Roots Archives Forum

On lots of places on the net i've seen some people declaring themselfs as djs, and some as sound systems.

can you tell me what's the difference?
what's dj-ing reggae music, what's sound system?

sound systems are what DJs/deejays use to play music for audiences, which they toast/chant over.

One way to view it is to look at the sound system as the physical entity, its made up of speakers, amplifiers, turntable, sound effects etc etc. Alongside this there is a collection of people that work on the sound system, these are the operator, who mixes the sound and is responsible for setting up the electronic aspects of the sound system ie connecting up the amps in the right places, the selector who chooses the tunes, and the dj who chats/chants/toasts over the tunes. There’s also a good number of roadies or box carriers that will lug the speakers from the van to the venue. Think of the sound system as a collection of all these things.

Without the original JA sound system, we would have probably never had concerts and stadium shows the way were used to, with the oversize speakers, and the tens of thousands of wattage to blow weak eardrums...

well, there were already big concert systems in the US by the late 1960's, Bob Heil was probably the pioneer of the modern concert PA..... his system used by the Grateful Dead was about 20,000 watts (around 1969-70).


JA soundsystems were not quite that big yet.

Yeah but 2 be honest I think those sets were probably sonically inferior to the JA, especially when your talking about bass.
The rock guys + pop guys, their music was always pretty flat, the recordings were over-compressed and they never in my opinion made full use of the lower frequencies.
And so their live work basically mirrored that of the studio.

A JA set could play for tens of thousand of ppl and more, so you can imagine how much power that system is packin..! And i'm talkin 60's too, at the height of the independence fever - turning point for the music and the sound system.
And bass + power + clarity the order of the day.

A Jamaican soundman's idea of loud and The Grateful Dead's idea of loud are two very different things. Jah Steppa is right about the frequency range, and to deliver that amount of heavy bass takes some serious power. The electricians like King Tubby who built the amps and pre-amps for these sets knew their business and were able to flourish because everyone wanted custom built kit to deliver their sound the way they wanted to hear it. The systems in use in the US concert arenas were presumably built by people affiliated to electronics companies and without the independence of Tubby et al, will have had to compromise on components due to professional branding issues.

While both amplify sound, a Jamaican sound and a concert PA are two entirely different things. JA sounds often have a greater level of personalization, as there there is a history of owners and managers with a background in electronics.

But concert PAs are often personalized to achieve a desired sound, they aren't necessarily "out-of-the-box". The grand-daddy of concert PAs was a highly customized PA built by Owlsley Stanley for The Grateful Dead.

Take a look at this schema. With a little fine tuning, you could keep a pretty nice session!

http://www.dozin.com/wallofsound/

Hmmm.....interesting. That was in 1974..

btw i thought the Wall Of Sound belonged to Phil Spector?
Didn't it?? LOL