How Love Dancin’ is bringing great sound to live venues & festivals

In 1970, David Mancuso launched a concept and a party that would inspire nightclubs, DJs and sound system culture for decades to come, and even more so today. Keen to create a welcoming, commercial-free space for music lovers, he began hosting invite-only dance parties at his loft apartment in New York City, where people could dance for hours on end to sets played through audiophile grade equipment. His now-legendary setup included Klipschorn speakers, Mark Levinson amplification and Koetsu moving coil cartridges.

Mancuso’s parties were pioneering in both their format, and their focus on community and great sound. He went on to work with friends and collaborators to bring the format to Europe – first London, and later Italy.

Colleen Cosmo Murphy – a DJ, broadcaster, and founder of Classic Album Sundays – established a close friendship with David Mancuso after meeting him in New York in the early 1990s. She later moved to London, and together with Mancuso co-founded the London Loft party. She also co-produced the now legendary The Loft music compilations with David, as well as working with him on all of his ventures in and outside of NYC. She remained in close collaboration with him for the next three decades, running the London Loft parties alongside DJ’ing at festivals, remixing artists and hosting playback sessions with artists including Nile Rodgers and Laurie Anderson. Before his death in 2016, Mancuso asked Murphy to become chairperson of The Loft, and oversee its future as well as his legacy.

Murphy has continued to run the London Loft with a collective of friends, as well as hosting listening sessions in numerous locations through her work with Classic Album Sundays. Over the past few years, she has also been working with Trojan Sound System 'Selekta' Daddy Ad (aka Adam Dewhurst) to develop another musical event concept that channels some of the spirit of The Loft, with its focus on music, dancing and good vibes – and bring this to public venues.

The concept – Love Dancin’ – took shape at We Out Here, an annual music festival held in Dorset, England. Each year, Adam, Colleen and a team of collaborators travel to We Out Here to host a four-day programme of DJ sets in a dedicated tent fitted with a giant mirror ball, wooden dance floor, acoustic treatment and a sound system that combines high-end hi-fi with professional DJ and studio equipment.

The sound system supports both digital and vinyl playback. Curated in partnership with Glasgow retailer Loud & Clear, and audio specialists A-Live Sound, it features dCS Lina DACs and Master Clocks alongside rotary Isonoe or linear Mastersounds analogue mixers, Pioneer CDJ 2000NXS2 players, Technics 1200GR2 turntables, Audio Technica moving magnet hi-fi cartridges, Moon by Simaudio phono pre-amplifiers, with cabling and power conditioning from The Chord Company and loudspeakers from Danley Sound Labs. This is supported with a mastering front end featuring studio-grade equipment from Rupert Neve, Solid State Logic, dbx and Clark Teknik. It’s an unusual concept for this type of environment – it’s rare, if not unheard of, to see this level of audiophile and studio-grade equipment at a festival – but it has allowed Colleen and Adam to deliver a unique experience, delivering music without the harsh added bass and distortion that is often heard when experiencing music at outdoor events. The system has been carefully configured with the various acoustic challenges of festival spaces in mind, and all details considered to ensure the best sound possible for all those who visit. 

Over the past few years, the Love Dancin’ tent and party has become one of We Out Here’s most popular features, attracting thousands of dancers as well as leading DJs – some of whom end up staying for the entire weekend. Alongside bringing Love Dancin’ to We Out Here, Adam and Colleen have taken the concept to cultural spaces and clubs, including London’s Southbank Centre and Houghton festival’s first edition. In December, the pair will host a Love Dancin’ takeover at Wonderfruit Festival in Thailand.

At the heart of Love Dancin’ is a desire to deliver the purest possible sound, in environments where audio is often substandard or problematic. By taking the Love Dancin’ experience to festivals and live venues, the pair hope to show how investing in great sound can elevate people’s experience of listening and dancing to music, and bring a more exciting atmosphere to outdoor and social spaces.

Here, we talk to Adam about the concept and the Love Dancin’ story so far…

We wanted to share some of the magic of the private The Loft parties with festival-based music lovers …

The Loft is a private party and we wanted to bring some of those magical touches to a dance party in a field in terms of the sound system, dance floor and community.

For the sound system we wanted to take a more hi-fi and audiophile approach to festival sound systems and stages, designed to be ‘DJ’ friendly, so we could invite guests and they can mix and play digitally as well as using vinyl. 

At The Loft we use uncompromising but stunning Koetsu moving coil cartridges, phono stages, customised turntables and a Mark Levinson Ml-1 pre-amp (not a mixer) on the front end, then matched Class-A power amps for the Klipschorn speakers.

We beta tested some of this equipment with a hybrid ‘DJ’ set up for mixing at a few parties outside of The Loft and a few festivals, but found Class-A power amps don’t love generators in a field, and Klipschorn speakers don’t love some DJs, unless they truly understand gain structure (yes, we had some blown drivers!).

A £100,000 class-A power amp even went up in flames at the first edition at We Out Here ... we discovered that some of the food vendor’s generator had gone down on the Sunday night and without asking us, they decided to connect to our dedicated generator, pulling huge amounts of power for fryers and other kitchen equipment. Eek!

We decided to team with our dear friends Iain Mackie from A-Live Sound and Andrew Pirie from Loud and Clear Glasgow, who have worked with us on the sound at the London Loft parties for decades, to help us develop a high-end hi-fi-based approach to DJ playback in this environment.

I had introduced Iain to Danley Sound Labs equipment after I first heard it and was blown away in various ways. Within months, Iain had sold his warehouse full of D&B Audiotechnik PA systems, met with Danley in the States and became their distributor for EMEA (and now further afield). He doesn’t mess around.

