BillFitzmaurice.info

A huge 50,000-watt rig has been designed by the trio down to the very last detail, consisting of eight enormous 11-foot speaker stacks, positioned in a circle pointing at the audience in the center. It's been tuned for optimum sound quality, not maximum loudness. "The system is like a dinosaur, if dinosaurs had survived and evolved along with modern creatures," James says.

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As time went on, smaller, more efficient boxes and drivers were built with minor compromises to the quality but massive advantages in size, power requirements, et cetera. Each time one of these small evolutions happened, there was another small compromise (in my mind) and eventually we wound up with the modern club system. That can range anywhere from a bunch of shit piled up and run in the red to make drunk people not hear other drunk people very clearly, all the way to the modern awesome-sounding club / dance PA rigs, which, to my old-dude ears sound totally sweet if you play modern dance music, but don't tend to reproduce ‘Hells Bells’ particularly satisfyingly.

All three of us have old Mcintosh amps in our studios and homes. We're longtime fans." David adds: "James is forgetting another very important reason: they look amazing! Those front plates with the blue VU meters are a design classic, and eight humongous stacks with the amps built in and the meters moving in unison will look better than most modern club lighting."

byacey wrote: I'd be interested in what Bill's comment would be regarding the comb filtering nightmare in an inverted circular cluster like they describe.

byacey wrote:I'm not arguing with you, but respectfully,how would you begin to preventing comb filtering in a setup like this, multiple point sources in a circle?

byacey wrote:That Danley product sound interesting, but a different setup compared to what was described by the original post. The way I read it, they had multiple speaker placements arrayed in a circle facing inwards to an audience within the circle. I don't know how big the circle is, but with that many sources of sound, there must be a lot of combing within the ring.

How closely were you involved with John Klett in the designing of the soundsystem? – it must speak to the engineer in you:

JM: Pretty closely, like I’ve done speakerbox design in the past and I’ve done stuff with and without John [Klett], but I’ll say I did zero math on this, which is unusual for me and is possibly why it got so big. I normally do some of the math.

One of the beauties of this design is that the math is pretty simple on these boxes. You get a driver a speaker and the manufacturer says it needs 1.84 cubic feet and a port of X volume and then you just make a box. And that was the whole point. I make studio monitors for DFA and we made them super simple so that the artists on our label could have a beautiful pair of studio monitors for 700 bucks.

I think it should be more approachable. I get very bored when it has to be made in an anechoic chamber and it’s poly-molded out of a high-carbon bicycle material or boat material. Not that many people are going to be able to get this many McIntosh amps and have this many people working for them and helping build something like this writ large…

JM: I do think it would be nice for me to have a kid – a young person who wants to throw parties and can’t afford the soundsystem – to be able to go online and do some speaker design research. It’s not that hard, you can make them out of MDF – one of the cheapest materials – and in fact it’s a good material to make speakers out of… I don’t know if you would have the same medium density…

No one knows that better than James Murphy, the frontman of sadly defunct LCD Soundsystem, who spent his 20s working as an audio engineer before getting distracted by becoming a rockstar.

Each system is 5-way and it’s kinda obvious what it is: There are two 15s and it’s about 9 and a half cubic feet and the vents are huge but they’re not deep. Early bass reflex cabinets didn’t have the big shelf going back or pipes or any of that stuff, so those are tuned ducts; it’s also a reflex, they call them reflex cabinets, but this is where the vent is the thickness of the baffle.

These are really efficient speakers. For most of the night last night we were averaging about 80 watts, out of each of these mono-blocks, but we were getting very high levels in the middle of the floor because these put out almost 100db per watt.

So, same deal with the mids. It’s one mono-block per box. The stereo amplifier, because horns are much more efficient, we only have 450 watts for the horn and for the bullets and we cross these differently – I’m trying to not get too dweeby – but we’re crossing the horn about 2 octaves above what we could cross it at. I don’t like crossing horns near where they cut off. And the bullets are cut off way above where they normally cut off. You’re not stressing them that way, you can actually put a lot more power into them because you’re moving them less.

This thing on the top is called the birdhouse, because that’s where the tweeters live. And the horn thing is actually a drawer that pulls out and tilts down and it’s pulled out to time-align. All this is physically time-aligned, so there’s no timing other than just physical placement. And then the subs were bought in and they’re 21inch subs – pretty loud – and we’re actively crossing them over rather than using the crossovers in the subs.

So these are 1200 watts each, that’s what they’re rated for, they’ll put out a lot more than that. Last night at one point we were running the stack at about 2000-3000 watts, but we had like 10dbs of float on top of that. These things will actually give you a peak output that’s pretty close to 4000 watts peak.

The crest factor, because we’re using vinyl, there’s absolutely no dynamics, there’s no throttle, this is basically ungoverened. They [James & 2ManyDJs] have to control it back there. I have done the gain structure so it would be hard for them, but they could push this thing over the edge I guess, it wouldn’t be pleasant.