Who Were Your Mentors

My menthors are Tom and Jef Nuyts : the creators of the Ilumnia Magister and - Vocalis.. This speaker are the first in the world with a conus that float on a magnetic field . ( Ilumnia. be ). Than I build my set around this speakers : cd-player Audio Note Cd two/2 , Moon Mind 2 ( streaming-driver). ; Metronome Technologie C6 (dac) ; Daniël Hertz M6L ( préamp) and the VAC phi 300.1 : what  a wonderful sound !!!

Paul Klipsch, I met him at our local Audio store in CT
explaining audio and hooking up a Khorn to a 9 v pocket radio 
📻 and and could not believe the output from a $7 pocket radio
in around  1978 from memory. I then bought my first Audiophile speakers the Klipsch Heresy unfinished for $795 I stained then and spent 2 weeks applying several coats of  French wax they were beautiful , with a Lafayette receiver and a Kenwood direct drive  turntable.,and A Luxman cassette  deck And AQ cables .
this was a years savings working my first full time job. It was the best sound system in my neighborhood ,that started my
Audiophile chronic addiction !!

Not striving to be an audiophile but always a lover of audio from my childhood exposure to music. My earliest dabble, if you will, was in the service which facilitated equipment purchases somewhat cheaply. Like others stationed in remote locations around the world, there was little more to do than get high, drink, and listen to music. That band of brothers association drove many of us to want to hear more from our music and now drives my desire to listen at a higher level of quality and accuracy. Fifty years later I’m still working that theme, on and off, and have expectations that more changes are yet to come.
Of late though, my compass is being guided by a friendship with Sunny Umrao. A chance acquaintance acquired through an online automotive enthusiasts forum. Because of the current pandemic I’ve not had the occasion to actually experience his sage advice first hand in a listening room, but we’ve engaged in countless hours of conversations of audio design and engineering philosophy that I was for the most part unaware of. He has also shown me that it is possible to improve my system’s sound quality without draining the pocketbook through purchase experimentation.

I’m probably not an "audiophile" yet by anyone’s standards here and this journey is surely incomplete. I continue to be amazed at what I can now hear from my own audio collection and sometimes find myself wiping a tear from the emotion of it.

Perhaps that is what really drives and excites me most.

Opening a high-end shop in 1973 and learning by LISTENING to the many, many products we carried--over 75 different manufacturers--crazy bookkeeping--and then spending my time LISTENING to everything when we closed the doors for the day.

I also happened to have a number of actual musical instruments that, while I am no musician, I could play well enough to HEAR what they sounded like live.  

Then, I continued to go to many concerts of ALL KINDS of music (except opera--there wasn't any down here back then, and frankly, I was not really interested in it enough to find it somewhere else--mea culpa.)

Anyway, I changed my opinions on almost everything by LISTENING and focusing on the specific sounds of instruments and learning to "separate" them in my head while doing so.  My time learning to play guitar iin college by listening to guitar parts "only" helped me with this.  It is not "scientific" any more than my playing my various instruments "live" was, but it helped.

Finally, I played in many bands when younger and worked with actual musicians who wanted a specific "sound" from their instruments on various songs, so I learned that all musical instruments could produce many different sounds.

Complicated, but the Mayorga Direct-to-Disc pressings were also helpful in all this.

SO, it is a combination of many elements that go into this hobby that result in "learning" to listen to music.

Finally, I taught a "Listening Skills" class at my job (large computer company) after I sold the store, and let me tell you, teaching engineers and programmers and managers to "listen" --especially to each other!--is much harder than determining if the drums were mic'ed correctly on a specific recording!  

We always said that "listening" is the hardest skill to master.  I believe today's world illustrates that better than anything I could post.

Cheers!

I love to explore… I was an Exploration Geologist for ten years… the guy out by himself finding the next property to explore. Later as a IT executive I implemented cutting edge systems to global corporations. So, no one. I love figuring out really complex problems then guiding others to follow.