OSWALD MILL AUDIO

Prick Up Your Ears

Talk

By ROBERT SULLIVAN MARCH 28, 2012

House speakers From left: Jonathan Weiss's star model, the Imperia; the comparatively diminutive Monarch.CreditAdrian Gaut

To understand what Jonathan Weiss, the founder of Oswaldsmill Audio, is doing in the world of sound reproduction — or what the general public refers to as stereo systems — you have to forget what you know. Or what you think you know. That stack of little black boxes connected by wires in your living room? Sorry, but as far as Weiss is concerned, that equipment has more in common with your microwave than anything he plays music on. The tunes you hear when you are on the treadmill, ear buds lodged in your auditory canals? If that noise were a visual, it would be a bad Xerox. “Horrible,” Weiss says.

I have come to see and hear Weiss’s handiwork in his loft in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, which he also uses as a showroom. “This is the shape of our historical progress in the quality of sound reproduction,” he says, drawing a downward slope through the air as he moves toward a set of Imperias, his star speakers. Weiss is a collector of fine old gear and well-made tools, and a visitor who didn’t know his occupation could be forgiven for thinking that the Imperias are a pair of well-maintained Victorian rocket launchers, something salvaged from the set of “Doctor Who.”

“In the ’60s, home audio equipment was starting to go to hell,” Weiss continues, selecting vinyl LP’s to play. (Weiss also makes turntables and tube amplifiers because, frankly, if you have some of the best speakers in the world, what good are they if you are running your music through a cheap needle and lousy transistors?) “In the ’80s, things just literally fell off a cliff.” Or, as he states pointedly on the O.M.A. Web site, “People not only forgot what great sound reproduction sounded like, but at this point, most have never even heard it.”

I am about to hear it, through the Imperias, which go for $175,000 and are tall like basketball players, each speaker horn cut from solid Pennsylvania black walnut, polished to a vaguely midcentury West Coast finish. Weiss’s playlist includes “Smiley Smile,” by the Beach Boys, a mono recording of Bob Dylan, some Stravinsky conducted by Stravinsky from 1961 and Bobby McFerrin, live, for starters.

If you are into stats, then you will need to know that the range of the Imperia’s vertical array of conical horns is 20hz to 20khz, which covers the entire human audible spectrum. If you are into the history of sound, you will want to know that the Imperia’s midrange speaker uses a Cogent DS1428 field coil compression driver, which is modeled on a vintage RCA component, the MI-1428B. If you are a sound geek, you will go nuts over the sheer size of the rear-loaded subwoofer horn’s neodymium woofer. And even if neodymium is nothing to you, you may find it fascinating that Weiss’s system uses very little power to send the Stravinsky-conducted clarinet sweeping through the Dumbo loft as if it were a searchlight.

But regardless of how much you care about frequency response or energy, when you close your eyes, you don’t so much hear Nina Simone as understand her presence, and to hear Nina Simone so profoundly and beautifully makes you want to cry.

In a sense, Oswaldsmill Audio is a proprietor of locally sourced sound engineering — its products are homegrown, the result of Lehigh Valley craftsmanship. The smooth turntables are made from ancient Appalachian slate. The aluminum alloy in the horns is cast by a local foundry, the not-yet-dead industrial legacy of Bethlehem Steel. And the nearby Knoll furniture factory has guaranteed a supply of woodworkers with skills to make the speakers.

“The manufacturing capacity in the area is extremely special,” Weiss says. “Ultimately this has to do with harmonic resonance.”

Back in Dumbo, as the sun sets beyond the Manhattan Bridge and the Imperias continue to send music into the room, the range of Weiss’s conversation is as wide as the tonal distance from oboe to bass trombone. Corbijn had told me, “I think that Jonathan is a philosopher,” and it’s true: despite the high price of his spectacular equipment, Weiss directs the listener to a higher plane that’s cheap, or even free. “It’s a physical thing — sound and harmonics,” he says. “It’s a deeply spiritual thing. It’s not just playing your Jascha Heifetz and your ‘Dark Side of the Moon.’ There’s a whole other layer to this.” As he speaks, he carefully adjusts a stylus on a groove. “People listen to music constantly,” he says, “and because they do, they have lost the ability to listen.”