LATEST ADDITIONS

Press Day, Schmess Day. Some people were ready, some were not…

"I mixed it before we recorded it."

Day One was press day, with only we ink-stained wretches (or at least the carpal-tunnel afflicted) invited to the party.

"Bass—the final frontier," declared Captain James T. Kirk. I have no doubt: The biggest problem in nearly every listening room is getting the bass to sound right. Today, we voyage to the frontier of bass response.

A Brief History of Time
Because my listening room is also a mastering room, it has to be as accurate as possible (see photo 1). The floor is a concrete slab, with solid-block wall construction and a cathedral ceiling 23' high at the rear—there are no floor-to-ceiling resonances. A bay window hidden behind the curtains disperses the lengthwise room mode by varying it between 18' and 20.6'. The curtains tighten the stereo image and damp the subtle resonant chamber that would otherwise color the sound.

Though Westchester County, New York, seems a likelier locale for Bikram yoga studios, pet psychologists, and pricey restaurants specializing in "grain bowls" and fermented vegetables, the idea of manufacturing audio gear there is not without precedent. Cartridge manufacturer Micro-Acoustics (Elmsford, NY) thrived there for over two decades. George Kaye and Harvey Rosenberg's New York Audio Laboratories (Croton-on-Hudson, NY) assembled Moscode amplifiers there. Even the notorious loudspeaker manufacturer Fourier Systems (Yonkers, NY and Cocytus, Hell) got their start in the county that Hillary Clinton calls home, as needed.

This Gramophone Dream is about my continuing adventures as I slowly scale the pyramid of analog audio. I'm still too close to the sandy earth to see the mythical gold tip or enjoy a six-figure super-turntable. However, in this month's episode, I do reach a level where I can relax, play some eternally beautiful music, and peer out over the vast desert of record-player mediocrity.

This tale might have been scripted by Barry Levinson, the Baltimore-bred filmmaker who has set four pictures in his hometown, where much of the Sandy Gross story has also taken place. The young Sanford Gross moved there to attend Johns Hopkins University, and subsequently, in one of the city's Civil War–era houses, got Polk Audio rolling with fellow alumni Matthew Polk and George Klopfer. The company flourished, but Gross, who had minored in film at Hopkins, had an itch for Hollywood. He moved to Los Angeles, only to find the movie business tinged with illusion—much as Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett had portrayed it in Sunset Boulevard, their merciless 1950 film noir. So Gross plotted a new scenario, returned to Baltimore, and re-entered an industry committed to low distortion.