ONCE UPON A TIME · 03
We sell the gear. Six blocks west, somebody once built the room that set the bar for all of it — and then refused, on principle, to put a limiter on it.
The first piece in this series stayed inside our own building: Playground, Groove Society and Parking, three clubs at 1288–1296 Atateken. But one name in that story keeps turning up elsewhere. Mark Anthony — the DJ who played Playground's basement at sunrise — was also the Montréal contact for a New York producer named Angel Moraes. In October 1998, that connection opened a room on Sainte-Catherine Est that would be voted the fifth best dance club in the world.
The room
Stereo opened at 858 rue Sainte-Catherine Est, in what had been the 591-seat Théâtre Université. Moraes built it on an explicit model: the Paradise Garage. Not the aesthetic — the priorities. A room where the sound system is the point and everything else arranges itself around it.
That went further than the speakers. The club's own description of the building mentions three-foot-thick walls to isolate the sound, and a dancefloor built on shock absorbers to reduce fatigue — because people were going to be standing on it for eight hours.
It worked immediately. In 1999, Muzik magazine ranked Stereo the fifth best dance club in the world — the only North American room in the top ten. David Morales later became co-owner and a long-running resident; a 1999 listing bills his residency as his first ever outside of New York City. Frankie Knuckles called it “Mecca… the motherland.”
Morales, on how he ended up there:
When Angel originally built Stereo and asked me to come up and play, he said, “I can't pay you what you're accustomed to getting paid”… I wanted to play there once a month for no money.
The 2003 system
In February 2003, Morales commissioned Craig “Shorty” Bernabeu of SBS Designs to rebuild the system. It took until late 2004 and ran to “an investment well into six figures.” It was revised repeatedly over the five years that followed — the room was never finished, only current.
What went in: six stacks, fourteen feet tall.
Top to bottom, each stack carried a JBL 2395 acoustic lens horn, a JBL 2405 slot-loaded tweeter, a pair of SBS SH 112 horn cabinets, two double-15″ rear-loaded bass scoops and, at the floor, a Levan horn built by Steve Dash. Amplification from Bryston, BGW and Crown. Total: 19,000 watts.
That number is smaller than people expect, and Bernabeu was blunt about why:
Seventy-thousand watts is for Britney Spears at the Meadowlands, not a nightclub.
The part that matters
Here is the detail that separates Stereo from almost every large room built since: no DSP. No zoning. No compressor. No limiter. Ashly preamps, and nothing between the signal and the drivers deciding what the room could and couldn't do. The only digital equipment in the building was a pair of Pioneer CDJ-1000s.
If you have only ever heard a modern club system, this is difficult to convey. Nearly every venue you walk into now is protected — processed, limited, kept inside an envelope. There are good reasons for that: it saves drivers and it saves lawsuits. But it also means the system is making a decision on your behalf, several thousand times a second. Stereo simply didn't. The responsibility sat with the person on the mixer.
The lineage was deliberate. Richard Long built the Paradise Garage system; Frankie Knuckles learned sound from him, alongside Larry Levan. The horn at the bottom of every stack was named after Levan. A room in Montréal in 2004, quoting a room in New York in 1977, in hardware.
What it sounded like
When Frankie Knuckles died in March 2014, the club posted an unreleased recording of one of his sets in the room. It has been played close to fifty thousand times.
Posted by Stereo the day after Knuckles died, 1 April 2014.
A recording only gets you so far, and it gets you least far here: a room built to compress nothing is exactly the room a recording flattens. What survives better is what the people who played it said about it afterwards.
Morales, on finally walking in:
When I finally came and played, it took me back to simpler days. It was raw with a lot of character and charisma, it reminded me of the Garage and the Loft.
That is a specific compliment rather than a polite one. The Garage and the Loft are the two New York rooms this entire lineage comes out of, and a working resident of that lineage is saying a warehouse on Sainte-Catherine Est got within reach of them. He put the feeling more plainly elsewhere: “You really feel like you’re in somebody’s loft, and that’s really the concept at the end of the day.”
The other thing the DJs kept coming back to was maintenance, which sounds like a dull virtue until you have stood in front of a good system that nobody looks after. Knuckles, on how the room was run:
The shit goes out, it don’t stay out.
But the best evidence that something unusual was happening in there is an accident. At some point a visiting DJ played Bach to a full floor — eight hundred people. Bernabeu:
You’d think playing a recording like that for a full room would be offensive, because it’s all mid-range… but it was actually very pleasant on the ears. It’s a very versatile sound system.
