Alta Audio Alyssa
It was a “Wow!” audio moment I’ll never forget. It happened just after Ladies Who Lunch, our regular Friday afternoon lunch-n-chat for audio poobahs at the Grand Sichuan restaurant in Chelsea. It was dark at 4 o’clock, and the first snow of winter looked enchanting under the 24th Street streetlamps. Audiophiliac Steve Guttenberg and I were accompanying our turntable setter–upper friend Michael Trei to Bob Visintainer’s Rhapsody Music and Cinema, where Trei was scheduled to install a Lyra Etna SL cartridge on a TechDAS Air Force III turntable. I tagged along to chatter with Bob and listen with Steve to Alta Audio’s tall, openbaffle Titanium Hestia loudspeakers.1 Rumor had it that this was a happening system.2
Michael shushed us as he dropped the Lyra’s exposed needle on Duke Ellington’s “C Jam Blues” from the album Blues in Orbit, recorded in 1959 not far away at Columbia’s 30th Street studio (LP, Columbia CS 8241/Analogue Productions AAPJ 056). I have heard this recording on countless, very expensive stereos, but none of them generated such dense, full-size musicians in such eerily specific locations.
I sat frozen in the leather La-Z-Boy gawking at the holographic spectacle. At one point, I got up and walked around to see if I could stand in the soundstage and maybe touch a musician.
What I noticed as much as the life-sized musicians was how easily I could sense the boundaries of that 30th Street studio. This system specialized in nuanced, lifelike dynamics and low-level detail recovery. In that singular moment, with that specific LP, those tall, open-baffle speakers, and those Zesto Audio tubed amplifiers, I was 100% transfixed. I!”
