Photo: Joe Walsh | “The Eagles switched to using in-ear monitors for their residency at the Las Vegas Sphere, to combat an audio issue the proved challenging for a band that always used on-stage monitors to hear itself.
Walsh tells ‘Rolling Stone’ in a new interview that the audio issue is specific to the Sphere and its state-of-the-art design for pristine live sound. But it was almost a deal-breaker for the Eagles.
“One the Sphere there’s 160,000 speakers behind the screen,” Walsh explained. “No matter where you sit, you have speakers pointing at you, so they don’t have to be really loud. To do that, computers have to delay it a little bit from what we’re doing. Because it goes everywhere in the Sphere and comes out of these speakers all at the same time, there’s a delay there to process that.”
But that leads to problems if a band is performing live and relying on stage volume for monitoring; they’ll get confused as to what they’re hearing.
“If we’re aware of that [delay], we can’t play,” Walsh continued. “It’s like singing the National Anthem at a baseball stadium. [The sound from] right field comes right back at you, and then left field comes back at you, and then center field. There’s three of you and you don’t know which one you are.”
Eagles eventually relented and switched to in-ear monitors, so they can’t hear sound from the room, only the mics on the band.
Walsh admitted that adjusting to in-ears after so many years of touring was a challenge.”
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Photo: Joe Walsh | https://www.facebook.com/JoeWalshOfficial