How to Nail a 360-Degree Warehouse Rave on a Tight Budget

The Lush X YCD Melbourne Warehouse Rave Case Study

Raves seem like they were a spur-of-the-moment event that was pulled together by a bunch of cool, anarchistic kids who just happened to have awesome sound gear. If you think that’s how they really work, Hollywood has ruined you.

Mainstream dance venues and a penchant for event organisation. This is never the case. The Lush X YCD warehouse rave was an idea from two of Melbourne’s finest underground crews, but it was ambitious and slightly insane. They wanted to build a hexagonal cage that the WWE could sue us over, right in the middle of a venue, stick two DJs inside it facing each other, and have them battle it out set-for-set all night while the crowd surrounded them in a full 360-degree dance floor.

This meant no front-of-house or main stage. Just two artists going head-to-head in the centre of the room while hundreds of people boxed them in. This is actually the kind of brief we love as we see ourselves as a bunch of cool, anarchistic kids who just happen to have awesome sound gear, a disdain for mainstream dance venues* and, you guessed it, a penchant for event organisation.

(*We actually love mainstream dance venues, we’re just trying to sound cool, please still book our gear, mainstream venues.)

Full 360-degree audio coverage is hard to do well

When done properly, 360-degree set-ups are iconic, but they also require a lot of speakers, processing, and a budget that most underground events simply don’t have. The Jungle Audio motto, however, is to find the smartest path between ideal and achievable. (Our actual motto is “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line,” but that doesn’t apply in this particular case study.)

For low-end, the answer was straightforward. We deployed four Funktion-One F218 MK2 subs in a centre mono stack. All four were ratcheted together into one solid block, so bass physics could do the work. Low frequencies travel omnidirectionally, so despite the stack facing one way, sub energy fills every corner.

The mids and highs were the harder problem. The original plan called for four Evo X speakers, one in each corner of the cage facing outward. We talked through the trade-offs with the organisers before the event, as we knew that there’d be dead spots directly against the cage walls where the stereo image would thin out, but they were comfortable with this, so it was onwards and upwards.

Then we got onsite.

During walk-around and testing, it became clear the corner deployment wasn’t cutting it. We changed the system design on the fly and repositioned two Evo X systems to face inward from one side, mirroring them with two more on the opposite side. That gave us sweet front-to-back coverage. For the left and right gaps, we sourced additional QSC K12.2s on the spot and ran them as side fills.

Does all of this sound too nerdy? It kinda is, but we’re nerds! We’re the people you need to ensure things sound good. The front and back zones (directly under the lasers) felt enormous, completely enveloped by the Evo X coverage. The side walls became slightly softer zones, which turned out to be a feature rather than a bug, as people had somewhere to step out of the intensity. It’s spatial variation, which, inside a rave environment, helps the dance floor feel a lot bigger.

Great, build it in four hours

Three members of the Jungle Audio team loaded in at 6pm and had the full production locked in by 10pm when doors opened. That’s a tight window for a large truss arch over the cage, lasers, PAR cans, strobes, and two smoke machines running either side of the room, but we are legit pros.

The visual identity was built around the battle concept. One side of the room stayed red all night, the other stayed blue. Pick your DJ, pick your side. It sounds simple, but with no dedicated lighting operator in the budget, we had to program everything into automatic and sound-reactive modes (which we did).

The event ran from 10pm to 6am, and the final set was a vinyl face-off. It featured four DJs on turntables, performing inside the cage, roughly a metre and a half away from a wall of eight 18-inch drivers.

Unsurprisingly, vinyl and subwoofers do not enjoy being near each other. Remember when Song Discmans got the anti-skip feature? Well even that progressive 90s tech doesn’t apply to vinyl. We knew this going in and built a vibration isolation system during set-up: double yellow squash balls under heavy concrete blocks for mass dampening, plus Isonoe feet on the turntables themselves. It worked in soundcheck, and we were feeling good.

At about 4am, one of the Pioneer PLX-500s (which the DJ provided themselves) started feeding back around 120Hz. We had two minutes to solve it before the DJ’s notice, and it became their problem.

We tried rolling the subs up from 25Hz to 33Hz to reduce low-end energy feeding back through the platter, but that didn’t fix it. We then muted a nearby booth monitor we suspected was contributing to the vibration, but still nothing. We also applied a tight notch cut around 120Hz which helped out a bit. Once the DJ finished his track, we turned it off, moved the unit onto a completely different electrical circuit, and the problem was gone, and the audience never heard any of it. We thought that 120Hz of feedback usually signals a grounding issue, which seemed to do it in this case.

The feedback was mainly contained inside the cage itself, and the transition between tracks masked any audible artefact. That’s what happens when you have experienced technicians onsite who know what 120Hz on a turntable actually means. Problems get solved with an Ocean’s 11-like cool precision. That’s us. We’re the Ocean’s guys of audio. The Pitts and Clooneys of sound.

Bringing a concept to life without sanitising it

Lush and YCD came to Jungle Audio because they’d seen what we’d done on previous events and trusted us. They wanted Funktion-One low-end, immersive lighting, and a crew that understands underground dance music culture, and that’s what we are.

Without the production, this was a warehouse with some speakers in it. With it, it became an industrial fight arena that was packed down by 8:30am, with everyone enjoying A1 Bakery for breakfast before most of Melbourne had woken up.