Jim Austin

"'Happy' is our primary product," Elliot Fishkin, the proprietor of Innovative Audio, which is entering its 45th year of business, told visitors early Thursday evening, January 21. "We want you to be able to be connected to the music in profound ways." A small crowd was gathered in the lobby outside Innovative's newly renovated showrooms, in an expansive underground space on the east side of Manhattan, to hear amplifiers by VTL, cables by Transparent, and loudspeakers by Wilson Audio.

For years now, what I take to be a Brooklyn style has been prevalent among the local twentysomething crowd. The hipper restaurants are full of pretty young women and bearded men in plaid shirts who, on the one hand, seem ready for the woodlot but who, on the other hand, seem too skinny to lift a decent-size chainsaw. Likely as not, they arrived on single-speed racing bikes converted for commuter use. Nifty machines.