A dance system with no limiter on it, built to hit like a truck, that could also hold eight hundred people still for Bach. That is the argument for the whole approach, made by accident, on a night nobody planned it.
Why there are almost no pictures of this
We went looking for footage of that room and came back with very little. That isn't an accident — Stereo has run a no-cameras policy for most of its life, and it worked. There is no video of the fires. There is barely any video of the stacks. What exists is mostly audio with a still image over it.
The clearest interior footage we found is a few seconds long, and the person who shot it says outright that they were sneaking it:
A club that spent six figures on a sound system and then banned the cameras that would have advertised it is, in its way, the whole argument of this article.
The flyers
What does survive is paper:
Scanned and preserved by the members of Rave.ca. Click any flyer for its source entry. Nothing survives from the 1998–99 opening years — those nights are in the archive as text only. If you have one, we'd very much like to see it.
The fires
In July 2008 a fire gutted the venue — roughly $500,000 in damage, closed for more than a year. A second blaze came in the early hours of Tuesday 1 September 2009; police found accelerants. It killed a planned five-day Labour Day reopening with Roger Sanchez, Sharam and Angel Moraes.
Bernard Plante of the Village's merchants' association put it plainly at the time: “It was our city's answer to Studio 54.”
The 2008 fire ended the system this article has spent half its length describing — though, as it turns out, not by destroying every part of it. What went back into the room a year later would not be Bernabeu's build as he left it.
The club's co-owner, talking to CBC the day police confirmed the second fire was deliberate, sounded less like a businessman than like someone who had run out of patience:
I really don't know what it is. It could be anything, but I just want it to stop. We want to give people some music, we want to give people a good place to be, and we're having a really hard time doing it.
Tommy Piscardelli
That was Tommy Piscardelli, and he is the reason there is still a room to write about.
Moraes built Stereo and gave it its argument. Piscardelli is its co-owner alongside Mike Rein, who started as his night manager in the nineties and came back at the reopening as his business partner. Their split is, for our purposes, the whole point: Rein handles the administration, Piscardelli handles the sound. He has been the club's public face through every crisis in its history: two arsons inside fourteen months, a year and a half dark, the reopening, and then a pandemic that closed the dancefloor for the better part of two years. Angel Moraes died on 27 February 2021, aged 55. The room outlived its founder because somebody else kept paying for it.
Under Piscardelli the club has held the line on the model that makes it strange: no alcohol, no cameras, an after-hours permit, and the sound system as the entire point. The no-bar rule is not an eccentricity. It is what lets the room still sound like itself at eight in the morning, because nobody in it is being sold anything except the music.
If you have been reading this series in order, that is a deliberate inversion of where Montréal after-hours started. Lime Light invented the format in 1973 with a liquor permit that ran three hours past normal closing. Stereo runs the opposite bargain — sell no alcohol at all, and stay open past everybody.
He has defended it in public, too. In October 2021, with Québec still banning dancing in licensed rooms while seventeen thousand people sang along maskless at a Bell Centre concert, Piscardelli took the contradiction to the press:
They wouldn't be screaming, shouting, losing their minds. They'd be dancing.
Days later a crowd danced on Mount Royal to make the point in person. The ban came off. And in 2017, midway through all of it, DJ Mag named Stereo the best club in North America — an award for a system Bernabeu had no hand in building, put together by the man who owns the room out of what was left of his.
The system that's in there now
This is the part almost nothing written about Stereo will tell you, and it is why this section exists. Search for the club's sound system today and you will get the parts list above — the JBL horns, the Levan horn, the nineteen thousand watts — reproduced site after site in the present tense. Nearly all of it is copied, eventually, from that one Club Systems International feature of February 2005.
That system, as Bernabeu specified it, is not what is in the room. It went in in 2003, was revised repeatedly across the five years that followed, and did not survive 2008 intact.
What reopened in 2009 is Piscardelli's system, built by him — and, in his own words, built partly out of what was left of the old one:
We built the sound system using the original sound system with today's technology, immersing it together to create a system that's more versatile, less problematic, and easier to control with the different mediums the artists are using.
So: not a clean sheet, and not a restoration either. A splice — the surviving bones of the 2004 build, rewired around what a modern booth actually plugs into. His reason is the most practical thing anyone has said about this room:
Back in the day, everyone played vinyl so it was easy to build a sound system, one that sounded good for vinyl. Now, one week they have vinyl, the next week they have CDs, the next week they have USB keys, the next week they're playing on their computer. It all sounds incredibly different.
That is the honest answer to why a 2004 purist rig could not just be put back as it was. It was voiced for one format. The booth stopped being one format.
