I'll just throw this in for general comment - it's a quote from a google search of What is EQ'ing - I don't know but this made a lot of sense to me - and a question I'd then ask of
ringo - why isn't reggae recorded "right" in the first place?
It is recorded right, but I see what you're asking. Hope this isn't patronising, just trying to outline it in brief. In Jamaica in the 1950's nobody had any money and there were very few jobs so nobody had records or a record player. The few radios on the island could pick up American radio stations, but there was no Jamaican recorded music until the late 50's and even then JA radio stations refused to play Jamaican music until the late 70's. Migrant workers would bring American R'n'B records back when they returned to Jamaica and sailors would bring them to sell when they made port in Kingston.
Sound systems like Coxsone's Downbeat grew out of the need to have a dance, a social gathering, others like Duke Reid played records to attract customers to his liquor store. The sound systems would attract customers by stringing up metal horns in the trees and turning up the treble so that they could be heard from miles away. They also came up with the idea of putting the bass speakers into huge wardrobe size enclosures called a "house of joy" to give a deep, loud bass. When the sound systems started to compete with each others, the invention of the sound clash, they would try and build ever bigger speakers boxes and louder amplifiers to power them to drown out and and beat down their opposition. The resulting sound was the hugely emphasized drum and bass which influenced dance music etc.
When they started to make their own music in Jamaica producers engineered it to play on those sound systems, there was no thought to selling records abroad or to cater to anyone else's taste, and they would perfect over many years a production style which cut to vinyl the heaviest possible bass sound in the specific range they desired, intended to shake the spine of the audience. That's not the lowest bass possible, its the one you know when it hits you in the stomach. Pre-amps were introduced to increase the possibilities of amplification and then fitted with parametric controls to emphasize the desired frequency.
The art of the producer is to cut the tune so that when played on such a sound system all those aspects are present and can be manipulated by the sound man to destroy their opposition. Every reggae fan knows the uncomfortable truth that the record you hear on sound system, and very often in the record shop, doesn't sound as good when you take it home and play it on a standard hifi.
If you go through to the version (starting at 2:38) played after the vocal this is what we call a headtop dub - the drum and bass is heavily emphasised and much of the mid range cut out:
The furthest extreme of this production style is the sound system dubplate, which is often EQ'd to only sound good on a sound system. A few have been pressed to normal vinyl and released, this dub by Ras Muffet (starting around 5:30) is a good example. Recorded to digital format and played through YouTube it has little clarity, the bass is too booming and it sounds muddy. On sound system this tune is heavy like lead:
