Ariel Bitran

Stephen Mejias: On Thursday, April 12, Stereophile’s editorial assistant, Ariel Bitran, and I left the office at around 5pm, walked over to Grand Central, hopped on the 6 train, and made our way to New York City’s Lyric Hi-Fi.

As Ariel discussed last week, Lyric was one of two premier NYC dealers—the other was Stereo Exchange—that opted against participating in the New York Audio & AV Show, and instead held their own events.

Because both Lyric and Stereo Exchange are successful operations, run by smart people, we figured they must have good reasons for doing things their own way. But, even as the weekend approached, those reasons weren’t fully clear. Were financial obstacles impossible to overcome? Were issues of logistics too much of a burden? Had there been some sort of communication breakdown between the dealers and the show’s organizers? Did it simply make little sense for Lyric and Stereo Exchange to participate, or were they just being hard-nosed, stubborn, elitist?

Perhaps we would find some answers inside.

Prior to the onset of the Chester Group’s New York Audio & AV Show, there had been some controversy in regards to big-time local dealers Stereo Exchange and Lyric hosting their own events the weekend of the show. These events brought in big brands such as Totem, McIntosh, B&W, and Audio Research, who would be presenting exclusively at their stores. Would these dealer events keep participants away from the New York Audio & AV Show? How would these coinciding events affect one another? Were these signs that the show organizers had not done the work necessary to motivate exhibitors to participate in the New York show?

In the LessLoss Audio room, a gorgeous couple of Kaiser Vivace loudspeakers painted in a Lamborghini Orange finish ($42,500 in painted semi-gloss, add $2500 for the Lambo paint job) paired with electronics from Beyond Frontiers Audio, including their Tulip Tube DAC converter, which runs in a dual mono state with 2 Burr Brown chips, and the Tulip Stereo Integrated amplifier. Tulip, in the designer’s former country of Yugoslavia, is a friendly name for a “good old guy”. Cabling and “ambient field conditioning” in this room were provided by LessLoss, who offered their Anchorwave cables and Blackbody ambient field conditioner. The Blackbody claims to “enhance audio playback quality by modifying the interaction of your gear’s circuitry with the ambient electromagnetic field.”

I got to know Steve, head of VAS Audio over in New Jersey, after he picked up the Cayin SP-10a that Bob Reina reviewed in our April 2012 issue from the Stereophile Manhattan office. Steve invited me to the back of the VPI/VAS Audio Room to share a cocktail and a cookie where we discussed the hi-fi show business and our audiophile neighbors in Brooklyn and New Jersey. Steve's original home, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, places him in close proximity to some Stereophile staff, past and present, and his co-exhibitor VPI, led by the Weisfeld family, lives next door to him in Jersey. Hi-fi, like cookies, is more fun when shared with neighbors.