Stewart Marcantoni.
I met Stewart when he was moving from the east coast to Washington. He had an on-line store Weekend Environments and was driving out west with a minivan stuffed full of high end gear visiting customers along the way. Seemed like an interesting guy, I had an extra room, and know the area, and so for two weeks he stayed with us. Went house shopping during the day, and we tried all his great gear every evening and weekend.
This was around 1993, my listening room was new, and bare, but I had been at it a while and thought I was almost done. Ha. Every single thing Stewart brought in was not only clearly better than what I had, it cost less! At one point after changing amp, speaker cables, interconnects my wife came home and when I pressed play she literally jumped out of the chair, looked at me startled and said, "I thought it couldn’t sound any better. How does it sound so much better???!!!"
Stewart had the saying, it all starts at the wall. I knew wire was important but Stewart showed me just how important it really is. One time at his new home he played me what was then easily the best sound I ever heard. It was the same speakers and stuff I had heard before. But it was head and shoulders better. Then Stewart dropped the bomb, "There’s TWICE as much here in wire as components. Twice." This was, again, the 90’s. Imagine how chagrined I am to still be hearing people talk about putting maybe 10% into wire. When the best most experienced and accomplished audiophile dealer I ever knew proved to my ears: two times.
To give you guys some idea just how good Stewart was, Caelin Gabriel located Shunyata in Bremerton just to be close to Stewart. He brought his PowerSnakes prototypes over and compared with Stewart. (He brought some to my place one time too.) Stewart was at one time the highest selling Synergistic dealer in the country. When Ted Denney introduced his Active Shielding he did a demo at Weekend Environments with me and a couple other local audiophiles. It was Stewart who introduced me to the Talon Khorus speakers I used for 16 years. When I dabbled with building turntables it was Stewart who hooked me up and got me into the Talon Audio room as a vendor at CES.
Stewart taught me a lot about listening. He could hear things from anywhere in the room and at any volume level and with any music that most would have to calibrate and sit and strain and study with their favorite reference, over and over again, and still not be sure. He taught me about high end retail. He taught me about the music business. (And the car business- holy crap what he told me about that!) This is a long post, yet barely scratches the surface of the things I learned from Stewart Marcantoni.
This folks is a mentor. Stewart was independently wealthy from being a top SoCal car sales manager. He didn’t need the money from audio. He did it for the love of it. If I help a hundred audiophiles and write a million posts it will barely even begin to pay it back.
