James Murphy's 50,000-Watt Soundsystem Could Make Your Ears Bleed (But It Won't)

Forget the sound of silver. This is the sound of "slow."

That's "despacio" in Spanish. It's a chord that lays at the heart of a new mid-tempo DJ sound rig, the brainchild of Murphy, 2ManyDJ's David and Stephen Dewaele, and longtime DFA studio technician John Klett. Comprised of seven 3.5-meter-tall speaker stacks, the fittingly-dubbed Despacio soundsystem packs a whopping 50,000 watts of pure, glorious noise—and that's excluding its twin 21-inch subwoofers.

The audiophiles spent two years working on the thing, which weighs in at 4.5 tons. And if they really pushed it, Despacio would make shitting your pants look cute.

"If we ran the system at its full capacity, people would die," David Dewaele told Wired UK. "People's ears would literally be bleeding."

Which is what a lot of clubs today seem to be in the sole business of: Rattling your mind and body to the point of discomfort. Loud for the sake of loud.

But that's not the idea here. With Despacio, the idea wasn't to fashion a club soundsystem after standard club PA rigs that take cues from the modern, massive outdoor music festival insofar as the more sheer skull-fucking volume, the better. The idea, rather, was to make what's essentially a giant hi-fidelity home audio system, one free from the rat's nests of processors and digital circuitry that so many modern club soundsystem's rely on to pump out bangers at long ranges.

"We are not doing that at all," Klett, the DFA engineer, told Wired. "We are back to basically the kind of sound system that you would have had in the 50s or 60s."

What we get is a monument to analogue amplification technologies. A true sonic throwback. Here's how it shakes out, per Wired:

The amps were needed to power the speakers in the seven towering stacks, custom-built with metal frames encased in wood. The lower part of each stack contains four 15-inch drivers, which supply the bass (between 100hz and 400hz). On top of them are two amp racks (supporting three McIntosh amps each) and four 12-inch drivers, these are responsible for the lower mid range (400hz rising up to 2,000hz). The amp racks are covered with thick Plexiglas covers which act as an extended baffle for "keeping the energy of those 12-inch cabinets shooting their way into the room," as Klett puts it. At the very top of the stacks sits "the birdhouse," which is where the four tweeters live, along with a horn, that runs from 2,000hz up to 10,000hz, providing the upper part of the mid range and the treble.

In other words, a lot of power. Fifty-thousand watts. Fifty thousand. For comparison, the Grateful Dead's fabled Wall of Sound PA rig, arguably the touchstone in the evolution of live audio engineering, only went to 30,000 watts.

But much like the Wall, Despacio is run nowhere close to full volume—Dewaele told Wired that they haven't pushed the system beyond 20-percent capacity. (Dewaele stood center floor at Despacio's first appearance, at the Manchester International Festival, and even at 150dB he found the acoustic quality "so high that you can still have a full-on conversation with the person next to you.") With EQ and track dynamics spread over full range, Despacio is almost purer than pure. It's loud for the sake of clarity.

"There is tons of headroom. It's very clean, very relaxed," added Klett. "You are subjected to sound pressure levels that are really up there, but it sounds so clean and free of stress that you don't perceive it to be loud. You are awash with sound."

Not with, say, the sweat of some celeb DJ. Despacio puts the noise front and center, laying bare audiophilia's vintage, aesthetically-pleasing technologies. The system, not the DJ—whose booth is positioned at the rear of the club—is the spectacle. This may well prove to be Despacio's most lasting legacy, a celebration of the listening experience that'll reverberate long after that 33-rpm cut of "Girlfriend Is Better" dies out.

@thebanderson