The alternative is our d&b kit, way prettier and cleaner. But not got nearly as much oomph…

Whatever will work best in the environment, bearing in mind that bodies soak up sound — you don’t necessarily need to shake the building but, equally, you don’t want the back of the dancefloor getting stroboscopic bursts of sound as the bodies of those further forward unblock and reblock it.

What size space are we talking about and how many guests do you envisage?

I hadn’t noticed the bass being muffled with our particular (somewhat custom) setup, but I’ll be the first to concede don’t really have the ear for these things.

What does your sound engineer say?

No Beringer kit in our storeroom you’ll be glad to hear :P

Thank the Lord! 😉

Yes the Alpha is… Pretty good. Nexo’s latest amps are pretty shite, the d&b rack is far nicer, but yes, I can promise you it won’t be an afterthought by any means.

As I said, neither of the two videos sounded awful and I was only nitpicking on the grounds that “If it’s that good then it could be better” — if it had sounded utterly shite, I wouldn’t have bothered and simply thought “So be it.”

So, pick whichever you think best — or mix and match, if the kit will play nicely together.

Stage monitors? We have plenty of wedges — SSE built us some custom ones way back in the day. (longggg before my time) And then hired them back off us to go tour with slipknot. So I think they’ll do.

As long as I can hear what’s going on rather than having to rely upon what I heard in the phones before I slipped them off and trust my timing isn’t out when I rely upon my own sense of rhythm rather than the cacophony behind the stack blended with delayed reflection from the floor, I’ll be happy — two side-by-side on my right, or one large one with mono feed will do. The sound just needs to be good enough to hear the EQ balance — I can slip the phones back on to check for slippage.

We have CDJ2000s and a DJM900 — they don’t get much use these days unfortunately.

Sweet.

The complete and utter cockholster of a ‘DJ’ we rigged for last night spent half the time on the mic and cut the music to do it.

I hate that kind of MC — they ruin everything.

If you’re gonna rap with a turntablist to support you, fine, I’m all for that — good hiphop/triphop is excellent.

But the kind of primadonna who thinks their voice is more important than the music can fuck off to a poetry reading, where people are happy to stand/sit around — the people here are here to dance, you self-regarding cockwomble!

As for an A&H I’ll see what I do… Bettrr start saving my change now!

Nah, the 900 will be fine.

The A&H is like a rider … a nice to have.

I’d only insist on it if I were a headline name, playing to twenty-thousand fans — you’re paying me ridiculous sums of money to justify the ticket-price … so, in that case, you’d better make sure I have everything I need to do the job properly.

Again, I’m only picky because I’ve been spoiled and made good use of one over the years. But, like everyone else, when I first found myself faced with one, I too referred to it as the ‘Allen & Grief’ … it took me time to get used to what it can do for me and come to really appreciate the 4-band EQ and simple (but quality) filter — it doesn’t have many FX but what it has it does well!

You won’t find many people who use A&H at all frequently and won’t win many friends by spending the extra on a mixer that people don’t use to its full potential and either complain about because 4 bands is more to remember than 3 … or the fact that it doesn’t have the FX they’re used to on a DJM.

I don’t really even use the FX myself, just the EQ because that’s the way I mix: I do a lot of two-track blending and chopping/cutting, so my time is spent making sure everything is tight and swapping lines and channels … I don’t have time to mess around with FX like I would if I were playing one track from start to end and just fiddling the EQ along the way — so, for me, the extra subtlety of swapping the low mids rather than the basslines … or the high mids rather than tops … makes all the difference to my mix.

But the A&H isn’t commonplace and it’s only thanks to a particular couple of residencies that I have that much experience with one and the vast majority of my time has been spent on DJMs of one sort or another — I wouldn’t spend the money, if I were you 😀