I've been to plenty of unamplified concerts before, it's just that type of music isn't my main thing. Years ago I went to see a Big Band type jazz thing which was done without PA in a fairly large hall. Sounded great. A jazz guitarist came on after them and he played through a tiny little amp at the center of the stage. This too was very pure sounding.
That's all well and fine, but I like metal, I like distorted guitar music, and I think the PA is overdone. I wish more bands would play in halls with no reinforcement instead of dingy, reverberant clubs.
The musicians' amplifiers to me are the "reference" for rock music, just as acoustic instruments are. Unfortunately the PA pollutes the tone. In a small club, (if people would shut the fuck up for a change), a drummer without reinforcement can produce plenty of volume to balance with the guitar and bass amps. The singer most likely will not have quite enough natural volume to mix well with this, so put his voice through an amp. The guitar, bass and drums don't need any, or just a little bit perhaps. If you've ever heard a Marshall on "11" the thought of sticking a mic 3" away from the speaker and pumping it through the PA to make it even LOUDER seems absurd. Now take this to the extreme, where you might have a band with a WALL of Marshalls on stage - and they STILL send that through the PA! Insane!
I distinctly remember being at the Milwaukee Metalfest one year and they had one stage setup in a theater type room, which was great. The room was far more damped than the other three stages and it did sound pretty good. I really felt like I was sitting in a giant living room! One band came on, don't remember who, and got the amp going. The guitar crunch coming off that cab was beautiful! Then all of a sudden the guy at the board turned up the mic on the cabinet and sent the sound through the PA speakers. RUINED THE TONE UTTERLY! It was a night and day difference! I was so bummed! I was getting frustrated because the room was not that big, and there seemed no need for such blasting loud PA. The best seat at a metal show is dead nuts center against the stage if you can manage it. The PA noise is off axis enough and you can hear more of the stage sound, which is much better. At a Primus show once I was lucky enough to be inline with Les' bass cab and it was 10x more pure than the cacophony coming from the PA wall!
I do agree with the reality\speaker comparision, which is very telling. However, you're not really critiquing a speaker and amp combo for it's portryal of acoustic reality, you're critiqing a recording of what a microphone heard played through speakers. Microphones usually add a layer of coloration to the sound, often one that is subjectively favorable.
The right recording WILL sound more realistic, even if you have cheap playback equipment. I've recorded my cousin playing acosutic guitar in a bedroom and except for the coloration provided by the microphone, the sound is extremely true to life. If the recordings' aural cues of the space are somewhat in line with your own listening room the illusion of reality will be much effortlessly achieved.
Here's an idea: what if we took all this hifi knowledge and used it for making better PA systems? Find something that will make a guy singing into an SM57 through a speaker sound like a guy NOT singing into anything! Like, what would it sound like if instead of a stack of JBL PA cabs they used Avantgarde Trios or some other fancy pants hifi speaker? If our high dollar hifi speakers are so damn great why aren't they being used in sound reinforcement?
