2026 - thirteen years
The sound system itself is built up and arranged as seven 3-1/3 meter tall stacks of amplifiers and speaker cabinets surrounding a dance floor that is roughly 22 meters across.
Each stack breaks down to different speaker cabinets that cover sub-bass, bass, lower middle and upper-middle/UHF along with amplifiers to drive them individually.
When this project came up as a real thing it was January 2013, about seven months before the MIF 2013 event. There were a number of interesting design iterations... one looked like a eleven foot tall Dalek and was named as such. As we got a little more serious about it a few more design iterations came and went and in April, 90 days before the MIF event, we arrived at the "Monolith" design which is more or less what we built. Next we had to find a builder who would take the design from virtual paper to physical objects and, after a month and a half of having builders informing us that it would take at least a year to properly prototype test re-engineer and build such a thing, we finally got a yes... that was six weeks prior to the MIF event. The speakers arrived at the venue July 15th, three days before open doors, smelling of fresh lacquer. The top parts (the bird houses) were unfinished so we rubbed some clear oil finish on them as we stacked everything up. That was when, for the first time, the system was assembled and powered up. Three days later we did the first of three 10pm to curfew sets... so much for the long development time.
Despacio Soundsystem: From workshop to dance floor - timelapse v2 - on Vimeo from13 Aug 2013
Basic Facts: watts, headroom, and restraint
We typically operate with 10dB or more dynamic headroom so one would see the power meters on the big amplifiers running, on average, between 12 to 120 Watts each... with the whole system running on average with around 8,000 to 10,000 Watts. We don't compress or limit the audio because we want to reproduce the original space and dynamics of the vinyl records we are playing.
Headroom is the point.
We monitor levels on the floor to track and conform to standards for sound exposure, and strongly recommend that everyone who spends time on the floor use some quality hi-fi hearing protection… sound exposure is cumulative so if anyone spends significant time in the middle of the floor (or any loud place) they should have some good plugs - not those foam things.
Rarity:
this site has nothing to do with bookings.
(update 03 Nov 2026)
site content copyright john klett 1995 - 2026