Jump to content
IGNORED

I went to this rich old dude's house


marf

Recommended Posts

He gave me a pair of tannoy monitors. 

 

He's a life long audiophile hoarder. 

And a genius. He built a theater in his house. By himself. 3 walls of speakers monoliths. 

I couldn't believe my eyes, and ears. His cathedral style living room's walls were audiophile wallpaper. 

He had like 50 tube reel to reels. Mountains of tube amps. Boxes of valve mics. tube mixers. Ampex shit all over the place. A wall of vinyl like Ive never seen. 20k turntables. 

Nice guy. I wish I had a wad of cash in my hands today. 
 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A friend of mine who runs a moving company now used to do freelance jobs on the side when he was jsut getting started.  One of his regulars was a very rich, older audiophile type.  One day he called my friend to come over and help him move a pair of vintage, 1960s McIntosh monoblocks (that was about $80,000 of tube amp back then, around 10 years ago) into a closet because they "sounded bad" and he was replacing them with a Bose iPod dock that sounded "much better"

 

When my friend got there, the monoblocks were in a tiny, mirror-lined room the guy used for yoga.  The speakers were on the floor, against a wall, pointed directly across the narrow dimension of the room at mirrors.  Nothing would sound good there.

 

On the birhgt side, he got a pretty nice, 1980s Kyocera reciever out of it, on top of his normal fee. One of these IIRC.

 

 

 

 

EDIT: another time he helped the CEO of Genesee Brewing Company with some moving and was paid with $300 worth of frozen shrimp and two Playstation 2's (back when they were still current-generation).

 

 

 

A totally different friend of mine lives in rural Maine and there's an eccentric rich guy in town who has an insane guitar collection, and regularly bikes around town carrying an acoustic that has been appraised in the low 7 figures in a gig bag on his back.

 

 

The moral is you never know what will happen when you go to a rich old dude's house.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thebest I've seen wasn't a rich dude though, it was the building manager at a big rehearsal complex in the city where I lived in my 20s.  It was a big enough place that his position was live-in, so they had given him a reasonably large apartment in the basement.  He'd had the job since the early 80s, and had built a completely bizarre but amazing studio down there that was full of gear people had abandoned over the decades, so it had all sorts of obscure vintage synths and samplers that were considered worthless in the 90s.  I almost got him to sell me a working E-Mu EMAX (the rack version) for about $100 but I moved out of town before he decided.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I went to a rich guy's house once and it was filled with tacky shit.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I went to a rich guy's house once and it was filled with tacky shit.

 

 

That's what happened to me, too.  That's why I just  told other people's stories, mine weren't interesting. 

 

I went to a rich guy's house, his kids had rooms bigger than any apartment I've lived in and his basement had more than twice as many rooms as my parents' house.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ive never seen a speaker the size of a two story building until yesterday


 

 

 

an apartment like that in New York is a rich mans house

Link to comment
Share on other sites

^

What does he do with these behemoth speakers, how big is the room?

 

Maybe it's a part of the legendary Grateful Dead Wall Of Sound. I could easily see some collector being interested in that stuff.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

^

What does he do with these behemoth speakers, how big is the room?

 

Maybe it's a part of the legendary Grateful Dead Wall Of Sound. I could easily see some collector being interested in that stuff.

 

An interesting article about Owsley Stanley, the Wall Of Sound guy.

 

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/owsley-stanley-the-king-of-lsd-20110314

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I can see why the rich are right wing. They live in cloistered worlds. They don't interact with common people unless they work for them. So no empathy is built.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I can see why the rich are right wing. They live in cloistered worlds. They don't interact with common people unless they work for them. So no empathy is built.  

 

 

That and they learn not to trust anyone because the people who are around them tend to have agendas of their own.

 

I've known a few people over the years who were from really rich families, it was a miserable way to live. One of them is severely mentally ill now, the other spent most of her time playing WoW and watching porn but we haven't seen each other since I moved years ago so who knows now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.