BRILLIANT CORNERS

What was old is new again

- BY ALEX HALBERSTADT

Back in the '90s, when I was young and marginally employed, one of the things I looked forward to most was going downstairs to my mailbox and finding a copy of Audiomart. The booklet arrived every two weeks, sometimes monthly, and was filled with classified ads for audio gear typeset in tiny, difficult-to-read print. In those pre-internet days, you needed a reference from a subscriber to sign up for Audiomart, which fostered a sense of community and safety, and if you wanted to respond to an ad, you had to call someone. Mostly I just enjoyed perusing the ads, but the prices for some of the vintage gear, particularly the less legendary stuff, were low enough that from time to time I could afford them.

Audiomart was published in Virginia's tobacco country by a former military intelligence operative named Walt Bender and his wife, Lennice Werth. In 1988, they wrote an article for The Absolute Sound that offered an overview of some of the best American and European vintage audio gear from the classic tube era. They described not only famous components from the likes of Marantz, McIntosh, Tannoy, and Western Electric but also more obscure stuff from Acrosound, Lee, Brook, Electro Voice, Pilot, Hadley, and McMurdo Silver. The article became a reference among vintage mavens, and someone was kind enough to share a photocopy with me that I still revisit from time to time. (Intrepid readers can find a pdf online.) Inspired by Bender and Werth, Joe Roberts's Sound Practices, and my own listening adventures, I began to realize that the unrestrained, colorful sound of the best vintage gear moved and fascinated me more than what I heard at the retail stores.

One of the classified ads I answered in