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In The Grooveby Laurie LaMountain Photography by Ethan McNerney I vividly remember my first phonograph, or record player as it were. Received as a Christmas present when I was around ten or eleven, it was a very basic blue and white box that opened flat and closed with a gold latch when not in use. I could play either 33 or 45 rpm records on it. A plastic disk inserted into the center of a 45 allowed it to adjust to the spindle. An arm reached across to stabilize the records until they were dropped, one at a time, onto the turntable below. I also remember the first record I bought with my own money. Linda Crozier and Bonnie Cipriano, classmates at Presumpscot Elementary School, and I scoured the record stacks at Zayre’s for the record that we would play over and over and over, much to our parents’ dismay. Linda and Bonnie both chose The Jackson 5 single “ABC” and I chose Santana’s “Evil Ways.” The Catholic school girl in me had a sense that it was not the most wholesome choice, but something about Carlos Santana’s guitar playing and the suggestively dark lyrics was thrilling. I wore that record out. Eventually, I progressed to LPs. A big commitment, considering the price and the fact that each contained an entire album of songs, some of which I was inevitably not as fond of as others. Almost all of my albums, with the exception of Abbey Road, are more scratched and worn on Side One. I’m pretty sure, though, that the first album I sprung for was Led Zeppelin’s Black Dog and the second was Alice Cooper’s School’s Out. The latter came with a pair of disposable pink panties wrapped around the record, though this was later discontinued as the paper panties were found to be flammable. In almost every case, with almost every album, I could tell you the order of the songs and knew most of the lyrics by heart. When CDs came into play in the 1980s, most of us, including me, abandoned our turntables and LPs, swearing that the sound quality was much better on CDs. Turns out, after a few decades of listening to digitized music in MP3 format, we’ve come to realize there’s a depth and purity in analog music that we’re sorely missing. Neil Young feels so strongly that MP3 is the low bar for music, he’s introduced a new high-definition digital music player called Pono that offers listeners studio-quality sound. He points out that the reason you can store a lot of MP3 on a device is because they really have very little information in them; that they are too much of a compromise. So, either you buy a Pono (more on that later) or you can dust off your LPs and buy a turntable to spin them on, which is what more and more people, in all age groups, are tending to do. A New York Times article written by Christopher Schuetze points out that “It is not only those who still pine for the golden age of vinyl who are buying, but also those too young to remember a time when recorded music was routinely stored on a physical medium.” Rich Favia, who owns Longplayer Stereo Center in Bridgton, is old enough to appreciate the merits of analog sound in general and vinyl in particular. A self-professed audiophile, Favia came to his love of sound early. He grew up in a house where there was always music playing. He recalls his father listening to classical music and opera on weekends and his mother listening to Julius LaRosa and Perry Como during the week. He also remembers taking radios apart and fixing them at a very young age. When he landed a job at a music store in New York in his twenties, he turned his passion into his livelihood. “I’m really lucky. This is play for me.” Favia established Longplayer Stereo in the Hudson Valley Region of New York State nearly thirty years ago. In 2005, he relocated the business to Maine, where he continues to sell high-performance audio components and home theater products from his showroom on Main Street. What’s great about Favia is that he understands all kinds of technology, which is invaluable when you’re as technologically challenged as I am. Years ago, I brought him a Bang& Olufsen turntable I’d bought from a friend for fifty bucks and he set me up with everything I needed to resurrect my vinyl collection— and, it was affordable. More importantly, he was still around when I couldn’t figure out which wire went to which port on my new NAD receiver and how to actually get sound out of my new speakers. These days, Favia has more and more customers coming through the door looking for turntables and he notes that they’re not age specific. There are a lot of older people out there who simply want to spin their old vinyl and a lot of young people who have discovered their parents’ collection of 1960s and ‘70s records and want to find a way to play them. Then there’s a group in between that’s very high-tech about everything and is looking for a turnable in order to transform their vinyl into digital format. They care less about the music and more about the technology behind it. Convenience is an essential feature of the components they choose to deliver their music. Whatever their preferences, Favia is committed to providing his customers-audio components that will interface with what they may already have, along with technical know-how and experience to make them all work together as a high-end sound system. Since there are only about a dozen high-end audio dealers in all of New England, that makes Bridgton an audiophile destination. “The audiophile can literally spend thousands of dollars on a turntable, but I always reflect back on the definition of high-end. High-end doesn’t have to mean high price, it just means good quality. You can get excellent quality and you don’t need to spend a million bucks. There’s a turntable behind you that’s made in Austria that costs $300. Just plug it into an existing audio system and it’s ready to play. It’s considered a high-end turntable but a budget price piece. Will you get better sound out of the next model or two up? Yeah, definitely, but everybody has a budget. At least it’s a place to start and it’s made well. Then you get into the audiophile series of turntables, like the VPIs over there, which to me are the best turntables you can buy; they can range from a thousand dollars up to forty or fifty-thousand dollars,” says Favia. People who appreciate analog sound are all about quality. They will go to any length to achieve pure sound, or “audio nirvana,” and for that reason are referred to as tweakers. In an article in JazzTimes magazine titled “Tweaks . . . and Other Audio Voodoo,” author Mike Quinn puts it this way, “Within the universe of high-end audio exists a subculture. Harry Pearson, editor-in-chief of The Absolute Sound, the high-end bible, calls it ‘tweakdom,’ populated by individuals who cannot leave well enough alone, tweaking their audio systems constantly with exotic cables, magic dots and other mysterious gadgets.” Favia considers himself a tweaker. When asked if he’s likely to sell Ponos at Longplayer Stereo, he points out that while it certainly produces better sound quality than MP3, it’s still digital, which, Young himself essentially admits, is a compromise. In another article written for JazzTimes, Mike Quinn quotes Peter Lederman, chief engineer of Soundsmith Corporation, a manufacturer of fine phono cartridges, regarding the digital dilemma: “It is the events lost between each sample, and the multiple errors that are introduced by attempting to digitally capture, decode and filter your way back to the original analog sound that makes CDs inferior in critical respects when compared with analog. It has been said that once you take filet mignon and grind it up into hamburger, you can never find a chef that will make it taste like filet again.” While Favia realizes the scope of the digital industry and is not about to ignore it in his store, his take on it is this: “An analog signal is a continuous flow of energy. A digital signal is not. It’s bits and pieces of it; it’s fragments. You can fragment this thing into the smallest amount but there’s still spaces between everything. There are arguments out there that the brain can’t perceive that, well, a lot of people can. It’s subtle but it’s there.” Those people are the ones Favia loves to see walk through the door of Longplayer Stereo.
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