Solid State Power Amp Reviews

Sidebar 1: Rondi D'Agostino Talks With Jason Victor Serinus

"Once I thought I had the best hi-fi system that I could get. But then I would listen to a new product andbe shocked to hear something that I hadn't heard before. It always gave me a thrill, and I was always sorry that my old system didn't sound as good." Lest anyone think Rondi D'Agostino is even a little bit new to hi-fi, she clarified in our chat how long she'd been pursuing audiophile bliss. "I got into audio through my love of music," she told me. "I grew up in the '50s and '60s just outside of San Francisco in Sausalito, and I listened to many of the bands that played the Fillmore West and Avalon Ballroom. My mother went to UC Berkeley and was a psychiatric social worker, and my father was a founding member of the Longshoremen's Union in San Francisco. I had a boyfriend who owned a jazz club, so we'd do jazz a couple of times during the week and then hit the Fillmore and the Avalon on the weekends to see who was playing.

"One time my mother said she and my father were going to have dinner with their old friends, the Levinsons. My mother also taught part-time at Yale, where Mark's father was a psychologist. It was through Mark that I got into audio. Eventually, I arrived in NYC toward the end of 1969."

That was only six months before I returned to NYC, the city of my birth. As thoughts flashed back to the few months in 1970, when I was working nights at Gem (aka Gem's) Spa, at the corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark's Place, dispensing egg creams to drugged-out concertgoers who staggered down the block from the nearby Electric Circus at 2am in desperate need of a sugar fix, I was reminded how deeply audiophiles are connected by music, time, and place.

Rondi helps determine the ultimate sound of Krell components. "I listen for detail," she declared. "If there's more detail than I ever heard before, I think, 'that's great.' It's simplistic, but it's always how I listen to music and judge our new products."—JVS