Throughout my hundred years, I’ve told everyone who’d listen: If it’s adventure you seek, the best way to find it is to stand on the right corner at the right time wearing the right hat, and when the limo pulls up and the driver says, “Get in,” do not ask where it is going.
This strategy has served my life story well. It has placed me without striving in countless cinema-worthy locations, hanging with all types of legend-worthy characters.
Lately, that corner where I stand wearing the right hat is in front of the Polish newsstand at the intersection of Manhattan and Greenpoint Avenues in Brooklyn.
Twice in two weeks, I woke up early to be standing by that newsstand at the right time for my friend Beau to pull up in his metallic blue saloon. Both times I got in, I neglected to ask where we were going. Both times, I ended up somewhere like Oz or Wonderland. Both times, I came home thinking “Wow, I am blessed to be a traveler in this audiophile hobby. It keeps putting me on roads, opening doors, and introducing me to wizards, scholars, monks, and abbots.”
The first time, I thought we were driving to see our friends Dave and Jeffrey of Salt Cellar EMIA fame, but when I stepped out of the car, I was standing in tall grass in front of a raised-bank barn built in the 1830s. (See heading photo.) The barn’s nearest door framed its far side door, which framed a miles-deep landscape on the leeward side of the structure. For a long moment, the scent of clover dominated my attention. Then I spied acres of it all the way to the forest at the edge of the valley. “So, Beau, where are we? Did we crash on the highway and pass through the Vail?”
Just then, framed in the first doorway, I spied the Paganini-like silhouette of my old friend Pern, an authentic audio monk, whom I’ve known since I was building amps under the tutelage of mutual friend and humble wizard Arthur Loesch. Pern was Arthur’s running buddy and part of a gang I was a member of.
Shouting Pern’s name, I ascended the grass embankment, walked over the concrete threshold, and hugged my friend. Then I paused and looked down at the thick, heavily weathered floorboards, which, for a moment, put my mind in the Roman era. I felt like I had entered a sacred temple. Looking up, I expected to see a mosaic-tiled dome with some gold-leafed Masonic symbols and an oculus. What I spied instead were spider’s webs and stout ancient timbers that looked hand-hewn and assembled without fasteners. That’s when I named Vern’s barn the Stick Palace. The only light came in through the opposing doors. Back in the deepest shadows, the exterior walls were lined with console radios from the 1940s. Further inside, I passed wood barrels filled with transformers, capacitors, and loose wire. Between the shadowed walls and the central listening gallery was a formation of antique dining room tables covered in dusty tuners and cast-off amplifiers, mostly from the 1950s and ’60s.
After some hugs and secret handshakes, I sat down in the second row of the “seating for 10” listening gallery. Arranged before me were three pairs of vintage speakers. Closest to the front was a rare pair of 1970s RCA LC-1A monitor speakers in original gray refrigerator cabinets (footnote 1). Behind them, spaced farther apart, was a pair of 1980 Klipsch La Scalas in owner-stained raw birch cabinets. Behind them in the shadows on either side of the far door was a pair of Spica TC-50s sitting on oak barrels.
The plan for the day was to compare the Klipsch horns that belonged to Pern to the refrigerator monitors owned by Vern, who also happens to own the Stick Palace and all the clover and trees around it. I thought the Corvette in the drive might belong to Vern, but I didn’t ask. What I did ask was, “May I please sit in your green Ford?” Vern said “Sure, I can even start it for you.”
I asked if it was a 1940 model and learned it was a 1937 “maintained” original.
After I got in and properly situated on the high-knap upholstery, I rolled down the window and asked, “What do you call this color?”
Vern smirked, “Rattle-can green.”
In shock, I exclaimed, “You painted this car yourself?! In this barn? With spray cans?” “Yup,” he replied. “We can take it for a drive if you want.” I shook off Vern’s excellent offer, saying, “Thank you, Sir, maybe next time I visit, but for today, I have a powerful need to hear those RCA LC-1As.”
RCA’s LC-1A was designed in the 1940s by an engineering god named Harry Olson (footnote 2). Its purpose was to serve as a recording monitor capable of delivering the highest possible audio fidelity. It is a 15″ duo-cone design consisting of a paper-cone tweeter mounted inside the voice coil of a paper-cone woofer.
The first track was Elvis on RCA. It sounded so real and present that I knew right away these were the loudspeakers I’d waited my whole life to find. I mean that seriously, and I did not know it until that moment in the barn.
I’d heard RCA LC-1 drivers several times before, but mainly in half-spaces, wall- or soffit-mounted in recording studios. In the barn, Vern’s LC-1As are out in the middle of the floor between the doors, in their original, unrestored MI-11401 bass-reflex cabinets. There were two of them, and they were showing well-focused detail and precise imaging. Vern’s LC-1s resolved reverb and located walls way better than my Altec 604Es. They had smoother, quicker bass. But most of all, I was taken by how sweet and supple they made sound sound, not dry or stiff like Altecs.
What a moment! I am sure I never heard reproduced Elvis sound more like real Elvis than he did right then, because these were the speakers this record was mastered on, and because the acoustics of the Stick Palace might actually be perfect. Wind gusts may have blurred the imaging, but room reflections seemed nonexistent except maybe from the 3″-thick wood floorboards, which I imagined were cut at a local (circa 1830) water-powered sawmill. I asked veteran barn visitors and they all agreed: Speakers sounded cleaner in the barn than they did in people’s homes.
