In the beginning there was...Laskys. Laskys in London's Tottenham Court Road was the place to go for turntables. I am still looking for a picture of Laskys, this one is Henrys Radio. There were some Disco shops where they could be bought - SolarSound of Windsor, Henry's Radio, RSC,FAL and Roger Squires amongst the better known, but Laskys was one of the first 'Discount HiFi' retailers. The deck to have was the Garrard SP25, but my funds were limited so I began with a pair of Garrard 2025TC auto changers. Being,at that time) a Radio/HiFi/TV engineer,it was easy to disable the auto bit. Cartridges were ceramic; Sonotone 9TAHC,chosen because they could be played heavy - less jumping,and because I could afford no better, and also because of the delicacy of magentic types. Who could tell the difference anyway, and Stereo ? - I never knew a mobile that was not Mono.A bit later my friends at SolaSound gave me a pair (yes, gave) of AP76s, a transcription deck that was really 'out there'. The 2025s stayed in my garage until I built a console for my fellow DJ when we split.

Garrard 2025TC

Garrard SP25 Mk III

Garrard SP25 Mk IV

Garrard AP76

Decks sorted, next on the list was a mixer. Not far from Laskys is The Edgware Road,and it is there that you could find Henrys Radio and a whole row of shops selling surplus electronics. The mixer I bought then still survives, looking a bit different but essentially the same, in Maplins. It was a four channel mic mixer,powered by a PP3 9V battery. Inside there was a one transistor amplifier - and that was it, four pots (faders), four jacks in,one out. In the pictures of my Disco that show how it grew,despite all the electronics you can see,the mixer was a copy of that circuit - I just added treble/bass/monitor/Vu etc (and a mains supply). I paid £9.00 for the mixer, in Henrys Radio. You're going to get bored with lots of words, so a few more pics should keep you here a bit longer.Here are a few consoles. Be honest, a little tear welling up there? I now (yes now) use two SP25 MkIV - they still fetch good money bids on Ebay.

....which is why you can today go into a certain well known 'Disco Shop' and buy yourself a 500W (Max - always the 'max' word is there).amplifier, except it isn't. What you really have are two channels that produce around 80W rms (if you are lucky) and when bridged, may hit 500W peaks, mono. You take your shiny new amp to your next gig,wind it up,and wonder why the speakers sound awful long before your 'massive' amp has 'blown away' your audience. The RMS power of an amplifier is the power it can deliver, continuosly,and we have already seen why the speakers should be rated at least 50% higher than the amp. Emerging,newly trained to repair TVs et al, from Slough Training Centre, the theory I had learned proved that 20Watts should blow the roof off. At that time there was a simple rule for Amps; a pound a watt. Earning,then, £15.00 a week, Amps were expensive. A company called Linear ( I often wonder if that was the birth of the now huge Linear Devices), produced the Linear70 and it was the benchmark for many Discos (down here), and yes, that was RMS. A few Discos had moved up to 100W and a fellow DJ I knew ran 200W - back then that was a lot of sound. With very few 'Disco Amps' about, Amps used by bands were common as were home-brews. Some of the ready built amps had a strong home-brew look too. Names like FAL and RSC should jog a few memories. Also, back then, a young man named Clive Sinclair was marketing a number of modules, in particular for a HiFi system called 'Project 60', yep,20W RMS/channel. So it was that my first few gigs were run with a Z30 (20W)Sinclair module. Of course, the theory fell to bits because speakers are so very inefficent that most of the 20W gets lost (in ways we needn't talk about). I had two coloumn speakers, each containing four eight inch speakers. We need some more pictures.

And here it is, the Project 60 advert showing the Z30 module (yes just one), that I bought. It wasn't even 30W, even good old Clive had to sex-up the spec; the Z30 pumped out 20W. We really need some pics to send us back to those glory days, pics like these, and that onthe right is the Vox amp I bought.

So back to the tale...I only did a few gigs to find out how bad it all was. My first upgrade was to a VOX 60W guitar amp with a pair of matching speakers (two cabinets, each had two ten inch units). This was okay, for a while. I should jump in here to say that back then I could easily copy stuff and join bits together, but I did not really have any design skills. The VOX soon became too quiet - well to be honest,it blew up. This time I took a trip to Wood Green, North London. There was a road there that was like a smaller version of the Edgeware Road, and it wasin one on those shops (the same one I bought coils and crystals from as a boy to make crystal sets), that I bought a 50W Amp (later tested and found to around 40W RMS), but it waspart of a plan. The first thing I did was take it to bits and trace the circuit. I then built four of them, and put the lot into a case, 4 mono channels, Volume/Treble/Bass on all, and around 150W RMS. I had arrived! But my speakers hadn't.

Before I leave the speakers, a few words of caution. Watch a modern band or video - nearly always,if you look carefully, you will spot a Marshall stack. Checkout Marshall sales on Ebay - four figures is quite common. Why ? Well,again put in (I hope) not too boring tones), its all about distortion - the kind so loved by Rock guitarist; just listen to Gary Moore's 'Parisienne Walkways'. Its also about valves. When a valve amp is thrashed the kind of distortion (a sort of fuzz) is quite acceptable to human ears (and to electronic bits too). Feedback howl can be and is used as part of the track. but transistor amps work a bit differently. Whilst you can pretty much do what you like to Marshall, Simms-Watt, WEM and Carlsborough to name a few, try it with a transistor amp(or rather,don't). Here's what happens. Draw a circle. The top of your circle is the Max output of your amp (don't start with that Music Power rubbish). You decide to wind up the master fader - it all sounds a bit distorted, but so what, its a bit louder. Draw a line across the top of the circle, just below the top - that is what the Amp is doing and it is the distortion you can hear. It's called 'clipping' and most high power Amps have a clipping indicator, because its so dangerous. That straight line is current in the Amp output and worse, current in the speakers. It is not going up and down as the sound should - it is steady. In a fairly short time the Amp will get hot, so will the speakers. Then the Amp will die,and often the speakers too. That's why there is a clipping indicator. The reason this is not really a problem with valve amps doesn't matter here.The sound of an amp clipping is not very nice.

I never got into lightscreens (then), but there were many about. What I did have though was a pair of tall boxes (lined with tin foil of course), that sequenced. Microprocessers were only just emerging and Logic chips too - few of us knew how to use them. This was easily solved thanks to John Bull Electrical (South London) from whom I purchased what was; a row of sixteem micro- switches mounted on a shaft. At one end there was a motor and a row of movable cams so that as the motor turned the shaft a cam would press a micro-switch. It worked great, and every click of a micro-switch came out as a loud click over the PA...Picture time.

Here is a collection of the time from FAL - I suppose that then, when you've seen one you've seen 'em all. Then. but back to the Aurora. Now, you can choose from many sound-to- light systems. Some look quite good, most don't, and at a few family Do's I have been to, they seem to consist of maybe four spots and some (quite clever) LED pods, or similar. I achieved another ambition when I re-started the Disco. I designed a new Aurora from the ground up and added a micro for sequence effects too. It has eight channels and drives 32, 70W spots (so far). I am currently building a 4X4 high power LED matrix to add to it. You can see it in its current form on the main page and others, but what about those lightscreens on my home page ?