The amp men of Kingston

Tom Wong's sound, and by common account the first of the great Jamaican sound systems. A Chinese-Jamaican hardware merchant, Wong ran it in downtown Kingston from the late 1940s, and its reputation for equipment and for records nobody else had set the terms every sound after it competed on. Duke Reid and Coxsone both came up in its shadow.

The craft trade of designing and hand-building high-power valve amplifiers and speaker cabinets for Jamaican sound systems, established by technicians such as Hedley Jones and carried on by builder-operators including Lloyd Daley and King Tubby.

Hedley Jones's radio, electronics and record shop on King Street, Kingston; the amplifier Jones built in 1947 to play records outside the shop is credited as the first purpose-built sound-system amplifier in Jamaica.

The heart of a sound, and the part that was rarely bought off a shelf. Jamaican sounds ran custom-built valve amplifiers wound and tuned by local engineers — King Tubby among them — because the sound wanted more low end and more level than commercial equipment offered. An amp was a competitive secret as much as a component, and a sound's character was substantially its own.

The tube amplifier that powered the classic sound systems. Jamaican builders wound and tuned their own — Hedley Jones's amplifiers for Tom the Great Sebastian are the founding example — chasing warmth and low-end weight that off-the-shelf equipment did not offer. The valve sound remains the reference point that later transistor rigs were measured against, and UK dub sounds still build with tubes on principle.

Sound system started in 1956 by electronics technician Lloyd Daley at 17 Victoria Avenue, Kingston, running on amplifiers Daley built himself; one of the first sets with a bullfighting name, it pushed Daley into record production from 1958 when rivals would not play his exclusives.

Jamaican audio engineer, musician, inventor and trade unionist (1917-2017) whose 1947 hand-built high-fidelity amplifier, made to play records outside his Bop City shop in Kingston, became the template for the sound system; he supplied amplifiers to Tom Wong, Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd, built an early solid-body electric guitar, and received the Gold Musgrave Medal in 2011.

Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock's sound system, run from Waterhouse and the room where dub was effectively invented. Tubby, an electronics engineer who built and maintained his own amplifiers, began cutting instrumental versions with parts dropping in and out, adding reverb and delay live at the controls — first as exclusive plates for his own dances, then as a form in its own right that reshaped record production worldwide.

Osbourne Ruddock (1941-1989), the Waterhouse electronics engineer who invented dub. He built and repaired amplifiers, ran his own Hometown Hi-Fi sound, and began cutting versions with parts dropping in and out, drenched in reverb and delay worked live at the controls — first as exclusive plates for his own dances, then as a form in its own right. He trained Scientist, Prince Jammy and others, and his approach to the mixing desk as an instrument reshaped record production worldwide. He was shot dead outside his home in 1989.

Jamaican electronics technician, sound system owner and record producer (1939-2018) who built his own amplifiers for his Matador sound from 1956 and later produced early reggae for artists including The Abyssinians and Little Roy.

Before there were selectors and deejays, there was the amplifier, and the men who built it.

In the studios of 1970s Kingston, engineers learned to dismantle a finished song and rebuild it as something stranger, launching the version, the remix and the idea of the producer as author.

How a Waterhouse engineer turned mixing into an instrument and previewed the remix age.

How a wartime radar technician's amplifier and speaker cabinet set the template for sound-system bass.