For those of you having read my memoirs, 99% True, you're likely to remember my telling of the story with my first encounter with the incredible, Infinity IRSIII loudspeakers.
It's a long story so I won't bore you with it here, but briefly, the "S" in PS Audio, Stan Warren, and I travelled out to Sea Cliff New York to the home of TAS reviewer and publisher, Harry Pearson. Our mission was to wow Harry with our little phono preamplifier, but that never happened. In fact, so blown away with what we heard that summer's day, we never even removed the phono preamplifier from its box and went home with it.
Aside from being completely overwhelmed by the all Audio Research system along with a turntable and cartridge that probably cost as much as the net value of PS Audio at the time (which, frankly, wasn't saying much as those things go), what dropped our jaws to the floor were the loudspeakers.
1.2 tons of pure musical magic were they. Standing 7.5 feet tall, the four columns consisted of twin bass towers, each sporting six 12" woofers, and a pair of midrange treble wings, each with 32 tweeters and 12 planar midranges, all set in beautiful Brazilian rosewood.
When HP first turned on that system I can truthfully tell you it forever changed my life. To this day I have never had a bigger, more impressive single point experience. I mean, imagine going from what I was used to: a pair of Magneplanars with all PS gear—which sounded amazing—to this four column beast driven by the most expensive and exotic electronics on the planet.
Wow.
So, perhaps a decade or so ago, I decided it was time. I searched the planet for a pristine pair of the next step up from the IRSIII, which tuned out to be the IRSV. Those became my reference system and point of pride of years.
The IRS designer, my former partner and lifelong friend, Arnie Nudell, suspected this pair (from 1985to 1987) wasn't performing as new, so he encouraged us to rebuild from scratch the IRS crossover with parts he would have used had he built them today—which we did. Before Arnie passed, he personally tweaked and blessed those crossovers and declared them the finest pair of IRSV he had ever heard.
Not long after that, Chris Brunhaver, Bob Stadtherr, and I conspired to upgrade the one weak spot of the IRSV, its cheesy woofers (Arnie did not believe in investing customer's money into fancy woofers when a cheap high-distortion woofer's performance could be corrected with the servo system). Chris didn't agree with that notion and demonstrated to me that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, replacing those woofers with an expensive, low distortion, high-excursion version, powered with modern electronics and, without the crutch of a servo, sounded better. He was right. Our IRSV got all new woofers and the single mono power amp was replaced with twelve 700 watt amplifiers—one for each of the 12 woofers.
This became the state-of-the-art one-of-a-kind IRSV system.
Two years ago, when we launched the aspen series of loudspeakers, I retired this amazing system. Now, it is time to say goodbye to my old friend and find a new home for her.
If you, or someone you know, is interested in acquiring this system, and they can afford the $70K asking price, drop me a note. The system is ready to play, and I am hopeful we can find a good home.
Shipping is extra.
If you're interested, here's the original video of when we installed them years ago.
