One day, at a local record store, virtually every record he tested on headphones had exactly the aspect he was looking for: Hard-edged drums, suggestively distorted. Back at home, though, everything flattened out into the clean, featureless world of contemporary tech house. It turned out that the amplifier in the shop’s listening station was broken. Intrigued by the power of the music he heard in the store, he began experimenting with running sampled drums through distortion and overdrive, in order to give his music a rawness that it had previously lacked.
John Talabot (one of my favourite producers and Barcelona DJ) talks about how a broken amplifier in a record shop took his sound to a better place. I love little stories like this.
Check his stuff on Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/artist/1YvN5uOGQkHVUUlZUcnotD