Andrew and Loud and Clear Glasgow also helped us to find ways to augment and upgrade high-end DJ and PA equipment with very high-end hi-fi equipment on the front end. We’d taken the vinyl side of DJ playback almost as far as we could and still be ‘DJ’ friendly, working with Isonoe, Mastersounds, Audio Technica’s flagship Moving Magnet cartridges, Moon by Simaudio’s phono stages and The Chord Company cabling and power conditioning, but the problem we then encountered was the digital playback on this analogue system sounded simply awful in comparison to the vinyl. If we went from playing vinyl to digital, the vibe just changed and the energy and emotion within the music fell considerably. This is where our relationship with dCS began.

Andrew recommended that we try integrating outboard DACs and bypassing the internal processing of the media players we were using. “If you’re going to do something, do it to the very best of your ability” is a mantra both Colleen and I follow and put simply, dCS make some of the world’s best digital to analogue conversion systems.

We initially used an outboard DAC on each [media player] … to bypass the internal DAC via the digital output. The transformation was immediately apparent, once we’d configured all of the settings for the first time. (Cue to us in a field without phone reception trying to figure that out with our friends at Loud and Clear and dCS how to change the settings to optimise how they worked with the system and to balance them as closely as possible to the vinyl playback!)

The upgrade was amazing. The emotion, nuances and feel of the music were transformed to a new level yet again and matched with the sonic subtleties and nuances of the high-end vinyl playback. The Love Dancin’ mission was truly underway…

[With Love Dancin’], we want to take the sound and music to as pure a place as possible. David [Mancuso] always referred to his quest as trying to play back the music as the artist intended. Unfortunately, DJ equipment isn’t particularly audiophile and with so many gadgets involved, each step is degrading the signal path. We therefore try to keep it as simple as possible. We use the very best, yet simplest DJ equipment possible and then upgrade that further with very high-end cabling, power conditioning, phono stages, DACs and Master Clocks, instead of relying solely on the DJ mixer’s internal components alone.

What a lot of sound systems in my world forget in chasing their sound clouds is that the producer, mix engineer, mastering engineer, and artist all pained over getting the music to sound exactly how the artist wanted. Our job should be to translate that musical representation to the dancers as it was intended to sound, rather than reimagining it with overwhelming bass. (Trust me, there is usually a huge amount of bass already balanced within the musical production and our role is to try and convey that as best possible!)

Festival and sound in many venues, with a lack of investment in acoustics, can be a challenge on most people’s ears. Line arrays with the wind blowing away mid and high frequencies at outdoor festival stages, distortion and low-quality equipment degrading the music source, is a challenge for anybody there who came to enjoy their favourite artists, DJs and bands. It doesn’t have to be that way with the technology available. [With a great setup], people can listen to music for longer, their ears become less fatigued, [and] it doesn’t have to be crazy loud to be immersed and lost in the music. Like David taught us both, “we practice safe sound”, as well as trying to give the listeners the best musical, emotional and sonic experiences possible.

The DJs utterly love to play on a sound system like ours as there’s really nothing else on this level out there. What we’ve built is unique. The artists performing are able to take the audience and dancers to musical heights very few places are able to, and after hosting every year at We Out Here since 2019 (minus the pandemic), we have built a Love Dancin’ community within We Out Here’s beautiful community. So many artists and guests just spend the whole weekend at Love Dancin’ and that community aspect is so important to what has become a ‘party’, rather than a festival ‘stage’. There’s a vibe that builds and builds there on the dance floor that I’ve never seen at any other festival and I have been doing this for over 25 years professionally and internationally.

“Audiophile/hi-fi/Listening” bars and venues have been the fastest-growing trend in the food and beverage world for a few years now. Colleen’s Classic Album Sundays events kicked off the whole movement 15 years ago outside of Japan and as it blew up in the UK, music friends of ours all over the world wanted to start hosting events with her in their cities.

Colleen was very careful to partner with people who understood music first and foremost. She then helped source the best audio equipment possible, and helped them to select the right venue with good acoustics. Within a few months she was hosting Classic Album Sundays sessions in over 20 cities around the world each month, as well as special events and boom, the listening bar trend was born. 

Unfortunately, when there’s a band wagon to jump on based on a cultural phenomenon, people without the knowledge and experience jump on board to cash in on it and there’s now a new hi-fi/listening bar opening every week, somewhere. With has come venues with terrible acoustics, the foundation of good sound, homemade 'hi-fi' or visually impressive speakers connected to average amps and cheap ‘standard’ DJ equipment, and clientele wondering why they’re not blown away by what they hear.

Like great food, great sound starts with the source ingredients being of the highest standard possible for the end result to be the best it can be and for each stage of the process to work as it should, uncompromised and perfect as it can be. 

It really frustrates me when people and brands claim to deliver something to a high standard, but then deliver something far below that par. We’re working on a few things for both the audiophile dance floors as well as for listening spaces which we’re hoping will help address a lot of these challenges on the front-end side of things for people wanting to get closer to what that musical experience could and should be.

We’ll be taking a version of Love Dancin’ to Thailand’s Wonderfruit festival this year, which we’ve both played before. dCS, Moon by SimAudio and The Chord Company are supporting us out there too to help us upgrade the front end for the Love Dancin’ takeover on the Sunday. We’re all excited (and nervous!) to see how that goes in a new field, with a new audience and all the challenges that can bring.

Yes! But it’s all hush-hush at the moment. Let’s just say at this stage that we’re very excited to be working with some of the world’s very best hi-fi manufacturers on developing affordable solutions for ways to vastly improve ‘DJ’ orientated and ‘listening bar’ playback…

More info about We Out Here festival is available here.