Feel the power
Their Valve Sound System has earned itself more than a few admirers with its immense volume and massive bass sound. Dillinja is known for his love of reggae soundsystems, building his own when just 16 years of age. Many of these systems used the old Shaka valve pre-amps that the label and system take their name from.
So does he still have any vintage equipment? “Nah, basically the only thing worth keeping a valve amp for is its warm low frequency sound,” he says. “They’re so delicate, because they’ve actually got valves in them. We’d have to have so many of them. It’s all right if you have a small sound system, but to have valves running on a big sound system like ours would be a joke, you’d need a lorry just for the amps!”
He continues: “What we do is we use old bass bins which are still used today on reggae soundsystems, the actual cabinet design, and that’s what maintains the warm-sounding bass. You don’t need a valve amp if you’ve got the right speakers and the right cabinets. We can go up to about 100K – I wanted to go bigger but we’ve just got nowhere to put anything else.”
With all that sheer weight of soundsystem, Karl admits even getting it in and out of clubs is a problem. “We’ve got bassbins on top of bassbins at the moment and have to hire people in just to get them out of storage! We used to just have friends and people we know doing it,” he says, “but now we hire a professional company who come and sort it out for us. It’s just got too big to be asking friends to come help us out!”
The Valve System was partly set up, Karl explains, as a response to dodgy club systems not doing justice to drum & bass tracks. “I think my very first DJ gig after producing for all those years was in New York,” he says, “and I couldn’t believe the state of the soundsystem. Initially I thought it was just the one club that was sounding crap, but when I finished the tour, after playing 18 gigs, I couldn’t believe it – they all sounded shit!
"I came to the conclusion after going all the way around the world, that there are probably only about five clubs in the whole world that sound decent. Two of them are in London – Fabric and The End. Apart from those, all these supposedly good clubs just sound awful, their commercial sound systems are just built to cater for the high frequencies of pop music. The sort of music we make just wasn’t coming through on the system properly so we had to do something!”
