Brilliant Corners

"Paul Klipsch was a genius," Roy Delgado told me recently, with the sound of genuine amazement in his voice. "Me, I'm just a tinkerer." I've spoken to Delgado, Klipsch's chief audio engineer, a handful of times over the past few years and find him affable, plainspoken, and almost absurdly humble. His LinkedIn page describes him simply as "engineer at Klipsch." His bio on the Klipsch Museum website lists his interests as "a closer relationship with God [and] the pursuit of the ever-elusive largemouth bass." To be sure, Delgado holds several patents, has an intimidating grasp of loudspeaker design, and is anything but a tinkerer. But it was still weird to see him—dressed in the T-shirt, light jeans, and work boots of an Arkansas fishing enthusiast—at the Nine Orchard Hotel during last year's New York Fashion Week.

We were there for the launch of a loudspeaker, a collaboration between the Little Rock–based Klipsch Group and Ojas, the nom de solder of artist and designer Devon Turnbull. The Nine Orchard, housed in a pristine Neo-Renaissance bank building on the Lower East Side, is more upscale and stylish than the kind of venues that usually host audio events. The robin's-egg-blue room on the second floor was packed way beyond capacity, and in the hallway outside, a group of latecomers hoping to catch a glimpse of the action was growing into a small crowd. Sitting beside Delgado, Turnbull was dressed in an Ojas hat and a pair of Crocs by Salehe Bembury, a young American who designs footwear for Versace. A Comme des Garçons tag—or was it a belt?—poked out from under an oversized T-shirt. The costume made Turnbull look like a skateboarder who's got a side hustle writing code at Google.

The event was billed as a "tech talk," and when I arrived, Delgado and Turnbull were discussing the various methods of mounting a speaker driver to a baffle, a topic that even I, a writer for an audio magazine, found pretty obscure. You'd never know it by looking at the crowd. There weren't enough chairs, and many of the attendees were sitting on the Persian rug at the two men's feet, like pilgrims at an ashram. They appeared rapt, responded with amazement and delight to even the most mundane observations, and laughed heartily at the first inklings of a joke.

Unlike any audio-themed gathering I can recall, the people at the Nine Orchard were nattily dressed, with nearly as many women as men. The average age was around 26. After the talk ended, I asked five or six attendees about what made them want to spend a September afternoon listening to a talk about flush-mounting woofers. Everyone I spoke to told me they were fascinated by music and audio; all came to see Turnbull after having encountered his sound systems at music venues like Public Records in Gowanus or one of the Supreme stores around the city. None had a typical audiophile hi-fi at home.

I also ended up chatting with Liam Porr, a 20-something founder of a San Francisco–based speaker company called Western Acoustics. He said that Turnbull had created a model for running a hi-fi company that didn't depend on attending audio shows and securing positive reviews from a handful of specialist publications. "He is showing that there are other ways of reaching the public," Porr told me.

There's no question that, during the past few years, Turnbull has been the most intriguing figure in audio. With recent profiles in the New York Times and GQ, he has attracted more attention from the mainstream press than an audio designer has in decades. Part of Turnbull's appeal is his background in streetwear, unerring grasp of brand building and social media, keen eye for industrial design, and the conventional good looks of a 1980s J.Crew model. Then there's his sincere, almost dorky enthusiasm for horn speakers, low-powered tube amps, and their Japanese avatars. And in aligning his audio creations with high fashion rather than the drab world of consumer electronics, Turnbull has positioned his gear as a series of covetable, exclusive objects. Given how many selfies I saw being taken on a recent night in front of the hi-fi he designed for the upstairs bar at Public Records, I'd say he's on to something.

More importantly, Turnbull's visibility has to do with his participation in the most important shift happening in audio—the transition from listening at home to doing it in public. The exploding popularity of dedicated listening spaces throughout the (non-Japanese) world is just one indicator of this change. In moving endgame hi-fi out of upscale living rooms and into clubs, retail stores, and galleries and museums, Turnbull has captured the attention of the young listeners who frequent them.

Digressing only a little, this is a crucial point for those of us who worry about the increasingly geriatric makeup of this hobby. Do you also dread the steady beat of audio-magazine think pieces about the paucity of young people in high-end audio? One middle-aged male writer after another tells us that the reason young people shun audio salons is because they're obsessed with MP3s, or streaming, or headphones, or—more absurdly—because they've never experienced "decent" musical reproduction. This is some pretty weak tea. Anyone who thinks that young people aren't interested in music or good sound hasn't met any.

As a teacher of undergraduates, I spend a lot of time with 20- and 21-year-olds. Here are a few facts about their lives: This year, the annual cost of attending the private four-year university where I teach hovers just under $100,000. Many of them are graduating with student loan debts of $200,000, sometimes even $300,000. (Given that I teach nonfiction writing, I fear for these students' futures.) Many work several part-time jobs, and most worry about what happens in a few years, when they have to begin paying for their health insurance. Nearly all live far from their classes in lower Manhattan and share apartments with two or three roommates. The prospect of renting a place of their own, much less buying one, is unrealistic for all but the most fortunate. (You may point out that these are students at an expensive Top 30 university contending with New York City's sky-high real estate market, but these social and economic forces are hardly unique to coastal cities.)

So imagine what these young people might say if I suggested they invest in one of those $5000 "starter" hi-fi systems that are supposed to appeal to them. Understandably, their response would involve derisive laughter and not a small amount of ridicule. How could I blame them? Even if they could afford the gear, would they set it up in the communal living room where, more often than not, someone's visiting cousin is passed out on the couch?

To understand how we got here, let's review some recent history. High-end audio as we know it was shaped by baby boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964. Economically, the country they experienced in college was more equal than present-day socialist Sweden. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average annual cost of attending a private 4-year university in 1964, when the first cohort of boomers entered college, was $1011, or $10,292 in today's dollars. According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, by 1968, when these students were graduating, the average new home cost $24,700; adjusted for inflation, that's about half of what one sells for today. Most estimates tell us when these graduates took out student loans, they owed less than $1000. (Back then, student loans were collected like any other consumer debt; Congress didn't introduce draconian tactics like wage garnishment and the elimination of bankruptcy as a means for discharging federally guaranteed loans until the 1990s.) Finally, the Social Security Administration informs us that in 1968, the average American spent $294 per year on healthcare. Today, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, that figure is $14,570.

For members of the generation that got high in dorm rooms to the sound of Surrealistic Pillow, these historic levels of equality and opportunity meant that by the time they reached middle age, they had amassed unprecedented levels of wealth. (Here I'm talking about baby boomers unaffected by redlining and other systemic forms of disenfranchisement.) In doing so, they transformed the country's tax code, labor movement, and the rest of the economic system to advantage private enterprise and the already rich and to work considerably worse for just about everyone else. Readers who're starting to hyperventilate and compose letters to the editor should consider that this rather mild analysis is not a matter of electoral politics but simple, nonpartisan statistics. Today, baby boomers make up just 21% of the US population, but, according to the Congressional Budget Office, control slightly more than half the nation's wealth.

Our little hobby, still populated in large part by baby boomers, reflects these economic realities. Talk to an audio retailer, and you are likely to hear that much of the demand they're seeing is for gear that costs not $2000 but $20,000. These sometimes eye-watering prices are the subject of much grousing inside and outside the hobby, but of course they simply tell us about the market.