Well, maybe a 5watt class A amp. I have a 12 Watt Tweed Deluxe/Princeton amp I built with a D120 and powered by a pair of 6V6's. I can fill a bar with that amp. I would never ever aim that amp at my head, ever. But my little 5-watt Champ with a small speaker, I guess that little one is less brutal, but it's still amazing how powerful and "coherent" (see laser and coherence) the beam is, even from a little amp and speaker. While far less injurious, I still never aim the beam at my head. And not only for the health factor, but listening to any speaker from directly in the beam is a very unbalanced perspective of what the speaker really sounds like. In the studio or on stage, an engineer will rarely mic from in the beam, but usually just off to the side of the beam. Even Healy, from what I could tell, would keep the mic's capsule just outside of the beam, maybe looking toward the center, but not actually IN the center. It's very interesting to move a mic around a speaker while listening thru headphones. You can hear as the mic passes thru the beam (of any speaker) that suddenly the proportion of treble to the rest of the sound becomes orders of magnitude higher than even just 5 degrees off center. I think what happens when aiming the beam at the head is that our ear still wants to hear the warmth and body of the tone, so we'll still crank until we get enough of that. If you're in the beam, then you've got SO much beam by the time you also have enough tone fullness. The ear will tune out the treble and basically numb to it within minutes. Then we play a whole show like that and wonder why we can't hear shit after the show and why it's hard to hear what people are saying and have to learn to lip read when in a crowd.
Then, of course, there's earplugs.
Brad
Then, of course, there's earplugs.
Brad
... and it's just like any other day that's ever been...
