new yorker

Date: 10.18.98

Publication: The New Yorker

Article: On and Off the Avenue: Semper Fi

These are the Dark Ages of hi-fi. Only a few lonely fanatics still huddle around their vinyl records and analog vacuum-tube amplifiers, preserving the old technology against the conquering digital barbarians. Even if you’ve thrown out your last LPs, hooking up your disk player to a tube amplifier can give those cold, savage CDs some real human warmth. Today’s mass-produced stereo equipment is designed to be tossed when the next new gimmick comes along. Tube amplification, by contrast, promises durability and sonority — and a link to the legacy of that old-fashioned concept called “high fidelity.”

Blackie Pagano’s got a lot of ink on him — from the word “lonesome” tattooed on his jugular to the image of the Virgin Guadeloupe inside a shapely 300B tube that decorates his right triceps. Pagano is a craftsman — he loves tinkering with capacitors and resistors as much as he loves the “ripe” stereo sound he searches for. Tubesville, his silver-painted storefront, at 153 Ludlow Street (529-7345), is a rock-and-roll emergency room. The guts of guitar amps litter the floor; huge rolls of wire, boxes of dead tubes, and weird testing devices line the shelves; and cathode-ray oscilloscopes waver and quiver. Pagano can explain the subtle differences in obscure vintage tubes with the avunicularity of a good elementary school science teacher. Doo-wop groups like the Five Satins can often be heard in the shop, since a-cappella music is a great test for his amps. “Our ears are so attuned to the bandwidth of the human voice,” he says, “that distortions are immediately obvious.”

Pagano built high-end home stereos, priced from $2,500 to $12,000, to suit his customers’ ideas and specifications. He experiments with tubes even more esoteric than the 300B and likens his design aesthetic to tricked-out hot rods with a military influence. His latest amplifier sits on the workbench: a burnished-steel chassis with chrome handles and bullet-shaped nuts is topped by an array of tubes and a power transformer that looks like a twenty-pound doughnut wrapped in wax paper. For the novice, Pagano doesn’t recommend entry-level analog items from specialty shops: “Find a Dynaco Stereo 70,” from the early sixties, he says— “and then bring it to me to fix up.”