The Lowdown
The Stage One system from Electrotec is a battery-powered, wireless PA built around SKAA, the low-latency wireless standard we’ve seen before in the Soundboks speakers and the Dillinger Labs system. A full four-box rig like the one I tested is a hefty investment, but what you get for the money is a professional, old-school PA look and feel and great audio quality, but with no mains cable, no speaker cable and no drawbacks of consumr wireless (ie Bluetooth)… and to my ears it’s the nicest-sounding medium-to-large PA I’ve heard in a long time.
Video Review
First Impressions / Setting up
These are the production versions, with all the tweaks Electrotec have made since the pre-production tops we looked at previously, and now joined by the XB subwoofer. Straight away they read as a classic PA speaker design rather than a gimmicky party box. The cabinets are a tight, properly covered wooden build with big carry handles, rubber round the edges and a steel grille, and everything feels held together so the drivers can do their job. I liked that the tops and the subs are the same footprint, because it means you can stack them, and I’ve seen these set up with a sub on the floor and three tops stacked on top for a properly powerful column.
The tops are a three-way design with a 10in woofer, an 8in mid and a 1in compression tweeter, driven by 320W RMS of amplification. The XB adds two custom 10in drivers with 288W RMS behind them. That is part of why these things are heavy. My poles could only just handle a top, so if you’re going to loft these in public, get decent-quality poles you trust and get a friend to help you lift.
Setting up could not be much simpler. You drop in a battery, hold the power button to switch on, then tap it to cycle through the modes, and you’re running. There is no mains lead to find and no speaker cable to route. On the transmitter side you plug one SKAA transmitter into your DJ gear and it sends the signal to up to four speakers at once. I switched the transmitter on, lined up a track, powered up the four boxes, and they all found the transmitter instantly with nothing else to do. It really is a case of pressing one button on each unit to have a full PA up and running.
Each unit takes two hot-swappable packs and draws from one until it’s nearly flat before switching to the other on its own, with no interruption. You can charge a pack in or out of the unit, and even charge one while the other keeps playing, so in theory you could keep a set on rotation and run forever. Electrotec quote up to 34 hours of normal listening and up to 18 hours at full volume for the XB from a pair of packs, and the tops will do eight-plus hours flat out. That’s far longer than any gig you’re likely to play.
In Use
The reason you’d want any of this is wireless that actually works for performing. Bluetooth is fine for casually getting some audio playing, and yes, these have Bluetooth on board if you want it, but it’s not something you’d perform on. SKAA is the alternative. It’s a wireless standard built for audio rather than piggy-backing on Bluetooth or WiFi, it’s rock solid over a much bigger distance (Electrotec quote up to 50 metres reliable range), and it runs to a guaranteed latency. For a DJ, that combination is gold.
Why go wireless at all? Because it’s just easier. Even with mains power nearby, wheeling the boxes out and plonking them exactly where you want them is quicker than running cable, and once you’re outdoors near a pool, a barbecue, kids running around, or you just want fill-in or satellite speakers exactly where the crowd is, the flexibility is hard to argue with. I tested outdoors on the balcony and being able to place each box precisely, with nothing trailing back to the mains or the mixer, changes how you think about a set-up.
On sound, these deliver. My test track this summer has been Electronic’s “Get the Message”, and even at about a third volume, with the boxes turned up high, I didn’t dare push them any louder where I live. You feel the bass in your feet and the mids and highs right in your head, and while the stereo separation between two boxes is obvious up close and they’re a little harsh right on top of them, as any PA has to be to throw high frequencies a long way, the sound has that thing that a good PA has: Walk back and the gap between the boxes melts away into one big, coherent sound.
The tops have plenty of punch on their own, and for most DJ jobs one XB sub would do the trick, but a pair of subs under a pair of tops is something else again. I’d be comfortable covering around 250 people outdoors with this, and maybe 350 to 400 in a nice enclosed venue.
The part that trips DJs up is latency, and Electrotec are upfront about it. Run one transmitter into four speakers and you accept about 37ms of latency. It’s there, and with headphones on cueing hi-hats you can hear the top of the track sitting slightly behind. A lot of people wouldn’t notice it and it doesn’t bother me in practice, but it is real. The alternative is SKAA Pro mode, which drops to about 19ms and is, to my ears, undetectable for finger drumming, scratching or cueing. The catch is that Pro mode only feeds two receivers per transmitter instead of four.
So if you want four boxes and Pro-mode latency, you’ve two options and both work well. The first, and the one I’d choose, is to wire each sub to the top above it with a single XLR cable wound round the pole, then feed just the two subs wirelessly. Now the transmitter is only driving two receivers, so you get the 19ms, and the subs pass audio up to the tops. The second option is to buy a second transmitter and stack the two by your DJ gear using the through socket on the bottom, so each transmitter feeds a pair. Either way you’re back to ultra-low latency across all four boxes.
Where the Stage One really pulls ahead is versatility, and this is where it separates itself from the other available SKAA gear. The rear panels are packed. On the tops you get two combo XLR/quarter-inch inputs with independent gain and peak metering, a HI-Z switch on the left channel for plugging a guitar or pedalboard in direct, left/right/mono channel selection, XLR and 3.5mm outputs, a mono wired-out button, a USB MP3/WAV player with transport control, a 3.5mm input, and a USB-C charge-and-play socket that plays from and charges your phone at the same time.
The XB adds low-pass filter, phase, and routing controls right on the panel, plus a high-pass-filtered XLR line out so you can hang a wired top off the sub with a proper crossover. All of it is laid out clearly and explained in an in-depth manual that’s worth reading. The tops can also act as SKAA hubs themselves, so you can plug straight into one box and have it drive three more.
The big top-mounted volume dial controls either the local box or the whole bonded group, so you can set an overall level and still trim individual speakers. The hot-swap batteries mean you’re never tethered and never caught short. And the build quality and finish are what you’d expect at this price, but it’s reassuring to see it delivered.
Conclusion
The Stage One system is the most fully-rounded PA I think we’ve reviewed for DJs. It does the wireless, it does the battery power, it does the volume, and it wraps all of that in a professional PA that looks and sounds the part rather than a novelty. The only SKAA PA I’ve tested that’s got SKAA is the Dillinger Labs DFB/DFA system, and that’s a deliberately purist, half-the-price rig with no wired options, no extra inputs or outputs and no swappable batteries. It’s excellent for what it is, but it’s built for a smaller scale and scope. If you want the same wireless idea with real scale, real flexibility and every connection you could ask for, this is the one. Think of the Stage One as a Soundboks on steroids, with the versatility the Soundboks doesn’t have.
Who’s it for? Mobile and event DJs who play outdoors, at pool parties, barbecues and functions where dragging mains cable and speaker runs around is a pain, and who want a rig that covers a few hundred people without compromise. It’s also for anyone who values being able to place speakers exactly where the crowd is, wirelessly, without the reliability worries of Bluetooth.
Who should think twice? Anyone on a tight budget, because a four-box rig is a serious outlay, and bedroom or small-bar DJs who’ll never need this much box. If that’s you, look at the Dillinger Labs SKAA system or a Soundboks or two with a SKAA receiver, and if you don’t need wireless at all, a conventional pair of battery tops and maybe a sub. The 37ms latency in four-speaker mode is the one thing to plan around, though the wired-sub or twin-transmitter workarounds solve it neatly.
That aside, this is professional, convenient, reliable kit that sounds superb and takes the cables out of DJing without taking the performance out, and for the DJ who can justify the spend it’s about as complete as a wireless PA gets.
