Gramophone Dreams

Most of what I know about audio I learned from drag racing. That's where I first recognized the relationship between force, geometry, and sound. When I was barely out of high school, I began consciously picturing sounds as a symphony of forces operating in a Cartesian space. In retrospect, this "Cartesian picturing" was probably inspired by the descriptive geometry class I was taking at Wright junior college in Chicago, but I didn't think of that at the time.

In my partner's tiny wood-framed garage, revving an engine with racing headers and no mufflers was a Level-6 noise event that made hot, pressurized air crackle in my ears like machine-gun fire.

The exhaust was loud, but I was standing close enough to the engine that I could distinctly hear cooler air and fuel hissing as it rushed into the carburetor at extremely high velocities. Meanwhile, the exhaust was heating and pressurizing the entire plywood room, shaking its flimsy walls. Kids on bikes standing just outside the open garage door told me they felt the hot wind.

This high-drama sound was easy to picture as a vectored three-dimensional force, with temperature coefficients.

I remember how the next day, while towing our car to Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove, Wisconsin, I once again pictured the sounds around me on a three-axis graph.

Racing Sundays started early and quietly, not talking to my partner Bill sitting next to me, driving hungover with my ears tuned to the myriad vibrations transmitted through the trailer hitch on the back of a blue '49 Plymouth. Picture a homemade car trailer fashioned with diamond plate and square steel tubing painted machine green carrying a gutted, hoodless, windscreen-less, chalk-white '58 MG bolted to a home-made chromoly frame, powered by a Chevy small block. Total investment: $750.00, including the home-brew deep-sump oil pan.

The trailer's hitch was the apex of an acute triangle welded to a broad rectangular frame, which, while being pulled, functioned like an antenna capable of receiving and transmitting data about wind speed and direction, pavement conditions, the effects of braking and accelerating, swerving, bouncing, and shimmying, and whether the tires were inflated correctly.

Throughout the drive, the trailer's twisty frame, narrow tires, squeaky springs, and rattling chains "read" the pavement, forming a mesmerizing broadcast of what I named Sounds from the Hitch. This hour-long symphony climaxed with loud, tires-on-gravel crunching sounds as we crept forward in line, waiting to secure a space in the pits—and eat ham and eggs on a roll with melted Wisconsin cheddar.

No question, drag racing heightened my awareness of the force, volume, and direction of sounds. It taught me to listen mindfully to my environment and helped me understand the structure of audio recordings.

CanJam NYC 2025
My plan was to arrive at the Times Square Marriot at 10am, right when CanJam NYC 2025 opened on Saturday, then float through the aisles and see who I ran into. Thus began the day's marathon of chatting—interrupted of course by stints sitting at cloth-covered folding tables listening to DACs, amps, and headphones. And?

In the subway on my way to CanJam, I pictured relaxing on those cubic white vinyl ottomans with a coffee and a croissant—and with Cowboy Gene, a hippy musician I know who dresses like a cowboy (with gold RCA plugs on the ends of his string tie), loves bluegrass and Patsy Cline, and collects vintage guitars; with the luminous Jana Dagdagan, who makes videos about audio for her YouTube channel Jana Loves HiFi; and with my machinist/engine-builder/audio guru/cartridge-collector friend Richard Cirulnick, who talks about blowers, fuel mixtures, and cam timing and knows exactly what color machine green is.

After I checked my coat and got my badge, I passed through the doors to the big room, and dang me to tarnation if those iconic white ottomans weren't gone. They had been replaced by more than a score of cloth-covered tables. Now there was no place in the auditorium where I could sit down, except at the cloth-covered tables where you must audition headphones. There was no place to drink coffee or meet friends. The aisles were narrow and packed shoulder-to-shoulder with fit young'uns, most wearing puffers or blue parkas. Everywhere I looked, I saw youth cohorts standing three-deep waiting to listen to what must have been a thousand headphones at more than a hundred tables.

To my smiling amazement, during my first hour walkaround I counted four CD players and two turntables, one (turntable) by FiiO, the other a gussied-up vintage AR XA called "the Salad SA-XC" by its maker, Andy Cook.

(Author's warning: This will not be a traditional data-packed show report. There will be no prices or specifications. My goal is to describe the scene and share the feeling of the day by spotlighting a few memorable moments with friends and showcasing a few head-fi luminaries I regard as friends and shining pillars of the headphone industry.)

