Photograph by Whitney Curtis, Illustration by Sam Wiley
Sitting in the kitchen of his Creve Coeur home, Bob McCarthy wears a pair of bright pink pants, a colorful shirt, and sparkling blue glasses—all rock star. When he speaks, though, it’s with the assurance of a physicist who’s mastered his field.
“The world of sound is a scientific world that’s inhabited primarily by artists,” explains the 55-year-old sound designer. “So what you have is people with artistic sensibilities living in a world that has hard and fast rules of physics, and the tuning of the sound system is that bridge point between the artistic experience and the science side.”
He’s discussing equalization, a technical process with not-so-technical roots. When McCarthy first began setting up sound equipment in the ’80s, often touring with bands like the O’Jays and Commodores, equalization was deemed a sort of “black art,” one that only certain people practiced and that couldn’t be quantified or measured. That is, until John Meyer, a close friend of McCarthy’s, brought a dual-channel FFT analyzer to a Rush concert in May 1984. For the first time, it allowed a mix engineer to measure sound as the band played—an approach that McCarthy quickly latched onto, refining the process in the years to come. His goal: create spatial uniformity of sound.
“What we brought into the situation was the ability to see sound in a very naked way,” he says. “You could not only see it at the mix position [where the engineer operates during a show], but I could place mics all over the hall and tell you what it’s like.”
While the rest of the music world wasn’t as open to the idea, audio engineer Don Pearson, alongside McCarthy, was brave enough to try in-concert analysis with a certain group known for its ability to improvise: the Grateful Dead. “We introduced it to other bands, but they were too nervous to let somebody do open-heart surgery on their sound system with 10,000 people present,” recalls McCarthy. “But the Grateful Dead—gotta love ’em—their attitude was ‘Do experiments in the middle of a show? Well, yeah! That’s what we do.’”
Opera singer Luciano Pavarotti followed suit, using approximately 10 sound subsystems in a single venue to ensure every audience member could hear the tenor’s unmistakable voice—an approach far different than rock concerts. “The thing about rock ’n’ roll is that the delivery of power is of such paramount importance that people are reluctant to subdivide systems,” explains McCarthy. “In the world of Pavarotti and Broadway musicals, it’s delivery of a perfectly realistic experience that’s the key thing—they want Pavarotti’s voice to sound exactly like Pavarotti.”
In 1987, McCarthy received a call from Carnegie Hall. Comedian Rodney Dangerfield was performing there, but the sound system wasn’t wired for standup. Given the hall’s five levels, it was no easy undertaking. “When you’re dealing with a five-layer cake, you have to divide the sound system into a lot of pieces,” explains McCarthy. “It’s like a patchwork, with very careful attention having to be paid to where the seams are that hold the sound system together. Simply put, every single speaker must have a destination, a particularly unique area that it covers.” Apparently, Carnegie liked his work; McCarthy’s fine-tuned the system there since.
Today, his list of clients spans the globe: New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, Australia’s Sydney Opera House, Walt Disney World’s Fantasmic! show, Cirque du Soleil’s Love show featuring the music of The Beatles. In fact, in June, Sir Paul McCartney—the man who’d made McCarthy appreciate live concerts when he was a kid—attended the Love show for its five-year anniversary. As “Get Back” played overhead, the spotlight spilled out into the audience, allowing McCarthy to see McCartney singing along to the words coming from the sound system. “I thought, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this,’” McCarthy says with a smile.
Three decades after McCarthy began his career, sound analyzers are fully embraced by the music industry. “It’s like a complete reversal of what is normal,” he says. In 2007, he wrote the bible on the subject, Sound Systems: Design and Optimization—a 568-page book that explains everything from amplitude to frequency, voltage to polarity—and his firm, Alignment & Design, designs and tunes sound systems around the world. Besides teaching seminars for other mix engineers, McCarthy is working on his next book, a sort of “cookbook of recipes” that shows optimal sound-system designs for a variety of venues.
Still, as much as McCarthy has advanced the field, you probably wouldn’t know it if you were to attend a show where he designed the speaker system. “Our favorite sound review,” he says, “is when they talk about the lighting, the music, the costumes, and they don’t even mention that we exist.”
