Your First System

My first system circa 1977, was very hi-fi consisting of 2 x Pioneer PL12D turntables, an Audiotronic's amp pre-amp section into a Hitachi 2 x 400 watts power amp feeding 4  Wharefedale Airedale speakers. Fantastic sound but totally lacked the spl required for the disco work I was getting, so was constantly blowing drivers. Moving towards more PA type equipment I always tried to keep the system sounding as hi-fi as possible over all the years of change.

Pair of jamo 3way jobbies. 8.. maybe 10" bass driver... some no name brand mosfet amp that we had to drive down to the coast to buy in the late ish 90s. A soundlab shitty 4 channel mixer with a couple of home hifi CD players and a dodgy Mic...

If I remember rightly very first sound was about 8 big old hifi speakers powered by a Ferguson amplifier I think it was, and part of a broken midi system. Music came from a Ferguson turntable, and later a portable CD player. Lighting consisted of a pluto ropelight, and 4 par 38 downlighters that were made into a wooden box, plus 4 R80 spotlights that were fixed to a piece of scaffold board. There was a device made from a motor unit which I think was from some sort of kitchen food mixer. It had 4 microswitches that were wired up to the lights fixed around the rotating disc that was on this motor with a bit cut off it so it pressed the microswitches as it went round to “chase” the lights! There was also a couple of orange flashing lights that were “borrowed” from local roadworks too! This lot was only for friends party’s we did, never played out back in those days.

Edited by djeddie - 03 June 2018 at 12:34pm

Hah, love it. A good reminder that not everything made in the era of simpler electronics was bombproof. I wonder how they managed to screw up that design so badly.

My first 'rig' was a a pair of 12 + piezo mid tops built from parts from an old car boom box and wood recycled from an old wardrobe, although I did fork out for a genuine motorola piezo for each cab too! Bass was a pair of cheap pressed steel basket generic 15's in some random cabs built from 12mm chipboard. Amps were an HH S130 per bass bin and a Technics hi-fi amp (which is now in my living room!) on the tops all strung together with phono leads and jack to jacks and not a crossover in sight. When I upgraded the amps to a Peavey CS1000x I thought I'd really made it (it's a THOUSAND watts)! 
 What is slightly scary and/or depressing is that I would rather use that lot than what some of the 'dj's' around this way use currently. Oh, and I've still got the Realistic ssm-2100 mixer from those days in the garage, and everthing on it bar the cross fade still worked perfectly when I last powered it up!  

 I've just remembered that if we wanted a little bit more oomph we would use a pair of HH 212DC's, one each side on it's side between the bass bins and tops, except they weren't technically 212's, they were a 412 that had been cut in half, badly.... They would get powered by whatever amp was going spare, normally some random old 100w pa head.


Edited by njw - 02 June 2018 at 10:15pm