Same as last year, Focal and Audeze had colossal, impossible-to-ignore booths placed right at the front entrance, each with a dozen tables with hordes of tall attendees crowded around each one. After scanning the scene and taking a deep breath, I squeezed my way through the parkas to one of Audeze's side tables. I did this because I spotted an old friend, the gentle Steve Deer, who's part of a little gang I hang with, which also includes Nelson Pass, Dave Slagle, and Jon Ver Halen of Refined Audio in Forest Park, Illinois. At the table, Steve and Dave Slagle showed me the latest prototype of the Nelson Pass–designed "Zen-Beast" electrostatic headphone amp, a scaled-down, 256-JFET version of the master's famous "Beast With 1000 JFETs" (footnote 1), which I mentioned in GD26.

This new version of the Zen-Beast uses Dave Slagle's high-nickel iron and features an unusual single-ended circuit. Steve Deer said, "The incoming analog source is buffered with NOS Toshiba JFETs to provide a low-impedance input to a step-up transformer for voltage gain. Each channel is then fed into a parallel array of 128 identical JFETs, which reads in the circuit as one JFET, grounded by a choke"—one of Dave's—"for current gain. The output of each JFET array is then fed into another step-up transformer along with a bias supply to drive the electrostatic headphones." Nelson Pass once told me, about the choke-biased, no-feedback Beast, that switching to the high-nickel, low-DCR chokes let him observe low-level music signals operating below—inside—the amplifier's noisefloor. Wild.

At AXPONA 2024, I heard the 1000-FET version with one of my favorite headphones ever, the Stax SR-007. The sound—especially on orchestral material—was scintillating and creamy smooth, presented in living color. George Jones and Nina Simone ripped my heart out through those 1000 JFETs and vintage Stax ear speakers.

Because I had stopped in Times Square and eaten a doughnut, I arrived 30 minutes after CanJam opened, and I couldn't get near Audeze's new CRBN2 electrostatic, which I am hoping to review. At 2pm and 5pm, there was still a queue, so I decided to get here before the doors open on Sunday and try again.

I was sad because Wendy Knowles, Focal's charming and masterful PR human, was down in Tampa (where the puddles weren't frozen) at the Florida International Audio Expo, showcasing her company's new Diva Utopia floorspeakers. God willing, I'll see her at AXPONA.

Speaking of Focal floorspeakers, I laugh because at every New York CanJam, one of the first people I run into (this time because he was standing near the Focal booth) is Stereophile Senior Contributing Editor Kal Rubinson, who famously prefers henges of floor speakers to leatherette muffins covering his ears. Nevertheless, Kal attends every year and listens, and I presume enjoys himself. Something tells me he knows it's a cool place for serious listeners to be.

As I snaked through the crowds flocking the one- and two-table booths, I began my study of this year's demographic, which did not much resemble any crowds I've seen at AXPONA or the Capital Audiofest. First off, gray-haired geezers like me were thin on the ground. There were more zoomers than boomers. I and my fuzzy cronies stood out in this crowd, where the majority of attendees were under 50. There were slews of folks in their 20s, some of which appeared to be on dates with their romantic partners. I spotted two teen-girl gangs flouncing about and two packs of gender-fluid types. Diversity ruled. I saw no whiny tire-kickers complaining about bad sound, no Hawaiian shirts, no bored children or frazzled dragalong wives. Everyone seemed stoked, like they had a plan for the day and were prepared to flash plastic.

So who were these people? For sure, there were swarms of podcast and YouTube bloggers, many of whom used cameras on sticks to part the crowd like blind people with canes. I didn't see many print prattlers—just me, Kal, and Alex Halberstadt. By the end of the day, it was obvious: Stereophile readers were as thin on the ground as geezers were. At AXPONA and Capital Audiofest, the majority of attendees read Stereophile and recognize me as someone who writes for it. Here, no one under the age of 60 called out my name from the crowd.

This, I concluded, describes New York City's CanJam demographic: young, well-educated, tech-savvy, culturally diverse, unmarried, unaware of print-based press, and moderately affluent.

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Footnote 1: See firstwatt.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/art_beast.pdf.