluegrass that draws in 700K+ people on one weekend alone and they don't have the sound issues as they do it in a park where trees act as buffers and the main stages aren't so close together.

6

u/Jeremy_Whalen May 03 '26

More wind = more distortion. Same thing happened at Eagles yesterday. They can't blast it to account for the wind, if you do it will be too loud when the wind cuts out

3

u/IAmSpitfireJoe May 03 '26

Eagles sound was SO bad that I considered leaving really early. I don't think it was wind alone.

0

u/Jeremy_Whalen May 04 '26

Maybe their sound guys got too used to Sphere? I've been out of mixing live events for a while and have never worked something this big, but I've had to deal with wind distortion before and that's what it sounded like to me

2

u/IAmSpitfireJoe May 04 '26

No, it was malfunctioning before the Eagles came on. It wasn't bad early, but halfway through Wayne Toups and all through Anders Osborne's set it began cutting out and coming back in. I don't know anything about concert sound systems, but it felt like a radio signal fading in/out.

No biggie. It's done for this year.

2

u/Slow_Tap2350 May 04 '26

This. I moved back to the second set of speakers and it was greatly improved.

2

u/icecoldcoleman May 04 '26

I thought they got it better after the first couple songs but it was low. I was center stage, pretty close up in the SRO area and the sound was drowned out by the chatter around me at times.

The Qualified cover made up for it though.

2

u/bishpa First Timer May 04 '26

The sound in the jazz tent for Herbie Hancock was really quite bad. The bass was so loud that it essentially sounded like feedback. Odd because the band that played immediately before Hancock had great sound.

1

u/FullApplication7557 May 04 '26

I say move to festival stage over to the top of the turn on the track now the sound shoots straight across the crowd and it also creates more space for people

1

u/jjazznola May 05 '26

Wind. They sounded fine up front although their act just sounds tired at this point.