The electronics men and the birth of the sound system

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 full-range valve amplifier Hedley Jones designed in 1947 to reproduce the whole audio spectrum; the model Tom Wong acquired and christened a 'Sound System', making it a foundational artifact in the birth of Jamaican dance amplification.

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 economic pressure, high import costs and limited access to foreign gear, that pushed Jamaican and early diaspora builders to make their own amplifiers and instruments, as Hedley Jones did when he could not afford an imported guitar.

Hedley Jones's Kingston record store, where he played jazz and Cuban records through the high-fidelity amplifiers he built in the late 1940s, an early node connecting record retail, electronics and the dawning sound-system culture.

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.

The line running from WWII radar and radio training into Caribbean audio engineering, seen in Hedley Jones's RAF radar service in Glasgow, which returned advanced valve and high-frequency electronics knowledge to Jamaica.

The founding period of Jamaican and UK sound amplification when custom thermionic-valve amplifiers, prized for warmth and headroom, defined the sound of the dance before transistors arrived.

The do-it-yourself ethos, born of scarcity and import costs, in which Jamaican and diaspora sound-builders made their own amplifiers, effects and enclosures rather than buying them, prizing ingenuity over catalogue gear.

Arthur Reid (1915-1975), policeman turned liquor merchant, sound-system owner and producer. His Trojan sound contested the late-1950s dances with Coxsone's Downbeat, and from his Bond Street premises he built Treasure Isle into the defining rocksteady operation — Alton Ellis, the Techniques, the Paragons, Phyllis Dillon — before opening his rhythms to U-Roy's toasting in 1970 and helping launch the deejay record.

From a 1947 shop-front amplifier to King Tubby's workshop, engineers built the sound system before anyone sang through it.

In 1950s Kingston, Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat and Duke Reid's Trojan turned rival dances into the foundation of an entire music industry.

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

How fenced yards, imported 78s and crowned sound men turned 1950s Kingston dances into an industry.