In Part One (Issue 234), Roy Hall talked about his formative musical years, how he got into high-end audio, the story behind starting Music Hall, and more. We continue the interview here.
Roy Hall: This is maybe the 1990s. I'm in Las Vegas [at CES] and invited to a party. I'm sitting next to this guy from Austria, Heinz Lichtenegger, and we hit it off. Heinz and I just clicked, and at one point he says to me, “Would you like me to make you a turntable?”
So we brought in a turntable, it was just a basic Pro-Ject turntable, rebranded Music Hall. Sumiko went ballistic. Heinz said [to them], “Well, you've overpriced all your turntables. You're not doing turnover, and Roy's got the right price and he's beginning to sell it well.” So that [caused them to] restructure the [pricing of their] whole line and they started selling Pro-Ject properly. Sumiko started outselling me a little bit. [Heinz] kept me along because it kept them nervous. Their business improved dramatically, and my business improved dramatically. If you speak to Sumiko, if there's anyone left there [from that era], they'd probably have a different story. But this is as I remember it.
At one point, I got an e-mail from Heinz saying, “You’ve got to come to Austria to visit the factory. You’ve got to come up with a new turntable, a second one." So I go to the factory and the night before the meeting, I meet the man in charge, the manager of the factory, old Czech guy. This is not long after the [Berlin] Wall fell down. The factory was very cheap-looking and unsophisticated and not up to the European standard yet.
So I go to the factory and I bring a bottle of 18-year-old Macallan, which now I can't afford. Used to be $40. It's now $300. I gave him the bottle. I said “Look, I'm very pleased with the business we're doing. It's my favorite Scotch. I hope you enjoy.” He was thrilled, absolutely thrilled. I think giving a bottle of Scotch at that time was a big deal because it wasn't available [there].
Anyway, he said to me, “Do you like Slivovitz?” Slivovitz is plum brandy, you may know. When he saw my grimace, he said, “No, no, this is homemade stuff!” So the next morning I go for the meeting and he's there and the owner of the factory is there and Heinz is there and a couple of other people are there. They bring out this flask of Slivovitz, give everyone a glass, and they welcome me to the factory. And someone makes another toast, and another toast, and I stand up and make another toast, and it's 8:30 in the morning. There's a lovely expression from Glasgow that I use. I was legless. That's how drunk I was.
And then someone said, “OK, let's design a new turntable!”
And that's how the MMF 5.1 turntable was designed.
Basically I plagiarized the idea of a twin-platform suspension from a Revolver. I did a lot of plagiarizing in my life. But [I was] always honest about it. Never lied. There's not much original in turntable design. And over the years, I built up a business. Around about that time, after I had a couple of turntables, Mike Creek invited me to China. Shanghai, which was everything in my wildest dreams about exotic foreign places. Different things and different people and different attitudes. Had some fantastic meals there. Apparently the [Creek] distributor was a foodie.
Music Hall MMF 5.1 turntable.
Anyway, we went to the Shanghai International High-End Hi-Fi Show. I don't know if you've ever been to one. It’s just a cacophony of sound. It's usually a main area with all these little stands showing off and everyone's playing music and you can't hear yourself think. So I can only take so much of this. And I started wandering around the hotel. I saw that upstairs there were some rooms selling hi-fi, regular rooms like we have here. So I walk around and I pass a room and I hear music coming out of it and it stops me. I thought, “That sounds good.” I'm outside the room, so I go in and it's a couple of Chinese guys and they have an integrated amplifier, a turntable, and a pair of speakers.
They're playing classical music, and it just sounded together. So I asked them some questions. They [spoke] no English at all. So I got hold of, I think it was a maid who spoke some English [to translate]. They basically told me they had no international distribution, but if was interested in buying some of their integrated amps, [they’d] send them. They sent me a bunch of amps, and a CD player, which we called the CD25. These were the first Music Hall [components], made by Shanling. They were just literally off-the-shelf products out in China [with] my brand on it.
They started selling very well. At this point, Mike Creek got pissed off at me because I'm kind of competing against him. But I also realized that Mike Creek had bought Creek, and he had Epos [loudspeakers], and these were my two main lines. And if Mike Creek died, I would have no product [to sell]. I had to diversify.
A pair of original 1980s Epos ES-14 loudspeakers.
So I started bringing in my own Music Hall branded products. I'm not a designer, but would tell [Shanling] what I wanted. They were very good engineers. I discovered Shanling and was their first international customer, and resultingly, I became a sort of mascot to them, because I introduced them to the world and other people started using them.
So I got them to design products to my desire. I'd tell them what wattage I would like, what type of looks it should have, what sort of inputs it should have. Then they would make prototypes. I listened to them and changed the prototypes. Leland [Leard, now with Lone Mountain Audio] would help me with that. He always had a good ear, Leland. He’s a really good guy. And then we’d finalize it, and then the new Music Hall CD player, or the new Music Hall amplifier would come on the scene. We did very well with them.
A Music Hall CD25 CD player.
Frank Doris: I have to ask: what made you decide to sell Music Hall?
