LISTENING

Guns N’ Neuroses: The Life of a Used-Gear Specialist

- ART DUDLEY

During the years I lived in New York City and environs, I never learned my way around Brooklyn—something I now regret, given that borough's emergence as a hotbed of audio creativity: our industry’s Laurel Canyon, so to speak. Such gone-but-not-forgotten brands as Futterman and Fi were manufactured there, and today Brooklyn is home to DeVore Fidelity, Lamm Industries, Mytek Digital, Grado Labs, Ohm Acoustics, and Oswalds Mill Audio. The list of audio luminaries who call Brooklyn home includes Herb Reichert, John Atkinson, Steve Guttenberg, Fred Kaplan, and numberless others.

In 2012, Brooklyn’s Red Hook district became home to a different sort of audio company, one that filled a need so big that no one had actually recognized it before then: Stereobuyers, which is owned and operated by the youthful Adam Wexler, buys from audiophiles the gear they no longer want, freeing them up to buy something else—while at the same time offering for sale a great variety of used and vintage components, the likes of which we mortals could go all our lives without actually seeing.

On a rainy day in early March, during the sort of disorienting weather that leaves one wondering whether we’re heading away from winter or toward it, I took an early train from Albany to New York’s Penn Station, where Adam Wexler picked me up for the drive to the fine old Brooklyn waterfront warehouse that Stereobuyers shares with a letterpress printing company. The building is on a sizable wharf: If you step outside and look due east, you’ll be looking at the Brooklyn Ikea store; turn the other way and look to the northwest and you’ll get a clearer view of the Statue of Liberty than can be had from Battery Park.