Art Dudley Listening

During the years I lived in New York City and environs, I never learned my way around Brooklyn—something I now regret, given that borough's emergence as a hotbed of audio creativity: our industry's Laurel Canyon, so to speak. Such gone-but-not-forgotten brands as Futterman and Fi were manufactured there, and today Brooklyn is home to DeVore Fidelity, Lamm Industries, Mytek Digital, Grado Labs, Ohm Acoustics, and Oswalds Mill Audio. The list of audio luminaries who call Brooklyn home includes Herb Reichert, John Atkinson, Steve Guttenberg, Fred Kaplan, and numberless others.

In 2012, Brooklyn's Red Hook district became home to a different sort of audio company, one that filled a need so big that no one had actually recognized it before then: Stereobuyers (footnote 1), which is owned and operated by the youthful Adam Wexler, buys from audiophiles the gear they no longer want, freeing them up to buy something else—while at the same time offering for sale a great variety of used and vintage components, the likes of which we mortals could go all our lives without actually seeing.

On a rainy day in early March, during the sort of disorienting weather that leaves one wondering whether we're heading away from winter or toward it, I took an early train from Albany to New York's Penn Station, where Adam Wexler picked me up for the drive to the fine old Brooklyn waterfront warehouse that Stereobuyers shares with a letterpress printing company. The building is on a sizable wharf: If you step outside and look due east, you'll be looking at the Brooklyn Ikea store; turn the other way and look to the northwest and you'll get a clearer view of the Statue of Liberty than can be had from Battery Park.

Step back inside and you'll see—forgive the cliché—an Ali Baba's cave filled with piece after piece that fired my imagination and coaxed my always-simmering acquisitiveness into something hotter.

How did this happen?
The atmosphere inside the large room that Adam has carved out for a listening space and the company's open-plan offices is the sort that I find instantly inviting: exposed stone walls, an incalculably high ceiling with exposed beams and occasional swaths of sound-absorbing fabric, lots of framed posters and photographs, and, whether intentionally or not, an artsy mix of dark corners and nicely done spotlighting. It was a strangely cozy place to be on a rainy day: Just 12 paces from that room, the warehouse door remained open, reminding me that another 20 steps from there would land me in the briny deep. Maybe land's not the right word.

I asked Adam how he came to make his living buying and selling used hi-fi components. "My dad had always had a cool hi-fi but wasn't neurotic about it: That's where my interest in equipment really came from. And then, in college, I somehow found Stereophile, and I found that there was more [equipment] out there than you see on the shelves at The Wiz.

"So, I was going to school [at Ithaca College] in Ithaca, New York, and there was an electronics store there that had a used-gear rack. It was around the same time that I learned about eBay, so I went back to that store and said, 'If I can move some of that gear for you, can I get a commission?' They said 'Yes'—and I never looked back.

"I then graduated from Ithaca College in 2001, and I got a job at Rabsons, a hi-fi store on Route 4 in New Jersey. I was just a stock boy there, but then I started moving some equipment for them—and then I got a job at Innovative Audio, in Manhattan, around 2003. And in the years after that, I began Stereobuyers and ran it out of my home for a number of years, with a storage space in tandem. And then I found this space, where I've been for eight years."

As it turned out, 2012 was an unfortunate year in which to open a waterfront business with a valuable and in some cases irreplaceable inventory: on October 29 of that year, Hurricane Sandy raised the sea level in New York City, flooding streets, tunnels, subways—and much of Stereobuyers' warehouse, which suffered tremendous losses.

When Stereobuyers suffered that interruption in business, Adam Wexler had a related business to fall back on. "When I left Innovative, I also started my other business, called Resolution Audio Video, which does automation/smart-home/high-end custom installations. Our most recent project was a custom installation for the CEO of Atlantic Records, Julie Greenwald; she wound up with a Bel Canto Black amplification system and DeVore O/96 loudspeakers.