RH: I had no intentions of selling Music Hall. After Leland left, we had had a bit of a bust-up. My business by then was going down because I was getting too old to go on the road and we hadn't hired someone else. So I was speaking to [some of] the MoFi guys and said, “Would you be interested in distributing Music Hall for me? We'll have to make a deal where you get enough out of it and I would get less [money], but I’d be in charge of the company and you would do my marketing.” And we talked and talked and talked about it. And then one day I said, “Why don't you just buy the company?” So they made a consortium, which they called Turntables USA. They made me an offer. It was a lousy offer.
And I discussed it with my wife and she said, “Look, Roy, you're 77 years old and it's an opportunity to get out of the company and all the problems associated with it. Why don't you take it and retire? You can afford it.” They offered me a certain amount of money and bought my inventory. I thought about it and thought, “I'm never going to get another offer from anyone. No one's buying companies like mine.” And so I bit the bullet and I sold, and they got a bargain, though they think they overpaid. But you know something? I'm glad I sold it. I had done [Music Hall] almost 40 years. I'd been working since I was 15. I was 77, so not a bad idea to retire. And so I retired. Before the tariffs came. What good timing. That's basically it. And now I go to the hi-fi shows.
I miss the cash flow of Music Hall. But the other side of it is I managed to put enough aside to live at the same level [as previously]. I signed up at Queens College and [took] some English courses, which I plan to do [more of]. It's too easy to fritter away a day and do nothing. And as a person who had his own company for 40 years, there was no such thing as doing nothing. There was always something…
FD: Or a crisis or a problem.
RH: Business is [about] plugging holes. There's always something that goes wrong.
FD: You always got such consistently good sound at shows, and always from a modest setup. I know it was good equipment, and you had a lot of experience, but you always managed to get good-sounding rooms.
RH: You've kind of answered the question. Good-sounding equipment sounds good. And the reality of it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of the systems you hear don't sound good. The people who design them have never listened to music, have no f*cking idea about what good sound is. And it's the simplest thing in the world to see whether a system sounds good or not. I've got a standard way of doing it.
I walk to a room and you always see a bunch of guys staring at the hole between the speakers. Look at their toes and look at their fingers. If they've got movement, that's a good system. If they're standing there staring and no part of their body is moving, it's a bad system. And virtually all the demos I go to at the shows are like that. They just don't sound good. And they don't sound good because the initial equipment does not sound good, because whoever is making it doesn't have a reference point or doesn't know what he's doing.
I'm sorry, it's a very sad indictment over the industry, but why did our rooms always sound good? Because Creek always sounded good. Because Mike Creek's a great designer. When he brought out product, it was musical. I still have all this stuff at home I listen to. Fantastic stuff.
Epos was the same. Epos, the guys listened to music. Robin Marshall from Epos had a very good ear for music, and he tuned his speaker so that it was musical. So when you plugged it into a Music Hall amp and a turntable, you played music and it didn't matter what the room was. People [at shows would] say, “Well, it's a lousy room. [Our equipment will] sound better set up in your house.” No, a room is a room. Yes, some rooms are lousy, but I'll tell you something, good equipment in a lousy room will still sound good. Yes, if you put it in a better room, it'd sound better, but it won't sound bad.
Whereas bad equipment – I go to rooms and people have got [room] treatment all over the place. They've got panels, they've got this, they've got that. There's one thing that does help a bit, [which is] analyzing your room with a microphone and [software that] tunes [the sound] to the room. And that does work. I have to admit there's something to that, but we didn't have anything like that. We just played around and pulled the speakers forward or back until we hit the sweet spot. And when you hit the sweet spot, everyone has a smile on their face.
Sweet and simple: the Music Hall ha11.1 headphone amplifier (discontinued).
FD: I still get enthusiastic, and I hope to never lose that. I go to hi-fi shows and when I hear a great-sounding room, I want to sit there all day and I get excited by a new…
RH: Piece of gear. Exactly. That's it. That's it. You want to sit there all day, you want to hear another record, or you want to hear, “Can you play this for me?” Because it brings back memories and it's so good. But how often does that happen, Frank?
FD: Well, I think I'm a little bit more forgiving. I could joke and say it’s because of hearing loss! But the exceptional rooms just grab me. I walk into a room and if it grabs me it’s not even a thought process. If the room pulls me in, great. If it pushes me away, I won’t write it off, because I know how tough it can be to do a setup at an audio show.
RH: I've said this before. It's dead simple. The problem is, guys, we’ve got this bullsh*t about hi-fi, about what it should be. We've got preconceptions about cables and connectors, and we just read all this crap that's in all these magazines. It's confusing as hell. You walk past the room. It sounds good. Worth investigating. It doesn't sound good. Move on. Mike Creek said the most time you need to spend a hi-fi show is half a day. And it's true because I ignore a lot of stuff. I pop my nose in and if they're not playing music – it's nothing to do with the recording – if it's not catching me as music, I'm not interested.
