"Return to forever": A touring sound system for concert halls

In 1974 and 1975 the quartet, "Return to Forever," toured North America and Europe, playing to concert hall audiences. Highly complex and highly amplified, the quartet required a sound system capable of playing a variety of acoustic environments. Rose City Sound, of Portland, Oregon, provided a system, which, in addition to projecting to the house, afforded each musician a separate "monitor mix." The heart of the system was a twenty-channel four-way microphone-level transformer-splitting system: one "split" fed the house mixing board; another served as a "feed" to FM broadcasters; the remaining two fed two two-way mixing boards, giving the four "monitors" to the four musicians. With this scheme, the "house" is divorced from the stage environment, and a successful performance depends upon a fine interaction among musicians and technicians. Many features pioneered on this tour now are standard both in new hardware and in operating techniques.