From me to the CEO of Meyer Sound late last night:
I was wondering what happened at the Outside Lands Music Festival in San Francisco this past weekend. I was so excited to go see my first Tom Petty concert and was disappointed when the sound cut out twice on Friday night during Radiohead, but I figured for sure it would be fixed by day two of the festival. Then it happened again during Tom Petty! What gives?
Thanks,
Kirsten
From Helen Meyer, Executive Vice President of Meyer Sound sometime today:
I appreciate hearing from you. To answer your question, the technical difficulties that came up during the headliner shows Friday and Saturday nights at the Outside Lands festival were related to frequency irregularities in the power signal from the generators. The sound reinforcement system provided by Meyer Sound and ProMedia/UltraSound was functioning properly throughout both shows.
Although there is, of course, an incentive for Meyer Sound to claim it is not at fault, I tend to think this explanation is plausible. The speculation in the comments of a previous post that it was due to the bands having their own sound people misusing the equipment did not make sense to me because it would have been different people each night and you would not expect the same problem to be repeated. A hardware failure of some sort would be more consistent with repeat failures of the same failure mode. The only thing that does not really make sense to me is why these frequency irregularities would only show up during the headlining shows each evening and not during the preceding shows during the day and earlier evening.
Anyway, thanks to Rich for poking at me to dig a little deeper. I’m going back to amend my previous post and link it here for more of the story.












