Corbijn, for the record, takes no credit for the AC1’s creation, just pleasure. About eight months later, Weiss arrived at Corbijn’s place in Amsterdam with two elegant, horn-topped wooden pyramids, which he had named the AC1. Weiss was producing his first speakers when, in 2007, the photographer and filmmaker Anton Corbijn requested a pair. “You go to school now maybe to learn acoustic engineering, and the idea that people in the 1930s could ever have known more than you know, that’s just too much.” “That’s such a huge prejudice, that technology only improves,” he says. Experts mingled with D.I.Y.-ers, RCA’s “ Radiotron Designer’s Handbook” as their field guide.įor Weiss, the crime of bad sound reproduction is rooted in an intellectual snobbery. Guests came with tone arms from Germany and Western Electric monitors from the 1940s. In 1997, he bought Oswald’s Mill, the 18th-century mill and house for which his company is named, in New Tripoli, Pa.Īs he and his wife, the photographer Cynthia van Elk, slowly rebuilt the mill’s looted and crumbling living area, Weiss hosted sound tastings - weeklong events that were potlucks of tube amps and preamps, mercury vapor rectifiers and wine.

(Ballard called the film “a poetic masterpiece.”) Meanwhile, Weiss fed a growing fascination with pre-World War II sound reproduction, setting up his expanding collection of vintage sound components in loft after loft.

Ballard’s experimental novel “The Atrocity Exhibition,” an exploration of media and psychology. Upon returning to New York, he taught himself filmmaking and eventually directed an adaptation of J. 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.Īfter graduating with a degree in international relations, Weiss filled a backpack with philosophy books and roamed Asia for two years. 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. Web site, “People not only forgot what great sound reproduction sounded like, but at this point, most have never even heard it.” (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. “In the ’60s, home audio equipment was starting to go to hell,” Weiss continues, selecting vinyl LP’s to play. 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.”

“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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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