The brainchild of lifelong friends and audio veterans James Cooper and Michael Layton, the Flipside story began around two years ago, when James and Mikey combined their expertise - one in pro audio, the other in underground warehouse parties - and decided that the current leaders and pretenders in the field simply weren't giving both the impression and the sound quality that they required. In short, they felt they could do better.
"I remember going to clubs when I was younger and they had these really big, impressive systems, and the kind of impact it had on me. It's just not like that anymore," stated James. "We basically set about building our dream sound system, and that's exactly what we've done."
Fuelled by their disillusionment at the current state of club sound systems, the friends and business partners embarked on a journey that took then all across Europe and to the other side of the world, a journey that brought them into contact with some of the most innovative speaker designers working today.
As James explains, "The system itself is a double 18 Reflex hybrid sub, and then a double 15 tap horn kick unit, and then the top boxes are a horn loaded phase bung 12, and a horn loaded compression driver, and we've used three of the best loudspeaker designers that we've come across in the underground scene."
Collaborating with Michael Hurley from Purple Dot, Ian F from Element 5, and Michael Arena from Arena LSD in Australia, Flipside took their initial designs and crafted them into something different, as Mikey attests. "All of the designs we've worked with, modified, and produced a pro-level system that sounds absolutely fantastic. It's a point source array, so everything can be flown, or it works as a ground stack. But also, it just looks very aggressive. A part of what we tried to do was to bring back the showmanship of dance music sound systems, and we've done exactly that."
Since the idea was to produce a complete system, James and Mikey then looked at what would provide the power behind Flipside's custom built speaker boxes. For them, power and reliability were the prime concerns, which meant only one brand was a contender.
"When we first started researching what amplifiers we were going to use, the name Lab.gruppen was the first to come up, because first and foremost, we wanted both power and reliability. For our bass units, we built them around precision device drivers, so the first problem we faced was that we needed a hell of a lot of grunt in our subs, and a lot of power going into them. When we started our researching around as to what amps to use, it was always Lab.gruppen. We played around with them for a while and loved them, so it was an easy choice," Mikey said.
"I run systems pretty hard," laughs James. "With the Lab.gruppen amps, having that power available there is amazing, and it's a really clean, transparent sound that comes through them, there's none of the colouring or tainting that you might get from other amps which don't have the same kind of dynamic range as Lab.gruppen. The first amps we got were an FP 10000Q and an FP 14000Q, and when we started using them we didn't really look back. We were won over by them. The sound that came out of them was superb."
"Club sound is a bit more dangerous in a way, a bit edgier and rougher," continued James. "The way you run a sound system in a club is to run it to its physical limit. Having something you can rely on is completely and utterly essential. The Lab.gruppen amps sound awesome and they
