TUNED FOR OPTIMUM SOUND QUALITY, NOT MAXIMUM LOUDNESS

Despacio06_800Image: Rod Lewis

Despacio is Spanish for “slow,” which the Dewaele brothers originally intended to use for a night in Ibiza playing records between 95 and 115 bpm. “We’ve really been into the concept of taking records and slowing them down on the turntables to produce this swampy, sexier effect,” explains David. “When we moved it to Manchester we just stuck with it.”
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.
He explains: “The old disco systems were just sound systems, really. Big hi-fis systems similar in design to sound reinforcement systems, live system, public address systems and Jamaican dub systems. Dub systems were the first to get really specific about large masses of people moving around to pre-recorded music.

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Image: Rod Lewis

 

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Image: Rod Lewis

“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.”
Despacio has been designed specifically to reproduce both modern dance music and “Hells Bells” as accurately as possible. For that reason they will only be playing vinyl through the system. “Vinyl sounds better,” James says, simply, when asked why he’s rejecting digital music. “Why do things the easy way?” asks Stephen.
Getting the components right was important. They’ve been supplied by McIntosh, an audio equipment company founded in 1949,  just before the very first sound systems were beginning to take shape in Jamaica. Its heritage includes supplying amplifiers for the Woodstock festival in 1969, and creating the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound. “Those amps are ‘banuts,'” says James. “Which is a combination of bananas and nuts. 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.”

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Image: Rod Lewis