SOUND TRAVELS

We meet an audiophile who’s so fanatical that he built his speakers to be a part of his home, which we guess means he won’t ever be able to move!

Gerald built his speaker enclosures literally brick by brick. He built them into cabinets cemented onto the frame of an emporium-sized living room 20 years ago. “A room so large it could accommodate a basketball team,” a friend once joked. But it was no joke.

In each brick enclosure is a Klipsch speaker system fixed to the concrete slab that literally forms a part of his large house. He laboured for three long months on this life-long design, a design that he says “absolutely eliminates all resonances.” He even topped the brick cabinets with thick pieces of Jarrah wood from Western Australia to reinforce them.

He built his dream system using about 150 bricks per speaker and poured 40 years of audio knowledge into the Klipsch design. “My wife would be feeding me my dinner as I worked on them,” he said.

“These wonderful speakers have been here in my home for 20 years and will be here as long as the pyramids.”

The ports themselves are made of brick to produce a deep and controlled bass that extends to Hades (Cohen’s You Want It Darker sounded extraordinary). It’s not a kosher analogy for a spiritual tune, though Gerald got lucky when a good samaritan up the road intervened and offered him surplus bricks from his house extension.

“My neighbour had leftover solid bricks, not cavity cuts, and more than enough to build my project. They were just there, the right bricks, sitting on his lawn like nuggets, abandoned and waiting for me to build the speakers.” Gerald specially imported the 18” Klipsch bass drivers from the USA which deliver a staggering 98dB output for one watt at one metre. The standard Klipsch bass driver is only 15 inches.

I worked at the Motor Registration Branch in Carlton and banked my pay in the hi-fi shops not far away.

He also already had two Klipsch midrange drivers and tweeters which were highefficiency compression drivers. The midrange drivers fitted perfectly with the ElectroVoice horns (a wonderful, serendipitous match, he says) In addition, the Klipsch tweeters fitted snugly into the upper compartment.

According to Gerald, the flare of the Electro-Voice horn is unusually big and wide but it’s shallow; “so it doesn’t scream at you like some other horns”. If a horn is long, he says, it overtakes the bass and dominates the sound. Interestingly, he uses only the pre-out of an Accuphase E301 integrated amplifier, which he plugs into the input of a Luxman M-02 power amp. He says he experimented with other amp combinations but none produced greater dynamics than this combination.

The Klipsch/ElectroVoice speakers and their sensitivity of 98 dB/watt/m would require an amplifier with 10 times the power of the Luxman if his speakers had the sensitivity of ‘normal’ speakers (usually 86-90 dBSPL), according to co-interviewer, Paul Boon. “It’s a huge boost to perceived loudness,” he says, “hence the astonishing ‘cinema scale dynamics’.”

The system is completed with a vintage Ariston RD 11 turntable with a Fidelity Research FR 54 tonearm and Supex 900 Mk IV moving-coil cartridge, plus a Marantz SA11 SACD player.

PX: You had a room advantage over the ordinary audiophile, didn’t you?

G: Yes, I was an owner-builder. I could build my own sound room. I went from a poor migrant living in rented accommodation to building my own home and realising my dream of a music room... but I did have limitations. On one side I was limited by the fence line; on the other I was limited by finance (laughs). Having said that, my music room became a square, 8m x 8m, and therefore I installed acoustic tiles in the ceiling, velvet drapes, thick carpet etc to avoid the usual standing waves or echo reflections that other lively rooms have. Acoustically it is extremely well dampened (claps his hands). The room is everything; the Klipsch were tuned to it.

PX: So what led to your interest in hi fi in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), where you were born?

G: I brought my hi-fi habit with me from Ceylon in July 1966. I worked at the Motor Registration Branch in Carlton and banked my pay in the hi-fi shops not far away. If I didn’t have the money, I would borrow it to buy what I wanted. In fact, I took out finance and made decisions to spend big money in literally a matter of minutes; now I’m wiser it takes me a month to buy a washing machine.

PX: What drew you to the big Klipsch and JBL sound, before you actually owned them?

G: They had the tone and sound (scape) I desired, unlike most other speakers that sounded boxy. I loved them instantly but l was a bachelor living in a small rented flat with only one small spare room ... speakers like my original 3-metre long JBL Paragons barely fitted into that space. Later I bought all sorts of equipment and housed them at my friends’ places in anticipation of building my own sound room.

PX: Other than the bricked limitation of resonances, what other technical differences are there between the normal Klipsch system and your own design?

G: The drivers, as I mentioned. But most important of all, I geared the speakers and the whole system to the room. That was vital. [PX: Legendary amplifier designer, Demetris Backlavas (Australian Hi-Fi May/ June 2017. pp58), a critic of poorly tuned horn speakers, offered precisely the same analysis: the room is vital for horns to sound good.]

PX: You mentioned the resistors in the crossover being critical...?

G: The crossover is a modified one based on the JBL Paragon crossover I used to own. I’m now using a 20Ω resistor on the midrange driver, which tricks the crossover, tuned to 500Hz, so that it reads 20Ω plus 8Ω. When it reads 28Ω it changes the slope of the crossover for the midrange. The crossover point remains about the same but instead of rolling off at 12dB per octave, it slopes over at 7dB or 8dB per octave, and that pleases my ears. It brings the midrange lower than 500Hz, creeping down more gradually and brings out the depth in the voice and trumpets. It sounds richer.

PX: What types of music do you enjoy most, and which artists do you like most?

G: Music puts me into seventh heaven, especially with a good wine and comfy seat. Half the time I listen to the music, and the other half I think of how I can improve the sound. I even do that while listening to my desert island disc favourites like Hot August Night, and my Jim Reeves box set (laughs). Generally, I prefer music from earlier years— more mellow sounds, people like Acker Bilk, The Carpenters, Neil Diamond, The Seekers, and I even enjoy Johnny O’Keefe’s rock and roll music and 70s pop music.

PX: How do you see the way we will consume music in the future?

G: I am old-school and don’t have any interest in streaming. I have an iPad, that’s the only new medium I’ve updated to for practical purposes like emailing and so on.

PX: What motivated you to turn to movies with your big sound system?

G: The late president of the Melbourne Audio Club, Len Lugg, urged me to show movies because it was a big room. I bought a large motorised screen, and I later bought a 180”, 65 kg motorised screen with a

16×9 ratio. It’s absolutely movie standard and you can walk about without your shadow crossing the screen image. It took seven strong audiophile friends and six ladders to install that screen. The Epson 9300 projector has a long throw which suits the dimensions of the room.

PX: You are a master host who loves to entertain: your sandwiches are legendary.

G: I enjoy hosting and am proud to be considered a good host. I love to share my love of music with my long-time friends and others. It’s my hobby and it means a lot to me. Peter Xeni