Mashup Sound is a dub sound system we built from second-hand speakers. It's a stack of horn-loaded boxes about nine feet tall, standing on an old solid-core door with a red top and six casters. Most of the drivers have already had a life or two: JBL parts from a touring rig, a pair of Altec cabinets, a sub cone patched with silicone, and a mid horn we built out of plywood in the studio.
Sound systems started in the yards of Kingston in the 1950s and went from there to the basements and house parties of Britain. The crews built them themselves: the boxes, the amps, and later the records. A system was known by its sound and by who ran it. Ours started with a pair of scoops in a record store (page 1-7).
We wanted a manual like the old instrument manuals from the 1950s and 60s: typed, one column, tables, drawings and blank pages for notes. So we made one. It's set in Mashup Pica, one of our typewriter fonts. Every number, every repair and every change goes in here, so whoever has the system next knows what they've got.
In 1950s Kingston, sound systems played open-air dances in fenced yards called lawns. A system was turntables, valve amplifiers and wardrobe-sized home-built speaker boxes, often moved by truck. The dances gave working people cheap access to American rhythm and blues, which the radio didn't play and the uptown clubs priced them out of. The engineer Hedley Jones built early custom amplifiers and the big "House of Joy" cabinets.
Tom the Great Sebastian (Tom Wong) ran the first commercially successful system, from the late 1940s. Duke Reid carried his in a British-made Trojan truck painted "the Trojan King of Sounds", and Clement "Coxsone" Dodd ran Downbeat. They competed for crowds with louder rigs and rarer records. They bought the records in the American South and scratched the labels off so rivals couldn't find out what they were.
When American R&B ran short, the sound men started making their own records. Their studios, Dodd's Studio One and Reid's Treasure Isle, put out ska, then rocksteady, then reggae. Deejays talked, or "toasted", over the records: Count Machuki on Downbeat in the 1950s, and later U-Roy. In a sound clash, two systems played against each other and the crowd picked the winner.
Dub came out of the same scene. Osbourne Ruddock, King Tubby, was a radio and electrical repairman who built amplifiers and effects for sound systems, and he ran his own Hometown Hi-Fi from the late 1960s. From about 1971, in his small studio in Waterhouse, he remixed reggae for sound-system play. He pulled instruments in and out, threw parts into echo and spring reverb, and dropped everything but the bass. Lee "Scratch" Perry and others took it further. The dub techniques in Section 10 come from those studios.
Jamaicans who came to Britain after the war brought the sound system with them. Duke Vin and Count Suckle arrived together in 1954 as stowaways. In 1955 Vin built Britain's first sound system in Ladbroke Grove from a second-hand turntable, a fifteen-pound speaker and a four-pound home-built amplifier. Suckle soon ran a rival, and the two clashed. The color bar kept the community out of a lot of pubs and clubs, and they often couldn't hire halls, so they danced at house parties and blues dances in basements and front rooms.
British systems built big home-made bass boxes too, including the "scoop" bins this stack gets its scoops from. From the 1970s on, systems played reggae and dub bigger and louder every year: Jah Shaka (Lewisham, from 1970, on his own custom system until he died in 2023), Sir Coxsone Outernational (south London, 1969), Saxon Studio International (Lewisham, 1976) and Channel One (east London, taken over by Mikey Dread and Jah T in 1979).
Notting Hill Carnival grew out of Claudia Jones's indoor Caribbean carnival of 1959. Sound systems were officially invited in 1973, and Duke Vin played. Today more than thirty static systems each hold a corner over the August bank holiday Sunday and Monday, and the organizers say most people come for them.
You still know a sound system by its stack: bass at the bottom, horns at the top, built by the crew, often painted, named and lettered. Mashup Sound is a small one in that line, one stack built in Montana from second-hand parts.
Most of the stack comes from two American companies that had the same founder. James B. Lansing built loudspeakers in Los Angeles from the late 1920s, and founded Lansing Manufacturing in 1927. In 1941 the company was bought by Altec and became Altec Lansing. Altec had been formed in 1937 by engineers from Western Electric's cinema-sound service. From 1947 its horn-loaded "Voice of the Theatre" systems went into movie theaters all over the country. The 816A kick boxes are a later Altec design, from around the late 1960s and 70s: a short front horn with reflex ports for one 15-inch driver, sold for sound reinforcement and for stacking in arrays.
