In the world of reggae music the Sound System was the way the music was presented, sounds run by Coxsone Dodd, Duke Ried and others in 60s Jamaica, later by King Tubby - Tubbys Hi Fi, Pablos - Rockers Hi Fi, and here in England with Lloydie Coxsones - Sir Coxsone Sound, Fatman Sound and Jah Shaka to name but a few, in this tradition the Disciples also tried their hand.

In 1991 securing the funds to do so we built up a sound powering some 5000 watts, 4000 of which was used on the bass end alone, running through to twelve 400 watt 18" Fane Collosus speakers, the mid section was powered to 1000 watts and featured ten 100 watt 12" speakers in various boxes, the treble section powered by a 150 watt amp and consisted of three sections of 8 piezo tweeters. Our sound during this time was more than adequate enough for us to play alongside the likes of Aba-Shanti, Iration Steppas and many others. As you can see by the pictures we had an assortment of boxes...double bins (reflex) and scoop bins for bass...when we first started we had four double bins and 4 scoops but later changed to 3 double bins and 6 scoops, we still maintained 12 speakers overall....





A specially built pre-amp, something that only really exists in the reggae world, was used to sort out the frequencies, containing an inbuilt crossover set up to provide the seperate bass,middle and treble sections with the frequencies needed for reggae, also handling graphic equalisation plus specific EQ for the separate sections in the form of sweep control for bass, parametric for mids and a high EQ for tops, the pre-amp also featured cut-out switches for the bass,mids and tops as well as input sections for turntables, DATs, microphones and FX boxes and also an effects send/return auxillary for adding delay or reverb to all input sections, all of these features helped to sculpture the sound and add effect essentially making the sound almost another instrument not just a large HiFi like PAs, only in recent years have DJ equipment companies been adding some of these features to their gear such as - kill switches - etc. reggae sound systems have been using pre-amps since the early 70s ! in fact the BSL preamp was around 12 years old when we acquired it in 91.

A typical setup at a venue wouldnt see the speakers set as a stereo pair, most sounds arent stereo, the stereo perception in most venues would be lost on all those not standing more or less dead centre, so why bother !!, instead sometimes 3 or 4 or more stacks of speakers would be setup around the venue thus covering a greater area with upfront sound, although small venues or playing with another sound might require grouping the speakers into 2 stacks. The BSL sound usually set up 3 stacks containing 4 bass 2 mids and a tops section, with fine tuning from the pre-amp the sound was well defined with clarity in mids and tops and deep earthquaking bass, which at times was pushed to extremes, no compressors or limiters were used and if a speaker was blown in the proccess that was part of the vibes being produced !!... having played alongside club PAs running upwards of 10K watts and costing many thousands of pounds more, the BSL sound showed what could be achieved with minimal equipment but knowledge learnt from people with years in the reggae sound system business.





The traditional way of presenting music on sound system was through records or on dubplate, a dubplate also known in reggae circles as - black wax - or - slate - but generally known in manufacturing as an acetate, is a metal plate with a fine coating of vinyl used for mastering music on with the intention of growing a metal master / stamper for the production of records, the process of transfering music onto acetate was called - dubbing - and so the name - dubplate - came about, not strictly referring to dub music but to all reggae music. In Jamaica with the proliferation of sound systems and the need to play exclusive unreleased music to attract a bigger audience
than the next sound the acetate must have seemed the quickest and cheapest way of doing this, in 1990s UK with most music being mastered onto DAT and with the tapes fast rewind / forward, accurate song/ start position and the low cost of the tape media, a few sounds (notably - Iration Steppas - and our BSL sound) took to using the DAT format, the higher sound quality, better frequency response, the ability to re-record over a bad mix, to build a tune in the morning and play it on the same night gives it many advantages. There is some heated debate between the dubplate versus DAT format, but whatever works for the sound works...nuff said !!!

(PS: the above was written for the BSL website a fair time ago, obviously things have moved on quite a bit since the time i ran sound system, debates of dubplates, dats or other formats have been done to death, and barely matter now, sounds are running from cdrs, laptops.. i-pods even !?...and of course sounds have vastly moved on in power output, what was powerful as my bass end those years ago is more like a sounds midrange section now, the debate there could be is it all neccesary ?, well, for some it is, for many im not so sure, theres fewer and fewer venues for such high powered sounds, and smaller venues soon put a finish after a few rounds of such battering, as such losing sounds the potential for arenas to play in, which kind of defeats the object, some sense  needs to be taken into consideration i think !...anyways, it all carries on in one way or another, and ive seen the vast proliferation of new sounds around the rest of europe, and beyond, so it nah go stop just yet.)