Well, yeah, compared to today it's not great but no one had tried anything like that before. They delayed the sound to distant speakers with tape delay. It's cool as shit and was the groundwork for how we do things today.
It's like saying relay computers were dumb... Boolean logic was new and no one had ever attempted stuff like that before.
No, the whole point of the WoS was that there were no distant speakers. Everything was single sourced, to the point where each speaker only carried a single instrument.
The routing wasn't nessisarily full spectrum though. There were a lot of crossovers in use.
I also believe I heard some of the precussion mics were targetting only one or two speakers.
At least in the case of the speakers for Jerry, they had a a seperate McIntosh hi-fi amp for each speaker, being fed out of a Fender-derived preamp and a many-way splitter. Owsley basically bought the every one that model amp that was in stock at dealers on the west coast. Hundreds of thousands of dollars just on those amps - they were something like 2 or 3k a pop even then.
The only reason they were even able to afford in the first place was that Owsley (Yeah that Owsley, who was also their primary sound engineer) had so much illegal cash from a decade of making most of the LSD consumed in the United States. Band never even paid for most it. It was more this crazy idea Owsley had and mostly paid for that they kind of rolled with.
That sort of thing was more than a bit of a pattern in that camp, and was a large part of the band's downfall. It got to a point where it seemed like half of Marin county was on the payroll, and there was so much money going out that they had to tour constantly, wether they wanted to or not. The heavy touring clearly had a major toll on Jerry both physically and mentally. A two or three year hiatus around '91 or '92 would have done him (and probably some of the other guys) a world of good.
Not exactly: the wall of sound was only set up on stage. However, you could hear the music extremely clearly 1/4 mile away, due to the coherence. The delay towers were used before the WoS.
It's like saying relay computers were dumb... Boolean logic was new and no one had ever attempted stuff like that before.