Then the line that makes him a custodian rather than an owner:
It's my job on a weekly basis to tune the sound system for the artist that's coming.
Every week, per artist — which is only possible if the system is yours and you are in the building anyway. Sit with that, because it inverts everything above it. The 2003 rig was a commission: a celebrated outside specialist brought in, a six-figure budget, two years of work, a magazine feature at the end of it. What replaced it is built and re-tuned by the man who owns the room, by ear, on a weekly cycle. Nobody flies in. Nobody writes it up.
He rebuilt the room around it, too. The 1998 building already had three-foot walls; what went in after the fire went further:
I focused on building what I always wanted Stereo to be: a room with another room inside it. Between the two rooms are six feet worth of material that stomps the sound, absorbs it to give the quality you hear when you're at the club.
Six feet of absorption between two shells — and the reason for it is pure Montréal 2009. The Village was filling up with condominiums, and a club that leaks bass into a new tower does not keep its licence for long. The treatment that makes the room sound the way it does is also what keeps it open. DJ Mag noted the same room-within-a-room construction when it profiled the club in 2019.
Which, if you have been paying attention, puts Stereo closer to where this whole tradition started than the famous version of it ever was. Richard Long didn't sell the Paradise Garage a sound system and leave — he built it, and then turned up at three in the morning to re-cone the speakers. A rig built and maintained by someone who has to stand in the room every weekend is a fundamentally different object from one that arrives on a truck. It gets tuned to that room, by ear, indefinitely, by the one person who can hear when it is wrong and has to live with it if he doesn't fix it.
The continuity, then, is the philosophy rather than the hardware — the same insistence on a room where the sound is the reason you came, in a club with no bar to subsidise it and no cameras to advertise it. What changed is that the person making that argument is now also the person holding the soldering iron.
We would still rather print the specification than gesture at it. Tommy: if you ever want the build written down properly — what is in the stacks, what drives them, what you have changed and why — we would like to be the ones who publish it. The offer stands for anyone who has worked on it with you.
Why we care, from a shop full of turntables
Because the thinking scales down. You are not going to put six fourteen-foot stacks in your apartment. But the principle behind that build — spend the money on the transducers, keep the signal path short, don't let processing make decisions the operator should be making — is exactly the argument for a decent cartridge over a louder amplifier, and for a mixer that stays out of the way.
Nineteen thousand watts and no limiter was never really a spec. It was a position — and positions outlive the equipment that made them.
A note on sourcing: the technical detail on the 2003 system comes from two articles Craig Bernabeu has reprinted on his own site — a February 2005 feature in Club Systems International by Kerri Mason, and a Montreal Mirror piece by Raf Katigbak built around a joint interview with Frankie Knuckles and David Morales at Stereo's fifth anniversary. Both are quoted here with attribution. The Montreal Mirror folded in 2012. Photographs of the building and the stack are from his archive; if he'd prefer them credited differently, or removed, we'll do it the same day. Both articles describe the room as it stood between 2003 and 2008 — they are not a description of what is in there today, however many present-tense accounts online treat them as one. Everything this piece attributes to Piscardelli about the current system — that he built it out of the original, why, the weekly tuning, the room within a room — is his own account, given to Lily Moayeri for AGNT in March 2017. The original host is gone; we quote it from the Internet Archive's copy. He gives no component list anywhere in it, which is exactly why we are still asking for one.
One loose end we couldn't close: Stereo's own event listings show a “10 Year Anniversary” in November 2009 and an “11e Anniversaire” in November 2010, which doesn't square with an October 1998 opening. Possibly a rebrand around the post-fire relaunch. If you know, tell us.
Sources: Kerri Mason, “Stereo Montreal: The Continuing Sonic Saga of the Audiophile's Promised Land,” Club Systems International, February 2005; Raf Katigbak, “The Sound Refound,” Montreal Mirror; CBC News, “Stereo nightclub fire was arson: police,” 1 September 2009, for Piscardelli on the second fire; Global News, 22 October 2021, on the dancing ban; Xtra Magazine, 31 August 2009, on the fires; Red Bull Music Academy, “Montréal Rave: An Oral History”, on the Mark Anthony connection; Lily Moayeri, “Stereo and Tommy Piscardeli: Born of Fire,” AGNT, 31 March 2017, for Piscardelli in his own words; DJ Mag, Top 100 Clubs 2019, on the room-within-a-room rebuild; DJ Mag, Best Club North America 2017.
Part of Once Upon a Time, our series on Montréal nightlife. Next: the six a.m. permit that started Montréal's after-hours scene, at Limelight, 1973. Danced at Stereo, or worked on that system? Tell us about it.
