SPIN DOCTOR

There once was an ugly duckling

-  MICHAEL TREI

Forty years ago, as I was starting out on my audio journey, I railed against the flashy mainstream audio gear of the day. To me less was more, and I tried to convince my friends that my small, austere British-made audio rig, including what my friends jokingly called my Lynn Swanndek turntable (after the Steelers wide receiver), really did sound much better than their big silvery Japanese stacks loaded up with shiny knobs, switches, and meters. Audio was all about the sound after all, and I wasn't interested in some dazzling visual display that had nothing to do with what I was hearing. I gravitated toward gear that wasn't flashy or fancy looking, feeling that meant that the effort and expense to create it went where it counted most, to the parts that made it sound great.

While I've mellowed a bit over the decades, my basic attitude hasn't changed that much. I have owned a lot of pedestrian-looking but brilliant-sounding hi-fi equipment. Highlights include my Julius Futterman H3aa mono OTL amplifiers, with their unpainted aluminum chassis and Dymo labelmaker stickers printed out by Julius himself to identify the various connections and tube sockets, and my Croft Audio Vitale preamp, with its laughable attempts at bling: gold-plated knobs and a faceplate of roughly finished wood.

First place in the ugly stakes, however, has to go to my Symdex Epsilon loudspeakers (although Herb Reichert's legendary Jamaican-flag-painted refrigerator speakers, which had 15" Altec 416 woofers cut into the main doors and Altec 604 drivers cut into the freezer, may have given them a run for their money). The Symdex was the first speaker created by future Snell and Revel designer Kevin Voecks. When new, these speakers looked a bit like a skinnier Vandersteen Model 2, with fabric-wrapped cabinets and wood end caps, but I modified them to within an inch of their lives, turning them into very likely the ugliest speakers ever created.