99% True by Paul McGowan

Author:Paul McGowan [Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2019-03-15T13:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

The fateful morning of our new product’s reckoning at Norm’s house started out with fog, as it often does along the Central California Coast. Inland heat from the state’s Central Valley coaxed the offshore moisture across the dunes to wet the Deergrass, Giant Wildrye, Valley Sedge, and Purple Needlegrass that colored the land and scented the air once the sun broke through and burned off the fog.

My nerves were all a jumble that morning, but Stan counseled calm as we hopped into his army-gray Volkswagen Beetle.

“We have to know how the preamp stacks up against the best there is. It’ll be what it’ll be,” he said, always the pragmatist.

I didn’t share his confidence. This first test of our new phono preamp was a make or break moment for me. Did we have a product to sell or not? I was too new to the idea of selling electronic boxes to audiophiles and hadn’t any way to judge whether this was just another wild hair scheme or a path worth following towards success. So far, my track record of business successes wasn’t all that good.

Norm lived in an off-the-shelf, three-bedroom, single-story tract house in an area west of Santa Maria called Tanglewood, at the edge of the fog, near the old Cabrillo Highway. His living room was a bit dark, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust as Stan and I entered the house. When they did, I saw speakers lined up along one wall—more speakers in one place than I’d imagined possible. They started at the floor and mounted upward like a temple to the audio gods.

The first thing I could identify was a pair of massive Cerwin-Vega subwoofers with 18-inch drivers, personally built for Norm by the owner of the company, Gene Czerwinski. On top of these beasts sat tall, wide, angled panels of midrange speaker drivers from a company called Janszen. These electrostatically controlled drivers looked nothing like speakers—they were more like window panes. Stacked atop the Janszens were the oddest-looking contraptions imaginable: Ionovac horn tweeters that produced a blue flame when music was played. They made sound by varying the air pressure with high-energy electrical plasma. It was the plasma that glowed blue.

Those were only the speakers. Driving them was a stack of glowing Audio Research tube amplifiers, a tube preamplifier, and a tube crossover to send the three frequency bandwidths to the appropriate speakers. Feeding all of that was a turntable whose cartridge was installed in a strange-looking tonearm that traced the groove in a straight line across the record surface, rather than the arc described by a standard pivoted tonearm. And of course, there were wires and cables everywhere. Norm had one other tweak to further the enjoyment of his hi-fi system, something I hadn’t seen since my Army days in Germany: a freezer full of hash that he wasn’t shy about sharing with fellow audiophiles.

Once powered up, tubes lit and the needle dropped in the groove: the opening bass notes floated free of the speakers, as if the instrument’s own amp and speakers were in the room.

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