I have played on (and setup and tuned - I sometimes do freelance work as a lighting and sound engineer outside of my normal day job) several Funkion One systems, never really liked them though, they’re usually too harsh for my taste in the highs - absolute pain to tame properly. Personally I prefer Void Acoustic systems but that’s very much down to personal preference.
Anyway that’s beside the point, it is highly unlikely that anyone in the audience would be a full on audiophile (or even if there are any, they are probably drinking so their opinion doesn’t matter ). There have also been blind tests between high quality MP3 files and FLAC/WAV with audiophiles not able to tell the difference.
Some people have gone as far as analysing the information contained in a 320kbps MP3 file and all the information lost happens above 20khz where human ears cannot hear anyway.
I agree and think however that it’s more than fun. I think it’s where practice, skill and experience of judging audience reactions really comes into its own. Getting a track that you’ve not played for ages, mixed into whatever tunes you’re already playing, even when there’s no analysis, no confirmed beatgrid, no auto-setting of 8 key parts of the track, no harmonic keys prompted or auto-tuned etc… and they still kept dancing!
Real DJ’s don’t take requests Kidding kidding… but in all seriousness, requests are not a thing in my world (clubs / underground / outdoor parties) so for me personally it’s not about having every possible song available for a crowd’s demands, but having my entire collection - curated for years in FLAC format, with maniacal organization and tagging - available to me for my own enjoyment whenever I want. Not managing multiple thumb drives, but having a single source of truth for all music in my possession.
This is the future with DJing btw… having access to everything you own, with integration between your hardware device, software like Traktor or Rekordbox, and online storage for real time streaming to your device or full downloading of files for offline playback (out at a festival with no internet, for example). Trust me… having access to everything you own with advanced searching and streaming ability will not only become a growing demand but will become the norm for DJs and performers period.
I agree with you here. I carry both on me. I have a 1TB SSD that has almost the entirety of my digital collection along with two mirrored USBs for the gig. Cant count the amount of times where I thought of a tune that fit the moment perfectly, and voila it was on my ssd.
So large library’s at ever gig IS the way forward, is what we’re reading more and more people ask for. It’s less and less common for the elite style of a festival or club DJ to export 20 songs to a little usb flash drive and say stuff the audience, these 20 tracks are what they’re going to hear tonight whether they want it, or not.
Maybe the solution is to have a utility option of “make my search look at all my drives on all the USB ports and deliver the results as one list as if all the drives were one drive”
This would save the DJ running the same search manually against however many drives his collection spans across eg: 3 x 1TB drives plugged in
If I have to play a time-limited slot at some event, especially if themed/genre-specific, I WILL prepare my set in advance, but not in a “fixed” playlist style. As I said, Phil’s advice involves having about twice the amount of music for the period you are playing, preferably in mini-playlists. This gives you plenty of options to move left or right depending on crowd reaction, while still easily keeping your gig with your own boundaries.
That said, I am a true believer in the fact that what works best for you is what you should go with.
Actually unless your playing your music on pressed wax, it is compressed to fit in a digital format that takes all the original warmth of the music out
That’s a matter of opinion which media sounds best to you and has a lot to do with the mixing and mastering (and pressing) process of vinyl vs digital media. This is a pretty good YouTube clip about it: https://youtu.be/OaoLcdoI9h0 - also see the Real Engineering channel clip about it. There are pros and cons to both forms of media.
The conversation is not about vinyl vs digital formats, it’s about lossless digital formats such as WAV and lossy formats in high quality such as MP3 at 320kbps. I’m not going to engage in a vinyl vs digital conversation as generally arguing with either side on this issue is useless.
That’s not true at all. In fact, the electroplating process of vinyl introduces a different sound than the original master file, which is almost always digital. And these days many of those masters are recorded at at 24bit / 48k or 24bit / 96k. Those files are the essence of what the producer or musician recorded. That’s what they’re playing back in the studio, that’s what the mastering engineer is working off of. There is plenty of “warmth” in a digital master recording. You’re just talking about the sonic preference of vinyl (which, by the way, I prefer as well). On a good enough audio system, an uncompressed digital file can sound amazing. Certainly in the club world, when the system is tuned for digital instead of turntables (which is the case in almost every club now), you get some ridiculous sound quality. There is nothing compressed about it at all unless you’re playing back lossy mp3s - and then indeed, you have lost some of the original recording and that’s why I personally never play those files live.
). There have also been blind tests between high quality MP3 files and FLAC/WAV with audiophiles not able to tell the difference.
Kidding kidding… but in all seriousness, requests are not a thing in my world (clubs / underground / outdoor parties) so for me personally it’s not about having every possible song available for a crowd’s demands, but having my entire collection - curated for years in FLAC format, with maniacal organization and tagging - available to me for my own enjoyment whenever I want. Not managing multiple thumb drives, but having a single source of truth for all music in my possession.