TECH
John: “As little as possible, without getting too
technical, the system uses up to eight ‘stacks’ of
speakers and amps. The stacks are crossed over
into ?ve bands so we have subs, bass, lo-mid, himid and UHF. We went for McIntosh ampli?ers for
everything but the subs. The subs are bought-in
units and we have two of those per stack.
“The bass and lo-mid speakers are simple vented
boxes with two 15” drivers in a roughly 10
cubic foot box for bass, and two 12” drivers in
a roughly four cubic foot box for the lo-mids.
The boxes are rectangular and the vents are not
ducted — that means that the length of the vent
is simply the thickness of the front baf?e. The
vents are larger in area and really follow a design
paradigm that goes back to the earliest ‘re?ex’
cabinets. The vent velocities are very low. The
cabinets are ‘tuned’ lower than we are using
them.
“A modern day track is going to be louder than
a Fleetwood Mac tune, but with our system we
have the ability to play both tracks at the same
volume levels, not compromising on what we can
deliver.”
John: “The goal is not about making the loudest
system but as a by-product of what we are doing,
the system can get pretty ridiculously loud. I
have measured some peak levels that are pretty
high — I mean, look, we have about 10,000 watts
per stack. Take out the subs, as they are their
own universe. This leads to a pretty powerful and
loud system.
“In practice we are running about 15 or 20dB
under what the system is capable of doing so the
whole thing is loa?ng along and running cool,
effortless… that is the whole point — no stress,
take it easy, relax, enjoy. It’s really about being
relaxed-sounding.”
So has the soundsystem become the most
important element of Despacio?
James: “Yes and no, I think you just want sound
that is right for the party, for me you get people
who are starting to DJ more at festivals or on
stages, you get all these line arrays that are
really good for bands but I feel not good for
DJs, as they are not surrounding you in sound,
immersing you in sound, they are just hitting you
in the face with sound. We were thinking about
how clubs used to be, which is more about people
“The hi-mid horn and its driver are from JBL,
the UHF drivers are 40-degree conical ‘bullets’
from Faital, an Italian company.”
I guess it’s a pretty loud soundsystem?
James: “Yes it is loud and can deliver a
seriously loud sound, but that’s not the
point. To us it is like driving an old-fashioned
muscle car rather than a perfectly-tuned
modern day sports car with all its computeraided engineering. A lot of new systems
have a lot of digital processing before they
hit the ampli?er stage and this complicates
the issue, messes with the sound. With our
system it’s just a raw big sound. We’ve got
oodles of power under the hood. We’ve got
a lot of power packed in but we don’t have
to ?aunt it. We know it’s there, but we can
control the sound, we don’t have to run it
into the red. You’ll never get anywhere near
hitting the red, it’s pretty much bottomless
power. It just means that we can allow
the music to move through the system.
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