Lansing left Altec in 1946 when his contract ended and started Lansing Sound. Altec objected to the name, so it became James B. Lansing Sound: JBL. He died in 1949. JBL drivers went into studio monitors, theaters, touring rigs and high-end home systems. Its Professional Series of the 1970s was built for sound reinforcement, meaning big, efficient, and able to take a beating on the road. That series includes the 2440 compression driver and the 2350 radial horn on top of this stack. The 2440 is the pro version of JBL's 375 from 1954, one of the best-known compression drivers ever made. The 2440 and 2350 were standard touring PA parts in the late 1960s and 70s.
The rest of the stack: JBL 15s in the scoops, EV musical-instrument drivers in the kicks, a Dayton 12 for the mid (a JBL 10 in a wedge horn is planned), Ruby 18s, piezos, QSC amps and a Behringer crossover.
The drivers in the kicks are from Electro-Voice. On September 1, 1927, Lou Burroughs and Albert R. Kahn started Radio Engineers, a radio repair business in a basement in South Bend, Indiana. They built a public-address system for Knute Rockne, the Notre Dame football coach, who called it his "electric voice". When they incorporated in 1930 they used it for the company name: Electro-Voice. In 1946 they moved to Buchanan, Michigan, and EV stayed there for the next fifty years.
EV made its name with microphones. The 664 dynamic was nicknamed the "Buchanan Hammer" because Burroughs drove nails with it in sales demos. The RE20 became a standard broadcast microphone, and the 642 shotgun won an Academy Award in 1963. EV built loudspeakers too: the big Patrician home systems of the 1950s, made to compete with JBL, Altec and Klipsch, and patented horns, the Compound Diffraction Horn of 1952 and the Constant Directivity Horn of 1978. The company joined Telex in 1998 and became part of Bosch in 2006.
The EVM drivers are EV's musical-instrument speakers, made for guitar and bass amps. They came after EV's earlier SRO line. They have heavy cast-aluminum frames and big magnets, they're rated for a lot more power than most instrument speakers, and they're efficient. The 15-inch comes in two versions: the L, with a smooth cone (players say L is for "lead"), and the B, with a ribbed cone for bass. The kicks use the EVM-15L Series II.
Nobody designed the 816A for a guitar speaker. Measured in the 816A, though, the EVM is about 6 dB more sensitive than the JBL 2226H through the kick band, so in this system a guitar speaker plays the kick drum (Section 5).
A bricoleur, in the old French sense, is someone who makes things out of whatever is at hand: odd lots, leftovers, parts meant for something else. That's how this system got built. Almost every driver and amp in it came second hand, from shops, friends, online listings and piles of other people's gear, and a lot of it showed up broken. One sub cone is patched with silicone near the surround. Three of the QSC amps had vented capacitors until Trey at Syntron recapped them. The drivers go from 1970s JBL pro parts to a guitar speaker.
The boxes stay separate. They get stacked by hand each time and taken apart again after, the way sound-system crews have always done it. The stack sits on the door so we can roll it out of the way in the studio. Every plywood edge gets rounded over, the plies show, and everything rolls on the same red casters.
Most of these parts can't be replaced, so we checked every driver against its original datasheet and set the limiters by calculation, not by ear. That way it can be played hard without blowing anything up.
Standing next to it, even when it's off, it's more like standing next to a building than a stereo. When it's playing you feel it in your chest and through the floor. The first time we ran it as a full stack, it didn't sound "loud", but it got hard to talk to people. That's a good sign for low distortion.
Jason Cox, who built it, in his own words.
The scoops. Jay Bruns found the scoops at Rockin Rudy's Record Heaven, and as soon as I saw them I knew I had to build a sound system. It started as a speaker system for a doomed Burning Man art piece: the scoops plus 10-inch coaxial drivers in a compact hexagonal system, using car amplifiers and a miniDSP, to be run from solar power.
The first stack. Jay Straw was liquidating his vintage touring sound system. At the time I had no idea what I was looking at, but I grabbed the JBL horns and the JBL 2226 15-inch drivers. Jay Bruns dug up the Altec cabinets for the 15s, and the first sound system was born: two scoops, two Altec cabs, and a horn on top. It was big and loud and I was in love.
The mid. The mids came next. I had a single 12-inch Dayton driver, so I grabbed some second-hand plywood from Home ReSource and eyeballed a midrange horn sized to sit under the horn. That relieved some stress on the kicks and let everything play together happily.
The crossover. The Behringer DCX2496 does the crossover, delays and EQ for the whole stack, and I lean on it a lot because it's so configurable. The first one was a very old unit that eventually stopped turning on, so the one in there now is new.
