ABOUT

Oswaldsmillaudio

What exactly is this?

This is a website about audio. And Oswald's Mill is a housemill. But this is not your usual audio website anymore than the Mill is your usual house.

The Mill

Ten years ago I was finishing my first feature film, living and working in New York City. I had spent years fixing up a big industrial loft on the Brooklyn waterfront, so I could live and shoot my film there (The Atrocity Exhibition, from the novel by J.G. Ballard. DVD available here) and was not contemplating another renovation project. I was broke from making the film. But then one day a friend in Pennsylvania showed me the derelict, overgrown, on the verge of ruins Mill that would dominate my life for the next ten years. Oswald's Mill.

It had sat empty for decades, and had been unoccupied for the better part of a century. The mill's machinery had been removed 50 years ago. It was the rarest of all structures, a true housemill. That means a mill in which a house had been built, from its inception, not as a later add on. It is the only one remaining in North America, and perhaps only 8 more of this type still exist in Switzerland and Bavaria, the area from which the mill's builders emigrated.

The Mill is four stories tall, and about 10,000 square feet, or 2500 square feet per floor (or 250 square meters.) It's 200 years old. If you are interested, you can take a tour or find more info here. We tackled it floor by floor, starting with the kitchen. I've always found that once you start cooking, people show up to help.

I already had a big loft in New York City, so you may be asking yourself, why restore a huge mill in the middle of nowhere?
Good question. I did not know the answer at the time, but I know it now.

The answer is, so that you can have Oswald''s Mill Tube and Speaker Tastings...

Audio. Today.

I think you can talk about two ways of pursuing audio today. One way is the mainstream of magazines and their online variants. This way is more about simply buying things than it is about sound. We all know that people today like buying things, and with audio, you are given a continuous excuse to buy new things (it's called upgrading) by the magazines and webzines whose very premise is to market an unending, monthly stream of continuously improving components, each one replacing and surpassing the next. One problem with this approach, which you can confirm yourself by visiting high end audio boutiques, or even better, visiting shows like CES in Las Vegas, is that even after spending $100,000 or more (easy to do) you are still in all likelihood going to end up with an unlistenable mess. You won't be able to figure out why. You bought the A list components, but it turns out sound is more than the sum of these parts. You will now be on an endless chase down the rabbit hole, looking for exotic cables, capacitor upgrades and cryogenic treatment of power cords, outlets and even circuit breakers (not kidding here, though I wish I was) to fix the "problem." The problem, of course, was that you actually believed that the magazines were giving you honest, well informed advice, not marketing the wares of their advertisers. Eventually you will either give up, convincing yourself you like what you have (it is, after all, rated A, B, C or whatever), or you enter neurosis.

The other way is entirely different. You will have to go Underground. The people who pursue the best possible sound have nothing to do with the way I describe above. They either build their own tube amplification, or they find or restore the best tube amplifiers of the past. The people on this path use highly efficient loudspeakers, usually in horns or as fullrange drivers, and these speakers are almost always vintage. The reason is simple- almost all speakers made today are awful. They have been designed for decades for a world of (cheap) solid state, high power amplification. If you were to tear open the most expensive speakers made today, Focal Grand Utopia, Wilson, etc, you would have nothing more than a pile of drivers which cost a few hundred dollars each, or even much less. If you look at the prices from the 1930's for professional RCA speakers in the RCA Museum and Archive section, you will realize just how expensive it was to make the loudspeakers of the past. Those speakers had to be very efficient, using field coil or Alnico permanent magnets, but because the tube amplifiers of that time had very limited power capacities, the voice coil gaps and dimensions generally were very close tolerances. Today's high efficiency pro sound drivers are made for running with high powered solid state amps, and their designs are compromised to ensure the drivers don't blow up when hit with great amounts of power. Loudspeakers can be likened to musical instruments. You cannot get a violin to put out the acoustic power of an electric guitar. This does not mean, by the way, that such vintage speakers cannot be played to more than adequate volumes for home listening. Many of these speakers were used in cinemas and stadiums- just not with cheap, multi thousand watt solid state amplifiers.

So, what does this all mean?

Most of what is in here is so old it's new, and vice versa.

The Tastings

The Oswaldsmill Tube and Speaker Tasting started off as a very small group of people who build tube electronics and loudspeakers, especially horn loaded loudspeakers, wanting to share their efforts with others of like mind. Each year the gathering grew larger, drawing more people and more gear. You can follow the progression as almost all the Tastings are archived here.

Unlike audio trade shows, the people who came were not trying to sell anything. They made the trek to be around other people, like themselves, who were exploring just how far you could go with tube amplfication, super high efficiency horn loudspeakers, and other areas of audio that had literally fallen off of the map of the audio mainstream. When I started restoring the ruin of Oswaldsmill ten years ago, Sound Practices was defunct, and all that remained was the JoeList. I thought that if I opened the doors to the Mill, and started cooking, people just might show up...

They did.

You can look at almost all the Tube & Speaker Tastings (except the first) which are archived here. There is also the beginning of an RCA Museum and Archive, dedicated solely to RCA's high fidelity audio products.

The Forum section was created to allow people to communicate with each other, especially people not present at the Tastings.

The Cogent section is devoted to Cogent True-To-Life Loudspeakers. I have become the East Coast representative for Cogent, and will be setting up a showroom in New York City later this year (2007) with a Cogent horn system.

The Products section reflects a change of status. I've decided to start representing some of the people involved in the Oswaldsmill Tasting event, who have begun making audio products that I really believe in. Everything that you will find in the Products section is something that I have been involved in, or have used myself, and feel deserves wider exposure.

The Mill System section has a few purposes. One is context. It's useful to know what someone is using if you want to understand where they are coming from in audio. More importantly, the building of total audio systems is rarely discussed, whilst websites dedicated to the various aspects of audio, i.e. analog playback, loudspeakers, digital, etc, have multiplied.