Last weekend, I visited an old friend who lives near Walden Pond of Henry Thoreau fame. I hadn’t visited him since before the pandemic. He had just finished adding a wing to his house that included a dedicated hi-fi listening room the size and shape of a small church. Below a cathedral ceiling, the sweet spot featured seating for no fewer than 30 guests. Besides serving as his main listening room—he has another one that’s smaller—it serves as a large residential parlor with a baby grand piano for use in chamber music performances, which feature prominently in his and his wife’s social calendar.
It was a high-SPL thrill to experience his towering, field-coiled RCA theater horns (see photo) powered by RCA 845 amplifiers. We listened to highlights from his collection of master tapes played back on his 30ips Studer deck and to black discs played on one of his Fairchild 750 record players. The snacks were fine, and the people were all smiles, full of good stories and kind-heartedness.
I doubt many audiophiles have experienced a personal home sound system that moved this much air or pressurized a room this big. I kept thinking, “Man oh man, these enormous bass horns make regular woofers sound like emphysemic mice.”
My friend’s high-ceilinged space was perfectly sized and shaped for his giant speakers. That’s because it was designed carefully by an acoustician and built for no other purpose than to show off his vintage horns at their best. That room was neither too dead nor too reverberant. The voices of people in conversation were unusually intelligible, even at some distance, even in a sea of sound with 110dB peaks.
On the way back to NYC, my BFF runnin’ buddy, who was driving, laughed, saying, “Herb, do you think objectivist audiophiles host listening parties like this?” I snickered.