The first amplifiers. Jay Bruns had some very cool class D Extron amplifiers, designed for commercial sound installations in malls and the like, and they sound great. Six channels in two 1U amps played the system really loud, through the magic of efficient speakers and horn loading.
The Roxy. In October 2026 the Roxy Theater upgraded its sound equipment and offered its QSC amplifiers and two 18-inch subs for sale. I jumped on it, even though the sub boxes were full of popcorn, the cones were ripped, and the amplifiers had lots of bad caps and a truly impressive coating of dust and grime. Trey at Syntron recapped the worst three amps and we were in business. Going from 900 watts in 2U with the Extrons to 4 kilowatts in 8U and a couple of hundred pounds felt like a big upgrade. I rebuilt the amp case and added wheels.
The name. The whole thing needed small spacer boxes so everything would stack neatly, and the blank space called for some hand lettering inspired by King Tubby's Home Town Hi-Fi. The name had to be Mashup Sound.
The piezos. At the time of this writing I still need to build a crown of piezos to fill out the top octave with style. Nothing says DIY like an excessive number of piezos. They're cheap, take no power and no crossover, so they've ended up in a lot of systems out of ruthless practicality.
The debut. Mashup Sound plays its first show at the Ronan Street Block Party on Halloween 2026. Jesse Brenneman is playing records from his dub and reggae collection.
Thanks to Jay Bruns most of all, since there'd be no Mashup Sound without him. Also the Roxy Theater, Trey at Syntron, Home ReSource and Jesse Brenneman.
At full output, at its limiters, the stack produces about 130 dB at 1 m in front of it (Section 2). Outdoors, level falls by 6 dB for every doubling of distance:
Typical levels where it might play:
No published measurements of sound-system dances could be found. The bass is run hard and is felt as much as heard. A-weighting, which is what noise limits use, understates bass, so a C-weighted reading of bass-heavy music can be 15-20 dB higher than the dBA figure. The WHO's 2022 safe-listening standard for venues sets a limit of 100 dBA averaged over any 15 minutes. Above that, hearing damage builds up over time. Keep earplugs on hand for anyone near the stack, and for the selector.
Walls, floor and ceiling hold the sound in. A few meters from the stack the level stops falling with distance, and the bass builds up. In a gallery-sized room (40 ft by 16 ft) the stack reaches dance-floor level everywhere, with plenty to spare. Indoors it usually runs 10-20 dB below its limiters, and the limiter lights rarely come on. Expect the low end to boom in a small room. Turn the bass down at the mixer, not the mains up.
Outdoors there is no room gain. Level keeps falling 6 dB per doubling of distance, and the bass loses the boundaries that help it indoors. One stack holds about 110 dB to 10 m and club level to about 20 m. Beyond 20 m it cannot hold club level.
For more level outdoors, add boxes, not power. The limiters are already at the drivers' safe ceiling. Two stacks side by side give about +3 dB overall, and more in the bass: boxes placed close together couple, for up to +6 dB.
Outdoor events are usually limited by the level at the nearest houses, not in the crowd. Bass carries furthest and goes through walls. Point the stack away from houses, keep the bass down after dark, and check the local noise rules first.
The history pages were checked against these, 2026-10-19.
Wikipedia: Sound system (Jamaican); Duke Reid; Coxsone Dodd; Toasting (Jamaican music); U-Roy; King Tubby; Duke Vin; Count Suckle; Jah Shaka; Saxon Studio International; Lloyd Coxsone; Notting Hill Carnival; Caribbean music in the United Kingdom; JBL. Red Bull Music Academy Daily: Duke Reid and Sir Coxsone Dodd (2013); Warrior Charge: the birth of UK sound system culture (2013). Channel One Sound System: biography. Notting Hill Carnival (nhcarnival.org): sound systems. Sonic Street Technologies: sonic standardisation. Audio Heritage: Lansing Manufacturing; Altec 1876-1946; JBL Professional beginnings. audio-database.com: Altec enclosures (816A). BEXT: a brief history of James B. Lansing. JBL Professional: 2440 information. Wikipedia: Electro-Voice. audioXpress: Remembering the Electro-Voice T35 (Patrician). Forum and dealer notes on the EVM-15L/15B (TalkBass, Kemper speaker imprints). WHO (2022): Global standard for safe listening venues and events. Canadian Audiologist: occupational noise in nightclubs.