Beau was behind me, so I tapped his leg and whispered: “You need to own these speakers! They’d be perfect in your room.” Just then, someone tapped me on the shoulder. When I looked up I saw this beaming, smiling face, a face I hadn’t seen in 40 years. Despite dementia and too many blows to the head, I remembered his name immediately. “Randy!” I screamed—then Randy smiled bigger, obviously surprised I remembered his name. But how could I forget? This man changed the whole direction of my life in the summer of 1985.
It was August, it was hot, and I was pulling wires through pipes on a steel fishing boat anchored in the Hudson. During afternoon break, I was chatting with one of the other electricians and discovered he was into vintage and DIY audio, as I was. That very day after work, he took me via public transportation to his house in Jersey, wherein he led me through a long hall to “the back bedroom,” exclaiming, “I promise, you’ve never heard anything like this!”
The beige shag carpet and mauve gold-threaded drapes suggested a wife may have chosen the décor and that this was probably their master bedroom. On a fancy bureau against the wall at the foot of the queen-sized bed sat what I recognized as an early ’50s tube amp and preamp that looked like they’d been pulled from a nice music console. These pre-stereo components were flanked on one side by a patinaed brown speaker cabinet with a sloped front featuring flower-shaped cutouts for the sound to come out. These abstracted flower shapes were backed by a gold-threaded cloth grille stapled to the cabinet’s inside. A Thorens TD 124 turntable with an Ortofon arm and SPU cartridge sat next to what its logo said was a Brook preamplifier.
I asked Randy what was so special about this old stuff, and did he really listen in mono? He told me to “Stack up the pillows and lay on the right side of the bed,” whereupon he played for me my first directly heated triode amplifier, the push-pull Brook 12A 2A3, and its matching 7C preamp. Equally mind expanding, this was my first time ever hearing the full-range, paper-coned Western Electric 755A, in original WE cabinets.
When he finished playing Elvis, Frank Sinatra, and Birgit Nilsson, I was shaking and stuttering and, I swear, laughing out loud. Compared to any audio system I was familiar with, Randy’s weird gear made recordings sound laughably REAL. This “real” I’m alluding to was not subtle. Anybody would have noticed it.
I asked Randy why these singers’ voices sounded so vivid. He said, “Because this stuff was designed by top engineers at companies that knew consumers would accept payment plans to experience the voices of famous people projected into their homes.”
That was the paradigm-shifting audio pilgrimage that sparked my interest in directly heated triodes and full-range paper-cone speakers, an interest that has intensified with time and a better understanding of why this stuff presents recordings the way it does.
At the time I visited Randy, I was using Hafler kit electronics driving homemade speakers with Dynaudio drivers, sourced by a Kenwood KD-500 turntable, with an SME 3009 tonearm and a Shure V15 III moving magnet cartridge. Today, I am living in the legacy of that fateful day, and I am ever so pleased to reunite with my old pals Pern and Randy (aka “The Bear”) and their 21st century triode gang, several of whom visited Don Garber’s store, Fi, way back when and came to audio soirees at the Firehouse.
Pern told me, “We’ve been meeting at Vern’s barn for at least 10 years. We meet sporadically during the summer and fall, once, occasionally twice, a month. The regulars are a well-seasoned bunch of geezers who love nothing better than to escape from the world to a quiet pastoral setting and futz around with audio equipment while trading stories about audio adventures. The equipment is mostly from Vern, but all of us contribute. The gear we assembled today’s system with is mostly home listening room hand-me-downs, homebuilt electronic hazards, and all manner of weird electrical shit that just seems to migrate to the barn. We have NO aspirations to redefine the state of audio; we just want to have fun playing tunes together.” While eating oysters and sliced bits of grilled steak.
What Pern described is an established audio pilgrimage site.
My friend Randy Bradley adds some back story about how Vern’s old sticks became an audio palace.
“In 1990, I was living in these woods alone, wondering if there were any other people into audio in this upstate area. I was operating BEAR Labs, manufacturing Lightning Silver cables, the Symphony No.1 amplifier, and my DC-coupled SE MOSFET amps. … So, this desire to meet other audio people led to my creating the Catskill & Adirondack Audio Society, holding monthly meetings at members’ homes.
“We operated for a decade, starting with only a couple of people. Eventually the membership reached about 30. Vern was among them. Since joining us, he has held impromptu, irregular warm weather get togethers at his barn.
“The linkage to the NYC Triode Mafia was through Arthur Loesch, an early member of my club. Arthur knew you, JC [Morrison], Don Garber, Komuro, etc. … Arthur and Bob Cummings, who both lived nearby, were featured in a Joe Roberts Sound Practices issue. On a road trip, JC Morrison chronicled their systems.”
Other than the green Ford and the grilled burgers, the big treat was the gear: A Rotel RP-5300 direct drive turntable with an Audio-Technica AT10 moving magnet cartridge feeding into the phono stage of a hot-rodded Conrad-Johnson PV-4, then out the PV-4’s tape output to a Steve Short–designed-and-built line stage that uses 6SN7s and a GZ-32 rectifier. The amps were a pair of Nelson Pass–designed ACAs (“Amp Camp Amps”) run in strapped mono mode. And to top that off, Vern’s LC-1A cones had those extra-desirable paper bumps.
But! According to Pern, “The real star of the barn system—the component that makes the MAGIC—is the acoustic of the barn itself.”
Footnote 1: See scottymoore.net/RCASpkr.html.
Footnote 2: Scroll down the page here.
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