I worked on Water St. in the early ‘80s and spent about 18 years in and around Wall St. serving clients. If you travel East down Water St. toward the Brooklyn Bridge, it’s as if you are traveling back in time from a place where people move money to make money, to a place where people built things.
I’ve known Jeff Catalano, High Water Sound’s proprietor, for more than 15 years. Here’s something I wrote about his room at CES 2008 for 6moons, a room he shared with Lamm and Wilson:
…I’ve heard Wilson speakers a few times and while it seems ridiculous to offer an opinion on ’em — kinda like spitting into the ocean to make waves — I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the Wilson Maxx2s this time. I actually went back first thing the next day to just sit and listen some more.
I’d suggest, with complete respect to the various manufacturers, that Jeff Catalano had a lot to do with this enjoyment. Jeff is now four for four in terms of rooms at audio shows that I completely enjoyed. And a big reason I believe this to be the case is his respect for and love of music. I’d even go as far as to suggest that this exact same room put into the hands of a high-resolution spinning amusical meister would have left me cold. But that’s just me.
In the years since, I’ve always looked forward to hanging out in Jeff’s rooms at hifi shows because they promise a few things — great sound, great music, and great conversation. So you may be wondering why it took some 17 or so years for me to pay him a visit at High Water Sound and I don’t have a good answer. I don’t even have a bad answer except to say that sometimes our internal treadmill has us believing we can’t make time for a good time (see “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” by S. Freud).
Along for the ride was my friend, the writer Alex Halberstadt, who also pens reviews for Stereophile. When I tell people about Alex, I usually add that he’s “a real writer”, as his CV includes pieces for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, GQ, Travel + Leisure, Saveur, Food & Wine, New York Magazine, Grand Street, The Paris Review and two books; Lonely Avenue: the Unlikely Life and Times of Doc Pomus, and his recent memoir Young Heroes of the Soviet Union. So yes, a real writer. Alex and I share many likes (and dislikes) when it comes to hifi, music, art, and more which makes perfect sense seeing as I’m from NJ and Alex hails from Moscow.
Walking into Jeff’s place on Water St., it is immediately evident we are dealing with character. Everywhere your eyes travel, they are met with as assortment of curiosities including the structure that holds this ex-sail-making factory together. There’s also no missing or mistaking the massive Cessaro Liszt horn speakers flanking either side of the main room. I’ve read and heard a lot of people make declamatory statements about horn speakers along the lines of, “I don’t like horn speakers” which is very much like saying “I don’t like rap music” because people who make these kinds of black and white statements typically have little to no experience with the thing they’re decrying. Or to put it another way, if you think all horn speakers sound the same, you are a bigot.
A pair of TW-Acustic 300B SE Raven Mono Blocks pumped music’s life blood into the Liszt speakers, while a TW-Acustic RLS-100 Line Stage and RPS-100 Phono Stage ushered the music signal from one of two TW-Acustic turntables; the dual arm LS turntable with the solid copper platter and 3 motor option, TW Raven 9.5″ arm with Charisma Audio Signature Once cartridge, and TW Raven 12” tone arm with the Miyajima Labs Infinity Mono cartridge, and the Black Knight turntable with 2 TW 12” tone arms, one mounted with a Shun Mook Phono cartridge and the other with a Stein Music Aventurine 6 phono cartridge. Cables from Furutech, Harmonix, and Stein Music tied everything together while Furman Power and Vibex units fed the system with clean, stable power. Everything sat on racks from Silent Running Audio, and the room was treated with thousands of LPs, books, comfy furniture, and room treatment from Shun Mook and Stein Music.
As you can see, there were other audio treats all around from a carefully curated selection of gear that High Water Sound distributes in the US including Moscow’s S.A. Laboratory, Italy’s New Audio Frontiers, and UK’s Tron Electronics.
Once we settled in, Alex and I took up residence on the comfy couch and Jeff picked some music to play. A few moments in, Alex and I looked at each other, that kind of sidelong stare that needs no words to communicate something like, “Damn! This sounds f*cking amazing!” (at least that’s the rough translation of my sidelong stare). As the music continued and Alex and Jeff went about selecting the next piece of music and the next, I shared that my brain was somewhat scrambled, and it/I would need a little time to take in of all of this goodness. I remember my father-in-law, who lived through the Great Depression as a child in Newark running behind paving trucks to pick up the little balls of hot tar that rolled to the road’s edge to eat them like candy, saying “I’m not used to so much goodness” when he first entered our home.
Ahmad Jamal, Coltrane, Pat Martino (Live!), Miles, Etta James, Aretha and more mingled with fascinating stories of Jeff’s past as a musician (drummer), artist, DJ and more, and every record Jeff pulled from the shelves that line either side wall had a story to tell, as if the records themselves acted as storage devices for a life well lived.
Once I’d settled into the startling realness of Jeff’s system, and it took some real time, the music flowed into me as naturally as water — free flowing, powerful, delicate, warm, cold, and hot — taking over my senses as if I was on a great sailing ship with music keeping us afloat, guiding our journey. I’ve heard systems that sound like little factories where recorded music needs to be remade with great effort and the excursion causes some things to be missed in order to birth sound into the air in real time. This system startled with effortless fully formed beauty from a caress to a maelstrom.
We talked about the gear responsible for these magical moments, enough to begin to understand the salient points of design that help to contribute to the experience. Jeff has been in the business for decades, has spent more time than that in hifi and music (and art), and he talks about these music making machines without hyperbole, in matter of fact terms that are refreshingly devoid of shmaltz, boogiemen, and promises impossible to keep.
Truth be told, I avoided Water St. and its environs for years after I’d left my IT life behind, the place being overfilled with memories I’d rather not remember. Our day at High Water Sound, just one day, went a long way in burying that past, paving over troubled times with beautiful life-affirming music. As we walked out of 274 Water St. on our way to a fabulous meal, I felt a few feet of joy between my boots and the cobblestone streets.
