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Newsletter: Fall 2003
Store
Plays to Audiophiles
(Reprinted from The Miami
Herald - Monday, August 2, 1999)
In high-end market, Hollywood
Sound hits right note
By Jana Soeldner Danger
Do you think turntables are as passé
as manual typewriters? That vinyl records are found only in
dusty attics?
Think again. Larry Weinstein, owner of Hollywood
Sound, sells new and used high-end audio components to music
lovers who are willing to invest a little more into their
sound systems - the kind of people who turn up their noses
at many of the systems sold in chain stores the same way a
wine connoisseur might turn up his or her nose at Burgundy
aged in a neighbor's garage. Hollywood Sound handles all types
of high-end equipment, but Weinstein has a special place in
his heart for customers who prefer the sounds made by analog
systems - turntables and needles that play vinyl records.
There are two kinds of people who listen
to music, Weinstein said. "One kind is listeners who
use music as a background for activities. The other kind is
the person who will sit in a certain spot between the two
speakers and listen intently. "Instead of turning on
the TV at night, they'll turn on their stereos, and sit and
listen as if they were watching TV - they truly get involved
in the music."
It is the second kind of listener who buys components from
Weinstein. The products he sells are made mainly for music
aficionados by smaller U.S. companies like Cary Audio, VPI
Industries and Eminent Technologies.
There are probably about 500 such manufacturers,
Weinstein estimated. They're small cottage industries who
design for hobbyists and serious music lovers," he said.
"Most people aren't even aware of the high-end market."
The price of a new high-end component may be five or six times
what a person would pay for something mainstream, Weinstein
said. Sos everal years ago, he began focusing on used equipment,
which now makes up about 80 percent of his sales. "It
used to be mostly new equipment I sold," he said. "But
I saw a trend: people were looking at my used rack and not
my new stuff."
He buys the used pieces mostly from private
owners who are upgrading or simply selling their equipment.
He also does service work and equipment modification. Customers
come through word of mouth and from ads he places on audio
related news groups on the Internet. About 50 percent of his
business is generated online, and comes from all over the
world. Most customers are college-educated professionals.
The business grew gradually. Weinstein has always enjoyed
music and loved listening to his parents' stereo system when
he was a child."When I was 15, I bought my own system
that was higher-end than theirs," he said.
From then on, it was an electronic love
affair. "I was fascinated with the equipment," he
said. "I would buy it for personal use, and eventually
I was buying so much I decided I should open a store."
He opened Hollywood Sound in December 1982 with an investment
of $10,000, mostly money he had earned over the years selling
equipment informally.
A new high-end component
may cost five or six times more than a mainstream one.
"There's been a resurgence in sales
in turntables and vinyl because analog sounds better,"
Weinstein said. "There's more information retrieval.
No matter what you do with digital, at some point it has to
come back to analog."
Weinstein compared digital music to taking
a piece of steak, grinding it into hamburger, and then pressing
it back into a steak. "Digital doesn't compare to analog,
and the real music lovers will go to the trouble of changing
the record and keeping it clean."
Frank Goldfarb, a consultant to the medical equipment industry
and a Hollywood Sound customer, said analog systems are worth
the extra work. "There's a small but fervent group of
us throughout the world who think vinyl sounds better than
CDs," he said. "But the systems need to be set up
properly rather than just plugged in, and [Weinstein] is an
expert at it."
The digital vs. analog question is ongoing,
said Jonathan Scull, senior editor at Stereophile magazine
in Sante Fe, N.M. "There's always been a core group out
there who realize what many consider to be the superiority
of vinyl," he said. "When you put together a good
system with a good table, arm and cartridge and mount it properly,
the sound can be very wonderful."
Some new digital formats can sound as
good as vinyl, Scull added. "You might say they're analog-sounding,"
he said.
The high-end equipment needed to produce the quality of sound
preferred by Weinstein's customers doesn't come cheap. New
turntables sold at Hollywood Sound range from about $300 to
as much as $10,000. "The cartridge alone might cost $3,000,"
Weinstein said.
Jeff Addis, an airline pilot who lives
in Sunrise, has been shopping at Hollywood Sound since 1990
and has bought thousands of dollars worth of equipment. He
has some CDs, but prefers to play his collection of vinyl
records on a turntable. "I'm an audiophile, and to my
ears, a good record on a good turntable sounds far more like
real music than a compact disc," Addis said. Weinstein
"is probably the only guy from Key West to Palm Beach
who has a good mix of new and used equipment that focuses
on two-channel sound."
The store also caters to those who prefer
tube electronics. "Those old vacuum tube electronics
that glow in the dark make incredible music," Weinstein
said. "It just sounds better than solid-state."
Hollywood's downtown redevelopment hasn't yet reached Weinstein's
location at 523 21st Ave., but it doesn't really matter: He
could do business just about anywhere, he said.
"People either know about this high-end stuff or they
don't, and people who are looking for new or used high-end
are going to search me out."
"Only about 1 percent of
the population cares about this kind of equipment."
For more information call 877-921-1408
or email larry@hwdsound.com.
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