Art Dudley

This month I am writing about five vintage loudspeakers you should hear before you die.

Why vintage? Because the best vintage gear offers an abundance of musically agreeable qualities that are missing from even the best contemporary gear.

I was recently reunited with an old friend from high school. My best friend from high school, in fact. Our families got together, everyone got along, and as the dust of conversation settled toward the rug of companionable silence, talk turned to work. And when the inevitable happened, and my old friend and his wife—classical-music lovers both—asked how much a person had to spend these days in order to get a good music system, I answered their question with a question—a question that, crazily enough, just popped into my head...

In the early 1980s, not long after I moved to New York City, I went shopping for a new pair of speakers. I already had a Rega Planar 3 turntable, an NAD 1020 preamp, and an Amber Series 70 amplifier (the second-most-powerful amp I've ever owned); what I now had in mind was to replace my aging EPI 100s with something bigger. Like them though I did, the EPIs were too tight and light for my new apartment, and I was certain I could find something with more bass and better scale—and still stay within my less-than-lavish budget.

Even at its humblest, a 300B is a fine thing. And at its best, this classic triode output tube can deliver some of the most intoxicating music playback imaginable. If tubes are liquor, the 300B is clearly absinthe. (The 2A3 is Cognac, the 45 is Armagnac, the F2a is Tequila, and the EL34 is vodka—which is to say, you can make almost anything out of an EL34, from the repulsive to the sublime.)

In spite of having one end of my listening room devoted entirely to record shelving, there are now 15 cartons of LPs and 78rpm records scattered throughout my house, said bounty enduring as a source of distress for The Management. That prompted me to set about building a new record cabinet and equipment support to handle the spillover. That prompted me to take a fresh look at how my records are catalogued. And that prompted me to cull from my collection every mono record I own, thinking I would keep them separate from the rest.

Oswalds Mill Audio, the Pennsylvania-based company that designs, manufactures, imports, and sells a range of vintage-inspired and mostly bespoke domestic playback gear, has opened a showroom in New York City. OMA Dumbo, named for its historic neighborhood (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), now occupies the entire top floor of an industrial building at 110 Bridge Street in Brooklyn, walkable from either the Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridge.

In last month's column we met May Belt, whose contributions to domestic audio—made alongside her husband, designer Peter W. Belt—all have to do with reflexive perception: conditions under which a listener's comprehension of music can be altered, given the presence or absence of certain nonsonic stimuli.