Good thing is laptops have batteries and will usually run long enough on it to survive a black out. And they will keep the USB powered controller going too. More worried about a hard disk crashing for example. And that’s not just a theoretical possibility. I work(ed) in IT-related fields for many years and I see and have seen hard-disks crashing and even SSDs just stop working. Not fun.
Even for a house party, you are caught with your pants down :-).
To me, that is the single most important difference to analogue systems, the laptop does too many things and when it breaks down (even just a simple reboot) it takes quite a lot of time to be up and running again (30 seconds is quick for most laptops to reboot and open DJ software, load a track and be playing again and is a loooong time of silence on the floor). If your controller is not stand-alone mixer too, you even lose your capability of getting on the mic and explaining to the crowd what is happening and what you are doing to fix it. They’ll just stand there and look at you. Not fun hehehehe.
So, for me, always backups. I carry a spare laptop, spare external HD & a spare mixer or controller. Speakers I don’t worry too much about. I have a Numark 100W RMS booth speaker. Not suited to rock an entire dancefloor, but in emergency cases if I lost one of my 12″s I can turn it into a side fill to my then mono system :-).The Mackies have some headroom so I;ll just turn the volume up on the remaining one some.
Greetinx.
.
