I went to a Grateful Dead concert in Boston (At teh Boston Tea Party, Landsdowne Street) , new years eve 1969. I had never heard of them before that, a couple friends of mine convinced me to go, and the price was pretty cheap. At the time, I was home on leave from Fort Gordon, and needless to say, I was the only one there with a crew-cut
I was up close to the stage (no chairs or seating, just an open floor), it was no problem to move around and gawk at all their nice sound gear, including McIntosh tube amps, home built speaker arrays, the whole "wall of sound". When they took their break, the guitar player, and drummer walked over to me and we got talking about tubes, speakers, and how I was in the Signal School in Georgia. Yes, that would have been Jerry Garcia (long before he porked out) and Pig Pen. They seemed like nice easygoing folks and not consumed by their own fame.
I can remember after that, one long haired, really stoned-out guy saying to me "wow man, you just talked to God"...
The sound was definitely
LOUD, but also very clean and non-distorted, and not at all fatiguing to listen to (unlike my "bleeding ears" experience at an outdoors Aerosmith concert, five years later).
They had the "liquid' light show projected on the wall, and the atmosphere inside the place had a very heavy smog of certain recreational herbal substances
If you really want to blow up EL34s (and your eardrums at the same time) play Devo's "Whip It" at maxed-out volume. Friend of mine was doing that a few years ago, and blew up the OPT on a VTL MB450 power amp. Its eight Svetlana 6550Cs took the lickin' and kept on tickin' after teh OPT got replaced by VTL.
He sent it back to them, and they replaced the OPT at no charge except for the shipping expenses (which were fairly considerable for one of these beasties).
Apparently the OPTs had a internal insulation breakdown problem which took a few years to reveal itself. The other MB450 a few months later went through the same thing, they also replaced its OPT at no cost. They also upgraded the B+ fuses and holders, and a few other things in both monoblocks.
/ed B