LATEST ADDITIONS

One of my favorite things about the audio biz is that anyone with a dream and a garage can get in. Accumulate the knowledge to design a speaker or an amp, gather the tools and materials to build it, muster the courage and social skills to sell it, and you’ve got yourself an audio company! (Unfortunately, a few would-be entrepreneurs skip that all-important first step.)

There’s no better current example of this phenomenon than John DeVore, founder, president, and chief designer of DeVore Fidelity. DeVore was a musician and high-end stereo salesman in new York City who’d nurtured a hobby of building his own speakers. When he finally got to the point where he was satisfied with his designs, he started to produce and sell them. His company now builds speakers in the old Brooklyn Navy Yard, which has become a hotbed of artisanal manufacturing.

Control. Having personally installed hundreds of systems in people’s homes, I can definitively say that at the end of the day, that’s what it all boils down to. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a system for a dedicated theater, a bedroom, or even a simple home theater in a box. Having the ability to easily control that system is what sets the good apart from the bad.

It’s nice to feel that the music can be improved, and in the case of Aqualung [which saw a 40th anniversary box-set reissue in 2011 with new stereo and 5.1 mixes by Steven Wilson], that wasn’t difficult because it wasn’t a very good recording.

"One size fits all" surround is dying. It's time for us all to consider a whole new dimension. First, a parallel to impart from the annals of tech history. In the earliest days of photography, the emulsions and lenses were extremely "slow." Even in bright sunlight, a plate might require hours of exposure time. As technology improved, exposure times decreased to a minute or so.