4-Jun-2001 (Mon)

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages (but 21+), this is the moment you've all been waiting for.

The DNA Lounge will be reopening on Friday the 13th of July!

Last tuesday, at the last minute, we got our Special Inspections signed off. Barry then went down to the building inspector's office and camped out there until he arrived, and didn't leave until he had signed the paperwork, faxed it to the police, and verified that it had been received, just to make sure. Then on wednesday morning, Barry and our lawyer spent the morning on the phone, negotiating last-minute details of the exact wording of the stipulations attached to our permits.

At 1PM, we all went down to the far-too-familiar police hearing room, and reviewed a marked-up printout of the stipulations (covered with handwriting and crossed-out words.) I signed a piece of paper agreeing to the batch of stipulations that came from the noise abatement unit; and was to sign a blank piece of paper that they would then fill in with the actual stipulations, transcribed from the marked-up copy. Except that I didn't actually have to sign that one, because they had one on file from last year when we started this process!

So on monday morning, Barry went down to the City Tax Collector and paid the permit fees, and brought the permits home! I'm now the proud permittee of "Place of Entertainment," "Dance Hall Keeper - Extended Hours," and "Extended Hours Premises" permits!

And with that, we've chosen our opening date. This gives us time to hire and train our staff, finalize things with the promoters we've lined up for our initial batch of weekly events, and start booking events for the rest of the summer and beyond!

We'll have more details about what our schedule will look like as we nail things down in the coming weeks.

In other news, our dj coffin has been delivered. We've had all the gear for some time now (it's what we used for the noise test, for example) but we hadn't seen the box that the gear lives in until today. Here it is:

It's huge, and weighs about as much as a real coffin (body and all.) The reason we have a coffin, instead of just bolting the gear to the dj platform, is so that it's somewhat mobile. Depending on the event, we might want to have the dj be down on the stage instead of in the dj booth. As you see, it's got three turntables (Technics SL1200-M3Ds.) The shiny controller in the middle is the mixer ( Allen & Heath Xone:62), and above that are the controls for the two CD players (Denon DN-2100F.) The CD drawers open from the front of the coffin, at about thigh height.

It has a lot of audio connections going into and out of it, so to make it easy to move, all of the internal connections are soldered into one giant twist-lock connector, that is definitely one of the coolest plugs I've seen:

To the left of the coffin is the live sound engineer station, which will only be used when there's a band on stage. Our main mixing board isn't installed yet, but the equipment racks are. Here they are:

  1. These switches enable or disable the rear two main speakers. There are four main speakers in the room (plus a bunch of "fills") and when a dj is playing, all four will be on. But when there's a band on stage, people have a hard time dealing with looking at the band and hearing the sound coming from behind them; it's just something that perceptually weirds people out. So these switches are to kill the rear speakers during a live show.

  2. The glowing thing is the remote control for the SoundWeb that controls all the speakers. This is used for changing the mode of the sound system, for example, to go between "dj" and "live." In addition to telling the sound system to play audio from a different input, this can do things like select different equalization curves for each speaker in the system, so we can tune the room differently depending on what kind of performance is happening.

  3. These are a pair of dbx 2231 equalizers, giving four channels of EQ. These control the monitors on stage (the speakers the band members are listening to, so they can hear their own mix of what they are playing.)

  4. This is a dbx 2215 equalizer, for the dj's monitors, up in the booth.

  5. This is a Crest 6001 amp, for the dj monitors.
  1. This is a power strip and surge suppressor, and it has these cool little dimmable lights that pop out.

  2. These two Klark-Teknik DN300 equalizers sit between the final output of the live sound mixing board and the SoundWeb, giving the sound tech one last place to tweak things, after the mixes of the individual channels.

  3. These next three units are compressors (the first is a Klark-Teknik DN500, and the second and third are dbx 166A.)

    These (and the rest of the items below in this rack) aren't hardwired into the system, but are tools available on the mixing board for the sound guy to patch in where he needs them.

  4. This is a gate (a Behringer XR1400 Multi-Gate Quad-Expander, to be exact.) Basically this is a filter that opens or closes a signal path based on overall volume, and then leaves it open for an adjustable length of time: this is typically used for drums, so that the mic only activates when the drum has just been hit, and doesn't pick up ambient sound.

  5. This is a Yamaha SPX90II multi-effect processor (for doing delays and various other things.)

  6. These are T.C. Electronic D-Two and M-One multi-effect processors.