"Another recent custom installation of ours was at Bar Shiru in Oakland, California, a hi-fi/jazz/vinyl bar. Those speakers were also DeVores, custom-built with front-firing ports, plus some Altec recreations from Line Magnetic. The system is all-analog: all-vinyl, no digital." Pressed for other examples, Adam demurred: His clientele are the sort where he's sometimes forced to sign nondisclosure agreements.

How does this thing work?
I asked Adam to describe a typical Stereobuyers interaction, and he replied, "People contact us online for a quote, and if we're interested, we make a reasonable offer—and if the owner is within a 90-mile radius, we go pick it up." (Adam has three full-time employees and one part-time employee in Brooklyn; he also has an "outpost" in Colorado.)

That seemed awfully straightforward to me, and I said so to Adam—who replied that he often deals not with audiophiles but with their loved ones: "For one thing," he said, "we get a lot of people, family members, who are survivors of people who bought expensive gear right before they died: They were ill and just wanted to hear the best before they go. Deathbed audiophiles."

Other, more colorful interactions are not uncommon: "One time, I was buying a system from an elderly woman on the Upper East Side whose husband was, sadly, not doing so well. We went to her place and purchased just about everything in the system. And while we were there, she said, 'Oh, there's a box of turntable parts you can have'—and she went and got it out for me. And among the items in that box was a gun. A loaded handgun.

"I told her: 'Er, ma'am, there's a gun in this box.' To which she replied, 'Oh: So that's where it was!'"

"We deal with a lot of audio hoarders, too. We went to one place—this is in Brooklyn—where the guy had said, 'When you arrive, the door's open, so just come on in.' It was an apartment, and there were boxes everywhere—but also security cameras all over the place. We heard him calling, 'I'm back here,' so we followed the sound of his voice, and here's this gigantically fat man in bed, naked except for a sheet over his crotch. He then directed us: 'Go into the kitchen, the third box in the second pile is the thing I want to sell'—and while we're doing this, he's watching us and correcting our movements. It was very uncomfortable." "But the majority of the people who sell to us are audiophiles who just want to move on to something else, and they don't want the hassle of doing it all themselves."

Adam and his team sell these components through Stereobuyers' eBay store, called High-End Audio Auctions. "We have sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 components," he says.

With the exception of components offered "as-is," items sold by Stereobuyers are backed by a 14-day return policy. (Full details are at highendaudioauctions.com, as are links to their items on eBay.) "We have a bench where we do all our testing, but we tend not to do major overhauls here. We find that that isn't best for buyers of vintage.

"This Marantz 8b [presently in the Stereobuyers listening system] is fully stock, never been touched. Could I go through and replace all the caps and claim that I made it 'better'? Yes, but I don't want to play God and presume

I know how the customer wants it—that's for the buyer to decide."

How can you part with . . . this?
Knowing from personal experience the pangs of acquisitiveness engendered by some vintage products, and the remorse one feels when letting go of a particularly rare piece of gear, I asked Adam: Once you get hold of these things, do you find it difficult to part with them? "Ultimately," he said, "my passion to be an entrepreneur was to support my family—so that's what I think about when I find some . . . thing that I want to keep. My family is what keeps me on track. I may be an insane audiophile, but I have enough sanity to not go overboard.

"The only things I hoard are vacuum tubes. They're consumables and can't be passed around forever."

As for that family: "One day, while I was working at Innovative, a guy came in from Pennsylvania who wanted to listen to a system. My sales pitch was always easygoing, so I let him take his time. The next day, an attractive young woman came in and said, 'My father would like to hear that system again'—he sent his daughter in to talk with me . . .

"And now we've been married for 14 years—and yeah, he did buy the system!"

As for Adam's own system: When he's at home with his family, they enjoy listening to records and watching TV through a combination of DeVore O/96 loudspeakers, Shindo Cortese 300B stereo amplifier and Corton-Charlemagne monoblocks, and a Shindo Giscours preamplifier, with a Garrard 301 with a Shindo platter bearing in a LignoLabs plinth, an EMT 997 tonearm, an EMT TSD 15 stereo pickup head, and an Auditorium 23 Hommage T2 step-up transformer.