History
In the early 1960s, many professional live sound engineers were wrestling with the problem of giving the musical artist enough of their own voice to stay in tune during a performance. Using monitor loudspeakers may have been developed independently by sound engineers in different cities who were trying to resolve this problem during the 1960s. The first recorded time that a loudspeaker was used specifically as a stage monitor was for Judy Garland at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium on September 13, 1961. It was provided by McCune Sound Service.
Early stage monitors were simply speakers on each side of the stage pointed at the performers driven by the same mix as the FOH because PA mixers rarely had auxiliary send mixes. Today these would be called "side fill" monitors. Bill Hanley working with Neil Young of the Buffalo Springfield was the first person to combine putting the speaker on the floor angled up at the performer with directional microphones to allow louder volumes with less feedback.
Bob Cavin, a former engineer at McCune Sound, designed the first monitor mixer designed expressly for stage monitoring. He also designed the first stage monitor loudspeaker that had two different listening angles.
Read more about this topic: Stage Monitor System
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