The box-men: unsung builders of the weight

The ethos of building the rig from scratch rather than buying commercial PA, so cabinets, crossovers and often amplifiers are made or heavily modified in-house to a sound's own taste and budget.

Percival "Metro" Miller (born Jamaica, 1941), the engineer who built custom valve amplifiers and speakers for British sound systems from the late 1950s, including a celebrated thousand-watt valve amplifier for Jah Shaka, and is remembered as a father figure to UK sound-system engineering.

The role of the builder who designs and constructs the speaker boxes of a sound system, often a carpenter by background; a largely uncredited craftsperson whose cabinet choices shape a rig's low end as much as any record does.

The way a sound system's speaker boxes, hand-built, hand-painted and lettered with the sound's name, carry its identity, so that ownership and the pride of having built the rig are bound up with the boxes themselves.

The crew member who designs, builds, powers and fine-tunes the equipment, described by researchers as a "scientist of sound" continually monitoring and innovating the rig to keep a competitive edge, distinct from the selector who chooses records.

The joinery and carpentry craft behind sound-system cabinets, cutting, curving and bracing plywood into bass bins and horns; documented builders came from carpentry and upholstery backgrounds and pass the trade down.

Jah Shaka (Neville Powell, c.1948-2023), known as the "Zulu Warrior," was a Jamaican-born, South East London-based sound system operator who ran a roots-reggae and dub sound from around 1970. Celebrated for the spiritual intensity and heavy sonority of his single-handed sessions, he also released roots and dub records from 1980 on his Jah Shaka Music label, including the Commandments of Dub series.

The hands-on electronics craft of winding transformers and coils to build and tune amplifiers, associated with King Tubby, who wound his own coils to deepen the bass, and taught apprentices such as Scientist to wind before they mixed.

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. Per the engineer and broadcaster Mikey Dread, who apprenticed under him, Tubby built his first echo unit himself from two old tape recorders and constructed custom pressure-sensitive, spring-loaded switches for triggering sound effects, so that striking them harder or softer varied the result. Dread also credited a Tubby-built high-pass filter, applied to the snare and hi-hat, with producing the splashy "flying cymbal" sound heard on Bunny Lee and Johnnie Clarke productions such as "No Man Can Escape His Judgement" and "Jah Jah in Deh in Deh".

The electrical craft of stabilising and stepping the mains supply so a high-powered rig runs cleanly; King Tubby's regular trade was supplying transformers to steady the current for businesses and sound systems alike.