PORT TOWNSEND — With a little help from his friends, DJ and dance party organizer Mark Hardy built his dream speakers — set to animate the dance floor at Manresa Castle on Oct. 31.
The party, now in its seventh year, will take place from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. at 651 Cleveland St., and maybe a little later, Hardy said.
The 21-and-older event will include three bars, three dance floors and requires costumes.
Tickets can be purchased for $32.35, including fees, at asabovesobelowpnw.com/tickets. Same-day tickets will cost $40.
Building his own speakers came out of a desire to clarify the middle- and high-end frequencies for live dance events and the inability to afford the quality of speakers Hardy really wanted. Hardy refers to the high-frequency speakers as tops.
Hardy’s sound system was already stacked with two high-end sets of four sub speakers.
Both of the sets, totalling eight subs, had been purchased from local friends who had built the speakers themselves.
Andrew Cudlipp is a talented mechanic who regularly fixes up old BMWs, Hardy said.
Colby Lippert used to work as a developer with Microsoft’s Xbox team. When the two had kids and got busy, they agreed to sell the speakers to Hardy.
Hardy often scoured the internet learning about speaker technology and searching for ways to upgrade his sound system. The high end did not match the low in terms of quality, he said.
Hardy eventually concluded that building the best do-it-yourself (DIY) speakers he could was his best option.
“I read recently online that we’re at a special place in time where DIY speakers are actually as good as the best speakers that money can buy,” Hardy said.
That is true thanks to designers like John White, who designed Hardy’s speakers.
Hardy reached out to White after discovering his designs on Instagram about a year and a half ago, eventually purchasing a build kit, he said.
White utilized the synergy horn patent invented by Tom Danley, after the patent expired, Hardy said. Danley’s patent made use of the theoretical concept of point source, he added.
Point source comes when a design precisely combines the sound from multiple speaker elements — woofers and tweeters — into a single sound source, which spreads evenly across an entire surrounding space.
Typical loud speakers have multiple woofers and a tweeter positioned on a wave guide, which approximates the ideal balance between the elements for equal sound dispersion.
“With your speakers that are traditionally like averages, the sounds end up having what they call phase smearing, where it’s just not quite as precise,” Hardy said.
Having two point source speakers allows for a perfectly dispersed stereo image, Hardy said.
“Little details like textures in the sound end up sounding extremely precise,” Hardy said.
The speakers each have two 12-inch woofers and what’s called a 1.4-inch coaxial horn, which each handle a different part of the frequency range.
“So you might have the snare playing from one thing and the vocals coming from another part,” Hardy said. “Then the kind of crunchy part on the top of a synth, the like mid-bass, coming out of the woofers. Everything gets its own physical piece working on it.”
Lippert’s subs also used Danley’s technology. Danley even provided advice during the build, Hardy said.
Hardy noted that his two sets of subs handle separate parts of the mix too. One set handles the quick punch of the kick drum and the other handles the sustained bassy notes.
The technique is borrowed from Jamaican dance music culture, Hardy explained.
All of that separation of elements is steps further than most take in setting up their sound systems, Hardy said, adding that he is interested in prioritizing high quality over what’s easy.
While Hardy and Co. offer ear protection at the fairly loud events and Hardy himself wears protection, the speakers are what some call quiet-loud, Hardy said.
“It is a concept that happens when the audio is not distorted,” he said. “People’s sense of loudness is often associated with distortion. But because of the quality of the drivers in these speakers, there isn’t really that much distortion at all.”
Hardy said that to get a retail equivalent value of his whole sound system from Danley Sound Labs, he would have to spend about $85,000. All in, he spent about $19,000, he said.
“That doesn’t tell the full story as there isn’t a retail equivalent to the tops,” Hardy said. “They’re more clear and can get louder than the Danleys in the comparison.”
Assembling the speakers took about a month, he said.
Hardy turned to his friend Raphael Berrios for help. Berrios is a woodworker and instructor at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking.
“Most of that is just done through a glue-up,” Hardy said. “So you needed giant clamps.”
Berrios is responsible for painting the speakers white, Hardy said.
The speakers are powered by an amp and a processor, which separates the audio from the sound source — generally turntables — into different ranges of frequency and sends it out to the speakers and subs. Hardy refers to the box that contains the gear as The Arc, as in The Arc of the Covenant.
The Arc took about a year to build and required advice from White, help fellow DJ Thomas Wolinski and extensive use of Chat GPT, Hardy said.
The speakers saw their debut at September’s Off Center Fest in Quilcene, Hardy said.
“There were farmers who I wouldn’t say are keeping up to date on speaker technology who knew that something special was happening and were asking questions about it,” he said.
The speakers were further broken in at As Above So Below several weeks ago. The reception has been overwhelmingly positive, he added.
DJ friends of Hardy’s are so impressed with the speakers that they have been discussing how they can build their own smaller sets.
Hardy’s wife Lera Hardy joked that she was skeptical of his need for more speakers, Hardy said. After hearing the speakers in action, she is interested in building smaller versions for household use, Lera said.
Hardy originally moved to Port Townsend to restore a sailboat, he said. He got pretty far but ultimately abandoned the project. The process taught him meaningful lessons which he has carried into the speaker build and into building an extensive events production team, he said.
He attributed the success of getting the speakers across the finish line to breaking the project up into a number of small projects and teaming up with friends at different stages of the build.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@peninsuladailynews.com.
