THIS ISSUE: The confounding glories of lossy Spotify, plus the Lejonklou streamer.
The Amtrak Empire service snakes north along the Hudson River before reaching Albany, where it pitches sharply to the west, eventually winding up in Niagara Falls. In November I rode it—the Amtrak Empire service, not Niagara Falls—from New York City to the town of Hudson, New York. On my left, the sun beat down on the river’s expanse while an occasional sailboat flashed by. Above the water, the undulating domes of the Catskills, with their fading yellow and red streaks, looked like the work of an unsuccessful colorist at a busy hair salon.
I was traveling upstate to visit Rob Kalin, a founder and former CEO of the online craft marketplace Etsy and proprietor of a newish speaker company called A for Ara. One unusual thing about Kalin’s venture is the speakers: They are multipleentry horns, or MEHs, which feed sound from several drivers into a single horn. Compared to conventional horn speakers, MEHs are said to offer superior phase behavior, directivity, and coherence. They are also seldom encountered in the wild. Based on the work of engineer Tom Danley, which is better known in pro audio, A for Ara speakers are meant for home use and look distinctly strange: With circular horns made of CNC-machined wooden “petals” perched on a stem-like base, they resemble enormous tulips.
The other unusual thing is Kalin himself. After attending more than a half-dozen colleges, often using fake IDs, he founded Etsy with two friends in his Brooklyn apartment in 2005. By the time Etsy’s board fired him six years later, the company’s annual revenue had topped $40 million.
Unmoored and looking for a new start, Kalin left New York City for the pastoral meadows of Catskill, New York, a town of about 11,000 on the west bank of the Hudson. There, he bought
