stirlingtrayle
New member
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Hello. I've been listening to hi-fi systems since I was a little kid. My dad and uncle were rabid jazz fans and I grew up with a Sunday afternoon living room hi-fi jazz concert every week... My uncle had Voice of the Theater speakers. Wow, they were so cool. In college I started working at a hi-fi store in Eugene called Bradford's High Fidelity, and I was hooked for life. I think that was 1981, but memory fades over time... Moved on to work for Magnolia Hi-Fi in Seattle, then back to the SF Bay Area working for Doug Blackwell at dB Audio (perhaps some of the most fun I've had at any job), where I really cut my teeth setting up A LOT of turntables, tonearms, and cartridges. It was a real analog destination store. I remember setting up and/or working on over 30 SOTA turntables in one month. We sold Wilson Audio WATT, before any Puppy partner existed and I had some very lasting and important conversations with Dave Wilson. I remember him teaching me one of the most important lessons of my entire career; it was about real bass response. Dave had the WAMM system at his house and he demonstrated a solo flute recording, with and without the system's massive subwoofers. One moment you heard a perfect flute sound, the next moment you heard and felt a flute in the room. Who knew...? Ahh, those were the days. I moved on to Transparent Audio Marketing when they sold MIT, van den Hul, Well Tempered, and Response loudspeakers. Then on to be the corporate audio product trainer for The Good Guys (that was a chapter,..) then on to Sumiko, where I eventually became a co-owner with John Hunter and Donald Brody. A very strong technical mentor for me at Sumiko was David Fletcher, for whom I have a lot of respect and thanks. At Sumiko, I had the opportunity to learn from some great industry folks, like Franco Serblin, Peter Gansterer, Alaistair Robertson-Aikman, Bo Christensen, and a great team in Japan, where I helped to develop the Sumiko Blue Point Special, SHO, and Celebration cartridges. As a result of traveling around to dealers selling OCOS speaker cable, and trying to make great sound, John and I also devloped a pretty cool loudspeaker set-up process that has been effectively taught to hundreds, if not thousands of sales people around the country. I still use a derivative of that solid process today. I left Sumiko and imported T+A and Amphion loudspeakers, but our young and somewhat overly ambitious company didn't survive the 2008 economic downturn. Since then I was with Immedia where I worked with Allen Perkins selling, testing, and building Lyra and Spiral Groove, both world class products. And lastly with VANA, where I got to work with my old friends at Vienna Acoustics and Primare, as well as Chris Feickert, Daniel Brakemeir at Acoustical Systems, and the good folks at IsoTek. It's a fun industry to be a part of and I wouldn't trade working in it for the world. Which leads me to where I am today. The most fun I have, and what I'm best at, is in set-up and optimization of audio and theater systems. I'm just not a sales guy. Turntable and cartridge set-up, loudspeaker placement and fine tuning, equipment placement and isolation, room tuning, streaming systems, etc. is what I love doing. After over 30 years of doing this at a fairly high level within the industry, I've decided to establish a non-product oriented system optimization business directed to consumers, where the only agenda is about making what is already there work as well as possible, and not about having to buy something new (and expensive) in search of what's probably already there. But if you need or want something new, I can help you find what would work well with your system, and I will always encourage you to establish a relationship with and work with your local dealer. Anybody interested in what I'm doing is welcome to PM me anytime.
Thanks - Stirling Trayle
Thanks - Stirling Trayle
