On Thursday December 3, In Living Stereo, the high-end audio store in Manhattan's East Village, hosted a party to celebrate the arrival of the Gibbon X, a new floorstanding, three-way loudspeaker from Brooklyn-based DeVore Fidelity.

In their seminal work on the subject of audio "Bluff your Way in Hi-Fi" (1987), Sue Hudson and John Crabbe stated that "the perfect speaker would have no mass and no dimensions. The perfect speaker does not exist, and if it did, it still wouldn't." One might add, as a corollary, that a speaker with zero dimensions would also have infinite cost. At least there seems to be a trend in that direction. The Wilson WATT and Celestion SL700—to use today's two most visible examples—may have attracted considerable attention because of their exceptional performance, but they have also attracted at least as much because of their price/size ratio. Even in a considerably "lower" price bracket, a "simple" two-way loudspeaker with a 6" or 7" woofer costing $1000–$2000/pair would, at one time, have had most audiophiles laughing themselves silly.

This place where dudes went to get away from their wives

On a Thursday night out at Chickie Wah Wah on Canal Street

Stereophile contributing editor John Swenson and I had the good fortune to stumble upon an LP collection the store had purchased and put out in the “new arrivals” section.