In the mid-2000s, I worked at a “white-shoe” law firm on Wall Street, ran with renegades, and fancied myself a writer. Fast-forward some 18 years. The firm, like many cash-flush NYC firms, has moved to midtown and I’ve moved on. Those renegades are now respected members and players in the hi-fi community. I still fancy myself a writer.
Back then, I made friends with a big-eared clique that would influence my future in hi-fi: audio writer Michael Lavorgna (currently editor at TwitteringMachines.com); NYU law professor Jules Coleman; former Stereophile deputy editor and current AudioQuest director of communications Stephen Mejias; record-industry veteran Andrew Klein; composer Dan Cooper; illustrator Jeff Wong; vacuum-coffee–machine collector and audiophile Margery Budoff, who regrettably passed in 2015; Tone Imports’ Jonathan Halpern; and DeVore Fidelity proprietor-designer John DeVore.
Members of that roving gang typically met at Steven Mishoe’s Greenwich Village hi-fi salon In Living Stereo, where new equipment from Art Audio, Cairn Audio, Conrad Johnson, Nottingham Analogue, Pathos Acoustics, Komuro, and Verity Audio was the cause of much fascination. ILS was the first US dealer for several important brands, including Leben, Shindo, and DeVore Fidelity.
A few years before, DeVore Fidelity had set up shop in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the 220-year-old, 225-acre industrial site along the Brooklyn waterfront owned since the early 1970s by the city of New York. Formerly the birthplace of the USS Arizona and USS Connecticut, in the very early 2000s the Navy Yard was a collapsed, wrecked, rancid ruin. I loved the corroding behemoth:
