Audio Amigo : When It Comes to What’s Best in the World of Hi-Fi, Trust Your Ear, Says Bill Low, Who Should Know

SAN CLEMENTE — A few years ago, I went through a spree of drinking a Canadian health elixir that was reputed to have a vibrant effect on one’s vitality. Maybe it did; I don’t know. All I did know was that after investing $34 a quart in it, I was sure as heck determined to feel a difference.

It claimed to be a proprietary blend of botanical riches, though the most plentiful ingredient listed was caramel coloring. Whenever I contacted the elixir reps to attempt to discern what minerals and such it contained, or how it supposedly worked in the body, the questions would get tossed back at me: “You are the measuring device. How do you feel?”

Maybe it’s a guy thing, but I don’t have time to figure out how I feel. Just hand me a printout and I’ll initial it.

The world of high-end audio gear used to be a great tweak-head refuge for guys: It was all electronics and physics, all quantifiable stuff you could regard in terms like watts and wow, not to mention flutter and the ever-popular total harmonic distortion. If something didn’t sound right to you, repairmen could “put it on the scope” and tell you that it did.

But somewhere in the last few years, high-end audio has gone so sensitive and touchy-feely you’d swear you were out in the woods scratchin’ fleas with Robert Bly.

“Hi-fi is a very strange business, because it’s strictly an emotional, sensual product,” says Bill Low, whose San Clemente company, AudioQuest, pursues the sensual with things like $150-per-foot silver speaker cable.

“What really is being bought is an experience , and a good stereo is like making sure the hot tub is the right temperature,” Low says. “It’s not like a home computer, where you check the stats and buy it. While there is a certain audiophile hobbyist market that I am personally not very sympathetic with, that does enjoy playing with the equipment, to me the more you do that, the harder it is to forget it, which is the whole point of hi-fi: It’s to have the music totally take over and the hi-fi equipment should disappear.”

That puts Low in a curious place, marketing-wise: If the ideal is to ignore your stereo, doesn’t 27-cent-a-foot lamp cord lend itself to being ignored as well, if not better, than a few feet of cable that costs more than a Mac computer?

Low could point to the indeed extremely high quality of his cables--which, along with the $150-a-foot wire that gets all the attention, also ranges down to humbler 85-cents-a-foot stuff--or to his resistance-welded connectors and special grades of silver or copper, with differences in grain structure one would need an electron microscope to fully appreciate. Some conservative elements in the hi-fi community say the possible differences in sound are so small as to be inconsequential to the human ear.

But that fleshy instrument, and the emotions attached to it, are what Low and his $6 million-a-year business (24 employees, two dogs and a cat named Buckethead) rely on. He says the ears can perceive differences that equipment hasn’t yet found ways of detecting.

In the world of ideals, all parts of the music recording and reproducing process add some distortion. What has been ignored, he says, is how much distortion is introduced by simple cables: At best they smear the audio image; at worst they add a gritty, fatiguing distortion that can make listeners think they just don’t like music anymore. He says the ears can hear those differences between wires, and other more esoteric factors, like which direction the cable has been wired to the amplifier and speakers, and how long new wire has had to “warm up.”

“The ears are the strong link in all this,” Low says. “It is the attempt to intellectualize emotion and sensuality, which the ears are hearing, that is the limitation. The more people think about the process, the farther they get away from experiencing it.”

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If Low sounds like he has his rap down, by the way, it may be because he has published his opinions in essays that read like the Playboy Philosophy of audio.

He often has been in salesroom situations where a couple will come in: one, he says, with “the burden of making an intelligent decision,” and the other not caring to know a whit about hi-fi.

“I could bring them in here and demo two cables, and the ‘naive’ ones always know which is better. They may not know the hi-fi language to say harsh and imaging, but they’re always dead on, because they were reacting to the music,” Low says. “Meanwhile, the person trying to make the intelligent decision is listening so closely he’s not hearing music. He’s trying to hear equipment. And the differences in the equipment are entirely irrelevant--just toys and garbage--if you’re not enjoying the music.”

Unlike many in his business, he doesn’t see a $10,000 investment as a necessary part of enjoying music.

“For some people all that takes is a boombox at the beach, and anything more is wasted because the music is already doing for them exactly what it is supposed to do. I envy those people.”

Low, rather, is the sort of person who has trouble sleeping in motels if he’s too near an ice machine. That sensitivity has been heightened by years in the high-end (he prefers the term “merit-based”) audio business. To hear him speak of it, an awareness of the particulars of hi-fi equipment is tantamount to humankind biting the apple of knowledge: It’s a long way back to the innocent garden of simply enjoying music.

