A Timeless Legacy Continued: Using Today's Audio Equipment to Reproduce the Classic Led Zeppelin Sound at the Most Anticipated Reunion Concert of All Time
By Dan Goldstein
Could Led Zeppelin's concert at the O2 Arena have happened without the help of modern sound reinforcement equipment such as Meyer Sound's MILO arrays? And would it have sounded as good as it did?
The answer to the first question is yes, it could—but life would have been a whole lot harder for those responsible for turning the show into a production reality. The answer to the second question is... certainly not.
Lars Brogaard, whose rental company Major Tom Ltd. provided the Meyer Sound system, was originally introduced to the project by Paul Owen, vice president of US-based rental company Thunder Audio. Over the past several years, the two companies have worked closely to provide Meyer Sound systems for Metallica, Robert Plant, John Legend, Diana Ross and Rod Stewart. Owen and Brogaard understood that a concert of this magnitude would require not only a phenomenal sound system but a phenomenal team. Thus Big Mick Hughes and Meyer Sound's Director of European Technical Support, Luke Jenks, were involved, joining Robert Plant's FOH Roy Williams to achieve the quality of audio that audiences were expecting for this "once-in-a-lifetime" concert.
Brogaard highlights modern rigging hardware as a key advancement since the days when Led Zeppelin toured regularly. "At a gig like this, you have only a few hours to fly everything and make sure all the speakers are exactly where they should be," says Brogaard. "Modern boxes like MILO are properly set up for this kind of operation and so, we had no problems whatsoever. There is just no comparison with setting up for a gig in the '70s."
If the logistics of such a high-pressure event were made easier by modern hardware, then getting the sound right should also have been a simpler process. But Big Mick Hughes, who sat at FOH mixing the band, admits to feeling a certain nervousness in the run-up to the concert.
"I was in a dilemma," says Hughes, who was concerned that diehard fans who'd paid thousands of dollars for tickets might resent any attempt to update the classic Led Zeppelin sound. In the end, Big Mick's love of bottom end proved a decisive factor: "I listened back to some of the old bootleg albums that were made of Led Zeppelin gigs in the '70s, and really, there is no bass on them at all—not because you couldn't record it, but because the sound reinforcement systems at the time couldn't reproduce it.
"I couldn't see the point of going back to that sound. At the risk of upsetting the purists, I decided that the gig had to sound like it was 2007. So we mixed it as if Led Zeppelin had never stopped playing in the time since their last gig, 27 years earlier."
And while the band did stop playing together, the individual musicians did not. Roy Williams, who sat alongside Hughes mixing Robert Plant's vocal, grew up with the singer in England's Black Country during the '60s Over the past ten years of touring with Plant as a solo artist and with bands such as The Strange Sensation, Williams has witnessed Plant's growing interest in a diverse range of musical styles, and was keen to reflect that at the O2 concert.
"Working with Robert today," Williams says, "you're as likely to be asked to mix North African percussion as you are blues guitar. Meyer Sound systems are versatile enough to deliver that range of sounds with accuracy and clarity, which is why Robert and I use them whenever we can."