ONCE UPON A TIME · 02
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.
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. 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 rebuild
In February 2003, Morales commissioned Craig “Shorty” Bernabeu of SBS Designs in Brooklyn to rebuild the system. It took until late 2004, ran to “an investment well into six figures,” and involved monthly trips up from New Jersey.
What went in: six stacks, fourteen feet tall. Each one carrying, from the top down:
- One JBL 2395 acoustic lens horn with a TAD TM 4002 neodymium upper-mid driver
- One JBL 2405 slot-loaded tweeter
- Two SBS SH 112 front-loaded horn cabinets, each with two TAD TM 1201 mid-woofers
- Two double-15″ rear-loaded scoops carrying four TAD TL 1603 mid-bass woofers
- One Levan horn, built by Steve Dash, loaded with two JBL 2242 eighteens
Amplification came 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.
One more detail, and it's our favourite. Inside the bass scoops, Bernabeu installed beacon lights — purely because of who came before:
Richard Long had them in a few clubs, the Garage had beacons, Zanzibar had beacons in the Berthas.
Richard Long built the Paradise Garage system. Frankie Knuckles learned sound from him, alongside Larry Levan — Long would make three-in-the-morning house calls to re-cone speakers. The horn in every Stereo stack is named after Levan. A room in Montréal in 2004, quoting a room in New York in 1977, in hardware.
Also worth knowing: the hanging tweeter clusters cost $6,000 and were built out of $30 plumbing pipe.
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.”
Stereo came back, and in 2017 DJ Mag named it the best club in North America. Angel Moraes died on 27 February 2021, aged 55.
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 is not a spec. It's a position.
A note on sourcing: the technical detail here 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.
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; Xtra Magazine, 31 August 2009, on the fires; Red Bull Music Academy, “Montréal Rave: An Oral History”, on the Mark Anthony connection; DJ Mag, Best Club North America 2017.
Part of Once Upon a Time, our series on Montréal nightlife. Danced at Stereo, or worked on that system? Tell us about it.
