The inauguration of what may be the best record player in the world took place in Brooklyn, New York, but started at an old clothing factory in rural Pennsylvania.
“This is the most sensual fun you will have that will not leave you on a 12-step program,” Johnathan Weiss told Jeff Glor of CBS News.
Weiss is the founder and CEO of Oswald Mills Audio and Fleetwood Sound. After graduating in international relations at Princeton, he pursued a career as a documentary filmmaker until he realized that his true passion was solid.
He set out on a mission to build the best sound amplification system. Everything is done by locals, using local products.
“The slate is from here. The wood is from here. Our welding shop is right there. The people who do waterjet cutting, this is cut on a five-axis waterjet machine by the Mennonites. You are sitting here in a treasure trove of materials and know-how and human skills, “said Weiss.
The quality of the work is almost as impressive as the sound it produces, and it is necessary. Weiss said that in the past few decades, the quality of music recorded around the world has entered a very bleak place.
“The problem is that, in technology, the idea that things get better, cheaper, smaller – it works with things like computers, but it doesn’t work with sound. Because the sound waves are our size. What we hear is actually our size. And you want to miniaturize it? You blew it, “he said.
When most of us listen to music today, we listen to MP3s. Introduced in 1993, they took off with Napster and became ubiquitous. But Weiss said 95% of the sound was gone on MP3s.
“Can you imagine watching a television set where 95% of the pixels are dark? You wouldn’t watch it at all. But your brain and ears are much more sophisticated with the sound,” he said.
Weiss said that MP3s compress the sound to make room for more music. “The algorithms for MP3s, the reason you can have 10,000 songs on an iPod is because 95% of the information in the song is gone. It’s compressed. It doesn’t come back from the other side,” he said.
That’s where the giant cone-shaped horns come in. Weiss said that their size and shape make them the best way to amplify and direct the sound without any distortion.
The idea is not new. The design dates back to some of the first phonographs, which required a way to amplify sound without electricity. These original players used wax cylinders, which later evolved into vinyl records. Many argue that it is the purest way to listen to recorded music, and people seem to be getting the message.
Last year, for the first time since 1986, sales of vinyl CDs surpassed. Turntables can cost between hundreds of dollars and hundreds of thousands of dollars. The new player that Weiss revealed costs $ 300,000.
He said he hates talking about price because “we are in a culture where price is the product. Where people say, ‘It is a thing of X hundreds of thousands of dollars’, and that is what it is. I don’t want this for this. I want people to see this and say, ‘Wow. This is beautiful. I wonder what that sounds like. ‘”
Fleetwood Sound is intended to be a lower cost option for the Oswald Mills brand. For Weiss, music is a spiritual experience in which he hopes the next generation will be willing to invest.
“What art is more intrinsic to the human condition than music? Everyone listens to music and makes music anywhere. But what we’ve done because of our culture is that we’ve reduced music to something that is really just a pale shadow of that is. was, “he said.
“What do you want your musical legacy to be?” Glor asked.
“I just want people to understand what is possible,” said Weiss.