Low, 41, a Massachusetts native, got his start in the early ‘70s while a student at Reed College in Portland, Ore. (like other Reed successes Steven Jobs and Ry Cooder, he never graduated), building and selling kit stereos. He moved to California and worked as a stereo manufacturer sales rep before opening his own appointment-only hi-fi store.

In the late ‘70s, he had his first speaker cable made--he refers to it now as “original recipe”--and was sufficiently struck by the difference in sound it made to pursue cable design full time. His business has been in Orange County 11 years, expanding from two industrial complex units to the eight he now occupies. Low says it was a significant, and less fun, sign of success when he and his employees had to start relying on intercoms, instead of shouting, to communicate with each other.

His other office is even more remote. A few years ago, Low bought a ski getaway near Vail. “I had to buy it, because the only way I could get away was if I had my own phone lines, computer and fax machine somewhere,” he said. In August, he and his family moved there from Newport Beach, and he now commutes to Orange County twice a month to do business.

The heart of his business, he says, is the listening room where he tries out his cables. Four-thousand albums (he still prefers vinyl) line one wall. His favorite listening includes Leo Kottke, Townes Van Zandt, the Grateful Dead and Jesse Winchester, though he hasn’t yet dumped his copy of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” either.

The company’s audio cartridges are designed by others, with his input, but the cables (in addition to speaker wires, he also makes the cables that connect components) are strictly Low’s babies. He’s arrived at them all by empirical means, trying different designs and seeing what his ears think of them. “When some people think of AudioQuest, they imagine a lab with guys in white coats,” he said. Instead, Low claims he got the one idea he bothered to patent while in the shower one morning.

AudioQuest has also been making a name for itself as a record label, with a small roster that ranges from contemporary jazz to local Delta-style bluesman Robert Lucas. The current issue of Pulse magazine has named Sam McLain’s “Give It Up For Love” on AudioQuest as blues album of the year, acing out B.B. King and several significantly dead bluesmen.

It was McLain’s album I listened to while sampling some of Low’s cable in the listening room. This was preceded by a barrage of admonishments by Low about how unamicable such A/B tests are to one’s ability to enjoy music.

For all that, I was still able to hear a difference between one short set of cables connecting the CD player and preamp and another. Both were his cables, but what turned out to be the less expensive one had more presence, but also sounded harsh (I’ve studied the terminology, see). Low claims that harshness had more to do with the newness of the cable than its quality, and that it will sound better after a week of use. I found myself longing for the days when wire was just wire.

He loaned me a midline $80 set of speaker cables, which I subjected to rigorous testing on my home system. Among the components used were two sets of swap-meet RSL speakers, one of which had an extra hole that turned out to have been created by a .22 slug I found rattling around inside it. My speaker wires were hand-stranded from some thick, military copper wire a friend had found lying in the street one day. Low’s loaner cables were shorter than mine, necessitating repositioning one speaker atop my couch to connect it. This may have influenced the audio imaging, not to mention bothering my cat.

My first test record was a Jonathan Richman album that I happened to know was recorded in a studio that smelled of cat poop, with a drum set held together with duct tape, factors that I felt might help me from thinking in “audiophile” mode. And I have to say, heard through Low’s wire, it sounded markedly better, some of that in tangible terms like clarity and depth and some more easily regarded in terms of simple pleasure, like the way real water tastes after drinking chlorinated tap water.

This also held true when listening to Bob Telson’s “The Warrior Ant,” a Brit import vinyl copy of Jimi Hendrix’s “Band of Gypsys” and Charles Manson’s “Lie” album. For better or worse, the latter experience was like having Chuck right there in your living room.

We ran one other test here in The Times offices, affixing either end of one of Low’s cables to a pair of 16-ounce plastic cups, taking care to observe the direction of the cable. Though I was predisposed to like the AudioQuest product by this point, repeated trials with a variety of signals--including “Hey!” and “What?”--proved it to be inferior on all counts when compared to standard household twine.

It is such distinctions that Low says are the customer’s responsibility.

“In a free society, to me the customer bears the ultimate blame or credit for what exists and gets bought, because it’s voluntary. The fact that so much bad stuff gets made is because it’s what people will buy. It’s his responsibility to make intelligent choices. But the very act of wanting to make an intelligent choice has the customer reaching for handles, for quick, easy answers, and it is lies that are most easily packaged.”

But where is the truth in audio? Low says it can be elusive. “All a hi-fidelity system should do is allow that music to touch you on demand, to get through to you more of the time. But the difference between a $2,000 CD player and a $25,000 one might matter less to someone than whether they’re hungry, what time of day it is, or where their biorhythm is.”