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I can already imagine some cunning marketing guy from the cable industry reading the title of this post and stealing it as a slogan for his company. I have no problem with that. Let scavengers do what scavengers do best. It’s hard to explain what I felt this morning. Russians have a saying: when a dog has nothing to do, it licks its testicles. What I did today was clearly my version of that—an unnecessary, self-indulgent exercise. The only problem is that I definitely do not have nothing to do. I’m insanely busy, working seven days a week and sometimes twenty hours a day.

I also do a lot of listening nowadays, mostly for work, and much of it is what I would call meta-listening. Then this morning I suddenly woke up and realized that I didn’t like my playback anymore. It had nothing to do with sound. Sonically, it was exactly where it needed to be. It was perfect. The problem was the room itself. The way everything was arranged forced me into a listening position that had become uncomfortable as a place to live. There was nothing pleasant to look at. The room felt ugly and awkward.

So I decided to completely reverse the current corner playback and move it into the place where Macondo used to be, which of course meant dismantling Macondo. That is an interesting psychological move. For my current kind of meta-listening, the corner system has performed surprisingly well—almost insultingly well, considering what I know about horns. It works far better than the normal logic of such a system would suggest. But for serious analytical listening, and certainly for traditional audiophile listening, Macondo was operating on another level entirely. What Macondo could do was an order of magnitude beyond what my present corner horns with Amp-X can do.

Amp-X themselves are not extraordinary amplifiers in the conventional audiophile sense. The funny thing is that what they do well seems to exist somewhere outside the normal categories by which audio equipment is judged, but that is another subject. The important point here is that I am dismantling Macondo. I am dismantling probably the best audio system I have ever built. I still believe that a six-channel system with dedicated amplification, dedicated drivers, and a multi-cell horn stack is one of the best possible topologies. In my case it produced genuinely sensational results.

A perfectly reasonable question would be: why not simply drive Macondo with twelve Amp-X amplifiers? That is actually something I would very much like to hear. But the problem is that what I have now is already enough for me. I do not want to spend another part of my life chasing the next version of Macondo. So I decided to disassemble it, not as a defeat, but almost as a way of protecting myself from temptation.

If somebody wanted to buy the entire Macondo and Melquiades assembly, I would consider selling it, although I am not actively looking for a buyer. It is still a piece of art to me, and who knows, perhaps one of my sons may want it someday. Macondo was a lifetime project. But my life is different now. I no longer see myself spending years refining that idea because I have found other things that interest me much more. So dismantling Macondo became, in a strange way, a declaration. I am putting something enormously important to me into the basement because something else has become more important.

I’m posting below my new playback in its completely raw state. I removed almost everything and put the speakers into their new position. What I’m thinking about now is a different kind of listening room, not really a listening room in the traditional sense. The basic idea came from something I saw more than twenty-five years ago in New York. I was visiting someone through a friend of a friend. The owner had a large Goto system, probably four- or five-way. I don’t remember how it was driven, and I remember having quite a few problems with the sound itself.

What I do remember very clearly was the room. Apparently his wife loved plants, and he loved audio. They had built this enormous horn installation across the wall, with large frames and drivers everywhere, but the entire thing was surrounded by plants, vines, and greenery. The loudspeakers almost disappeared. Much of the amplification and electronics was hidden away in another room. The result was incredibly organic and beautiful. I remember thinking that one day I wanted something like this, but I wanted to take the idea further.

I want to turn my listening room into a kind of stylized jungle. I want lots of plants. I want the corner speakers, electronics, cables, and machinery to disappear visually. I want structures for my cat to walk and climb on. I want the room itself to become a place where I simply enjoy living. And if I can integrate into that environment the level of playback I am already getting from the corner horns, I may never want to leave the room.

That is what I am designing now. Not really building yet—architecting. It is not a man cave in the conventional sense. I do not want a room whose purpose is to display toys, equipment, trophies, and accumulated possessions. I want a room built around experience rather than objects, a room that serves the way I actually live. For me, that requires more than Macondo-quality playback. It requires a different integration between sound and life. That is what I want this new installation to accomplish.

So how does it sound? The way I assembled it was almost surreal. I dismantled the crossovers, disconnected the drivers, moved everything, and then decided: fuck it. I know too much about audio to spend another hour measuring everything, calculating everything, aligning everything, and then pressing Play already knowing approximately what I am supposed to hear. That is how I used to do it. This time I decided to do something different.

No phase tester, no time-alignment measurements, no crossover calculations. I simply assembled the whole thing by ear. It took about two and a half hours. I soldered the crossovers while listening. I did not pay attention to wire colors. I did not know which polarity was supposedly correct. I listened until I could identify the phase relationships between drivers and channels, and I kept changing things until the system locked together. It worked. It sounds right. It sounds different from before, certainly, but the important things are still there: the structure, the density, the expressionism. Unquestionably.

There are still things I need to fix. The largest problem right now is the right side of the room. I need the system to behave as though that wall does not exist. Originally I thought I might physically close part of the space and leave only a normal doorway. Now I’m not sure that I want to do that. I may instead use the entire kitchen and the long corridor toward the smoking room as part of the acoustic space. The problem is that sound returning from the back of that space appears to arrive in opposite phase, and I can hear the cancellation.

The good news is that the new position integrates very nicely with the large attic subwoofer. Remarkably, after rotating the entire playback by 180 degrees, the relationship with the subwoofer still seems to work. So architecturally, the idea appears sound. Fine-tuning all the smaller details will probably take months. That does not bother me. I think the basic solution is staying.

My main fear before doing this was that I would lose too much by giving up Macondo’s position and structure. I did lose something, but what I lost appears manageable. I think I can recover most of it, and perhaps I may gain something else that matters more. I really have not listened seriously yet. After assembling everything I played one piece that I know extremely well. It behaved exactly as I needed it to behave. I heard a few problems immediately, and I already know roughly how to address them. Then I stopped and dictated this note.

For a moment I thought of calling it Macondo 27, but no. It is not Macondo anymore. I felt that the new playback needed its own name. I considered a few names connected with Altec and with the reversed orientation, but none of them felt right. I wanted a name that did not feel like the name of a machine or even necessarily a person. More like an agency, something you can refer to as a presence. Macondo worked that way for me. Melquiades worked that way too.

The name I have been using lately is Lucy Voice. You probably do not know yet what Lucy means. I am working very hard to make that clear. So let it be Lucy Voice. I rest my case.

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