FD: I've made the mistake of sitting down at a demo and thinking, oh boy, this just sounds bad. And then they put on another recording and it sounds fantastic. It wasn't the system; it was the recording. Why use a bad recording at an audio show?
RH: I have to tell you a story. We always let people bring in their own records. One day we're doing demos, I think we're in Chicago [at CES]. A woman comes in and she's writing for Stereophile. I can't remember her name. And she said, “Can I play my record here?” And I said, “Sure.” And she hands me the record. I look at it and say, “I'm sorry, we don't play ABBA in this room.” And she says to me, “What are you talking about? I love ABBA.” I said, “Yes, I'm pretty sure you do, but we don't play ABBA in this room, so please take it back.” And she said, “Why?” I said, “Because we have standards in this room and ABBA doesn't meet our standards. So get the f*ck out of here and take your lousy record with you.”
FD: But that's a dilemma, because you get endless complaints about people playing the same boring demo music over and over and over again. And, how are you going to get younger people and a wider audience to relate if they don't hear the music they like? I've often thought that exhibitors should set aside a listener hour for each day of the show. Have people come in and play whatever they want and just go for it.
RH: We’d usually let people play whatever they want. Sometimes it was weird. It's just that I don't like ABBA. It's wallpaper music. Now, a lot of people disagree with me. I spoke to a friend in the music business. He said, “You have no idea how hard it is to make catchy tunes, and ABBA's brilliant at it.” And I said, “Yeah, they have talent, but it's not for me. I think it's dumbing down music.”
RH: I don't know if she ever wrote about it. But I found that with magazine articles, it wasn't the end of the world if they said bad things about you. You got a good review, you got a bad review. Once we got a really lousy review in Stereophile. It was like, “Oh f*ck, this is the end.” And [then] some guy called me up and said, “I'd like to buy one of your products. You got such a good review in Stereophile, I had to buy it." And I thought, [either] he's an idiot or I'm an idiot.
FD: Back when I was working at The Absolute Sound, there was so much pressure because a review by Harry Pearson could make or break a product. How was your relationship with him?
RH: Interesting guy, Harry.
FD: Decades later, I ask people if they still want me to talk about my time at The Absolute Sound with Harry. Nobody ever says no.
RH: He's part of [audio] lore. Harry did have that power. And my attitude to journalism from the very beginning was, No, you do not have that power. I don't care if you give me a good review or a bad review. Give me a good review, go f*ck yourself. Give me a bad review, go f*ck yourself. And it paid off because people began to get scared to give me a bad review. I was very vocal and with Stereophile, especially with Sam Tellig. In fact, that was so instrumental in building up Music Hall, because we had a built-in audience for our gripes, and we went back and forth for years. Sam became a good friend of mine. He loved the challenge. So he would rile me up and then I would rile him up.
But what started this all was [Stereophile reviewer] Corey Greenberg and his review of the Revolver turntable. It was really bad. It was a really rotten review. And this was [in the] early days, and I was upset by having such a bad review. I was asked [to submit a] Manufacturer's Comment. In the review, he'd said the only thing he liked about the turntable was the record clamp that came with it, the Pig.
So my response was this: “I'm glad he liked the Pig. He should stick it in his ear.” And that was sensational, because no one had ever written a response like that. The responses to Stereophile or The Absolute Sound were [always], “Thank you, thank you, thank you for a wonderful review.” Or, “Why didn't you call me and tell me you were having problems? I would have come around and fixed it.” So my attitude was, stick it in your f*cking ear. And that set the tone for Music Hall [in reviews] for the whole 40 years of the company.
You see, reviewers…have no fiscal understanding of what's involved in bringing a product to market. So a guy's been working two years on a product. He gets it right. He finally brings it to market. And someone like your old boss [Harry Pearson] says, “Well, not so good.” Boom, two years, hundreds of thousands of dollars gone because one guy who's powerful can destroy it. That's why I never let reviewers have power over me. I realized this early on. There was a guy called Frank Rich. He wrote for The New York Times.
FD: The theater critic.
RH: He could close a show after the second night, because of his [bad] review. I always thought, all these poor people out of work because one guy didn't like it.
FD: I worked for The Absolute Sound when they were at the height of influence, and it was very stressful for me to be in between manufacturers and Harry. I know how much work the manufacturers put into their products. I was an electronics buyer, and I know what goes into a product and the testing and the R&D. Especially with something like a speaker, you have to voice it, and you try 20 different capacitors and so on. Then you have to make it to a price point and sell it and make a profit on it. And then the manufacturer sat there and had to swivel for three or four months while the reviewer passed judgment on it. Especially when it was Harry doing the review. I saw everything from people telling Harry to take a hike, in polite words, to seeing them kissing his ass because they wanted a good review. What a weird scene.
RH: So I learned early on about the power of reviewers. And the only way you can defeat the power of reviewers is to ridicule them, is to take away their power. And that's hopefully what I did with Music Hall. Now, the other side of it is, I got friendly with a lot of reviewers. The more they try to put you down, the more you become important.
Header image courtesy of Harris Fogel.
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