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The Wall of Sound sounded very good indeed. It was as loud as required, but with the multiplicity of drivers, the volume was diffused over the entire arena. I saw the Dead with the WOS in Freedom Hall, in Louisville in 1974. We got in on the sound check and they played some esoteric cuts for us before the rent-a-cops chased us out.

Gary, I've often wondered what happened to the Wall of Sound (there were two of them) after the Dead realized what a money suk it was to move and operate them. The individual components would be worth a great deal if certified to have been part of the WOS. I can just hear the ad copy now: "Put your ear next to the T-35 tweeter and you may be able to hear Jerry playing China Cat Sunflower!" And the Mac 2300s-wowsers! What could be gotten for each one of those! I'd ask Bear but he crossed over some time ago...

Here are a few examples of chart recorder outputs from the man himself in 1963. He also put some chart records in various editions of Dope from Hope. K400 Paper.pdf

I owned a pair of Dahlquist DQ-10s for about 16 years. The DQ-10s and their early glowing reviews really kicked off the current imaging discourse. Of course, long before then, there was Klipsch Wide Stage Stereo, but few people had the room and pocketbook for that. The DQ-10s were great at "imaging" but not so great at other factors, like dynamic range. The best rock in-concert imaging I ever heard was from the Dead's Wall of Sound. Granted, I've not heard a lot of concerts recently, but I'm wondering if for amplified music anyone has ever approached that. Live orchestras, just areas of sound, woodwinds on that side, strings on the other, percussion in the back, the usual. If you listen to the Philadelphia + Ormandy Columbia recordings made in the late 60s you will hear quite a bit of "added" imaging and a very "forward" frequency balance. People either love or hate those recordings. I tend to agree that most in-home imaging is created at the soundboard, and I'd further add that a lot of imaging, even in speakers that are not "temporally aligned" is due to beaming at the upper end of the midrange driver. There are very few three-way systems with conventional drivers that don't have this issue. FWIW, the DQ-10s crossed over at the point where each driver's dispersion narrowed to 60 degrees. So the 5.25 inch cone midrange crossed over at 1000 Hz to a dome driver than in turn crossed over to a smaller dome at 6000 Hz, and then at 12,000 Hz to the piezo tweeter. I think PWK wrote a Dope From Hope on imaging.

Apples and oranges. It's not the recorder (yes I've used them) but the rest of the set-up. The test room is the overwhelming variable and I would take the curves you see in old High Fidelity or Audio articles as general indications of a speaker's response, but not with the precision we now have with REW and its peers. If you see near-field measurements of bass response in the later years of Audio it's pretty accurate since the room was taken out of the variables. The old chart recorders hooked to the typical General Radio BFO analyzer had "smoothing" but not by design. The inertia of the mechanical stylus (pen) created a degree of "smoothing" but not designed to be "1/3 or 1/6 octave" etc. With the exception of the later years of Audio (Mr. Heyser) I'm not sure any of the mags published raw curves, especially High Fidelity which was notorious for twiddling with the curve to make it look prettier. The exception I recall was there review of the LaScala, which got PWK riled up so much that the mag disavowed the review.

Let me make a suggestion that may help...in my book research I encountered a lot of scanned old newspapers in French. Some of these were so poor in image quality that copy-pasting them into Google Translate just didn't work. So I created a table of commonly encountered French words, like "Avec" and "Avis" with their English equivalents. Not the same as translating, but it enabled me to get the gist of what was being said. I'm attaching it as a starting point for you. Of course, you will need add technical terms that I did not encounter in reading 19th century articles. French to English.xls

This book is addictive, great for a long flight

I'm pretty sure this has shown up on the forums before

Better yet, make a pile of money with crypto/bitcoin/NFT/ponzi de jure and hire musicians to play your faves on request. No hardware issues, although you may find it hard to fit the entire band in your car for road trips.

"So grendel, how do you adjust the line voltage from your outlet to your amp? 120 volts is fine for me, not 128 or whatever." Morbius, you do know that what your tubes see is the B+ output from the power supply and the bias, right? They don't see the line voltage. If you want to really control and protect your amp, get a qualified tech to put pots and meters in the B+ and bias lines for precise adjustments of those voltages, and stop worrying about line voltage (unless you live in TX, LOL). Especially this summer, our line voltages from the grid will droop with load, not go beyond 120. I might add that I have seen exactly one confirmed case of "dirty power" affecting equipment, and that was in a communications lab which got its power from the same substation as a major shipyard with cranes, welders, converters and servomotors galore. IIRC, they finally put in a dedicated line from the power plant which cured the problem.

Save your money! This is actually a non-problem. The power company supplies a nominal voltage which means it can fluctuate depending upon load. In North America, the accepted or usual range is 105-125 V. You will share that pole transformer with one, two or three other households. Depending on load, your voltage measured at the wall outlet will vary in the range I just quoted you. No manufacturer, and that includes HH Scott, designs their products for one and only one supply voltage. Unless your power company has a real brownout (less than 105V) you won't hear any difference. If you feel you just must have a "power conditioner" read Audio Science Review for their tests of those things.

I know what you're talking about but the forum limits each attachment to 2 megs

wish I could post this in higher res, it would be easier to see the mirror tiles and other sparkly stuff.

Wishing you luck,. My HS always had old maids as librarians, how they reproduced was always a mystery.

The building in the background is the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA)