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Originally Posted by jdandy
US Blues........Thanks for that. Great tidbits of information. Of course there was the Grateful Dead's resident chemist Owsley Stanley, too. I drank a little of his punch at a Winterland Grateful Dead concert in 1969, and wasn't right until well into the next day. Phew!!! Those were some wild days in San Francisco back in the late 60's.  
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Dan- maybe everything WAS right until the next day.
A couple more tech tidbits- the WOS was actually a collection of six separate systems that were stacked together. There were 2 guitars, a bass that could play quadrophonically (each of the 4 strings had it's own MC2300 and could be played through half of each stack of bass speakers), keyboards, drums and vocals. Each musical voice had its own system and there was no mixing of sounds, except for the drum microphones and the vocal microphones, but they stayed within their own system.
The speaker arrays were designed as transmission lines, with the entire Wall operating as a point source to minimize phase distortion. The bass speaker towers were the physical height of the lowest note available on a 4 string bass- 38 feet. The center speaker cluster produced the vocals and the keyboards had a smaller curved speaker array on stage left (in your photo the keyboard cluster was not yet finished, note the curved stacking of individual speaker cabinets).
PS- For the faithful, or folks with deep interest in technical matters, there is a wonderful book called "Grateful Dead Gear" that details the guitars, basses, drums, PA's and recording dates of the band through their 30 year history.