In this episode of SoundStage Talks, SoundStage Australia’s editor-in-chief Edgar Kramer asks AudioQuest’s founder and CEO, Bill Low, about the act of becoming immersed in music, the events that led to the creation of AudioQuest, and AudioQuest’s role today as one of the world’s largest high-performance cable manufacturers.
Bill reflects on music’s ability to significantly impact individuals from childhood (as pure physical stimulation) into adolescence (through the curation of music as the soundtrack to one’s life) and, for a relatively small percentage of the population, into audiophilia — a pursuit of “the astonishing sensuality and presence of the music as enabled through a better hi-fi system.”
That last bit, of course, Bill points out, is not a requirement for immersion — something the performance audio industry too often forgets.
“I deeply regret,” he says, “that our industry refers to that goal as the reason to care and then shuts off the other 95 percent of the population from ever giving a damn about what we do because we sound like a cult speaking in tongues about how ‘the musicians are in the room with us.’
“No hi-fi sounds real,” Bill emphasizes. “So, when we tell people that the purpose of good hi-fi is to sound real, they have good reason to just laugh at us.”
Bill then reflects on his own irrepressible attraction not only to music but to purest sound itself: “Am I really just an aural-stimulation junkie,” he muses, “or is it about the music?”
He decides there’s no point in separating the two. Audiophile details — tone color, resolution, image specificity, etcetera — are all relevant to the extent that they facilitate emotional immersion.
When it comes to the job of “creating an opportunity for an individual to be controlled by the amazing power of music,” there has been little to no progress since the advent of the Sony Walkman, says Bill.
And when it comes to his own ability to “find his way in the dark,” to build a healthy business, to distinguish himself from others in the field, Bill explains: “Knowledge is both an enabler and a prison — when it’s misapplied... My saving grace as a cable designer was that I had no knowledge to misapply.”
Watch the entire episode below.
