They talk woofers and tweeters, electrostatic speakers and amorphous transformers.
And the audio freaks, thousands of them, are pouring into Denver this weekend for Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, the only audio convention in the nation geared toward consumers.
“It’s gone from a local thing to an international show,” says Brian Ackerman, the owner of Aaudio Imports in Parker. “We get press from around the world.”
The audio enthusiasts will fill 160 guest rooms in the Marriott Denver Tech Center and the Hyatt Regency Tech Center with their high-tech amplifiers and their 1,000-pound speakers. Other vendors will sell CDs and vinyl — old-fashioned records, which remain the gold standard for many audiophiles.
This, the fifth audio fest, came about thanks to a handful of Front Range “audiofools,” says Alan Stiefel, the owner of Red Rock Audio in Denver and one of the convention organizers.
And here they are, some of those very audiofools, sitting in the basement music room in Stiefel’s Cherry Creek townhouse and listening to Denver jazz singer Dianne Reeves.
It sounds like Reeves is standing in the middle of the room. But it’s a CD.
“Most people think we are crazy,” says Art Tedeschi, a mustachioed native of Youngstown, Ohio, who started the Colorado Audio Society in 1980. “When you see this” — he nods toward Stiefel’s shrine of audio equipment — “you say, ‘Wow, these guys are really into the hardware.’ But it’s really about the music.”
Well, OK. But it’s about the hardware too. Shiny black and silver machines are the suns around which these guys revolve.
“We have multiple rooms, like five rooms” dedicated to audio, says John Barnes, the gray-ponytailed, funky-bespectacled owner of Audio Unlimited in Denver. “My big system will push $600,000.”
“My system runs 2 4/7,” says Ackerman. “The lower level of my house is a showroom, 2,000 feet.”
The showroom, he added later, cost about $1.5 million.
Stiefel’s system involves a turntable with a 70-pound lead plate, an air pump in another room, and a series of tubes that deliver air from the pump to the turntable. It includes wood speakers his company makes that sell for $25,000 each and a pair of amplifiers topped with what look like clear light bulbs threaded with wires. The amplifiers resemble something from the set of “Young Frankenstein.”
Like Barnes — who confessed that just last month he bought about 1,600 record albums — Stiefel celebrates vinyl, and piled around the perimiter of the music room are LPs. But he also champions digital music and has made the “digital invasion” the theme of this year’s conference.
“If the audio people don’t embrace (digital) they will fall behind,” he says.
Dealers at the show will have a variety of high-end electronics that help transform CDs and MP3s — iPod-style music — from inferior to approaching the quality of vinyl, Stiefel says.
While high-end audio never can be described as cheap, you don’t need a house down payment to get started.
“I can sell you a system for $2,000 that sounds really nice,” says Barnes.
The convention will feature both approaches to high-end audio — the entry-level stuff and the gear made for CEOs (Barnes, for example, will be displaying speakers that sell for $180,000).
“We make this show so it appeals to people who love music,” says Barnes. “We try to show people what it can be like.”
For Stiefel, what it’s like is a massage. Or a great movie. Although it’s really not like either of them. It’s absorbing and meditative and relaxing and unique.
“Instead of coming home and having two scotches, I come down here for two hours and listen to music,” he says. “I think it has lengthened my life.”
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
