Tours, Interviews and Book Reviews

SECRETS Visits The House of Sound NYC.

We take a visit to what, for all intents and purposes, is the ultimate Audio/Visual getaway space and “crash pad,” right in the heart of NYC.

Introduction

During my recent trip to New York City to cover the CanJAM NYC show along with our intrepid videographer, Taps Das, we were extended the opportunity to visit the extraordinary House of Sound NYC, the McIntosh Group’s very unique event/listening space located in the Chelsea district of Manhattan.

This location is the second iteration of this kind of exhibition/demonstration platform of The McIntosh Group’s various brands. Our own Piero Gabucci visited the first location, called “The World of McIntosh,” down in lower Manhattan back in 2018. It was very much a smashing success and the talk of many in our field. It not only was an inviting demonstration area for various McIntosh Group products, but it was also a very hip and chic event space for all sorts of parties and media events.

That original World of McIntosh location was retired during the COVID pandemic and many of us wondered if there would be a new flagship/spectacle space established once life returned to a semblance of normalcy. Well, we got our answer late last year when this new location was announced in September.

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Having never had a chance to visit the World of McIntosh before it retired, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect at The House of Sound NYC. What I found was an artfully appointed and tastefully decorated, multi-floor living space especially targeted to the audio and videophile. With a variety of music systems that ranged from the easily approachable to the outright “Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams” class. But everything was beautifully and functionally integrated into the living environment. Not even the most outrageous of the systems seemed out of place. And then, there was the 9.16.4 home theater that easily outclasses my local AMC multiplex!

This was my dream NYC house, and I didn’t want to leave!

Please check out the video below to get a sense of what the whole House of Sound NYC is all about.

We would like to thank David Mascioni and Ricardo Miranda for their time and effort in arranging this splendid visit.

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Carlo Lo Raso

A native of Toronto Canada, Carlo's interest in audio began at a young age when, unbeknownst to his mother, he started taking apart her numerous transistor radios to see how they worked. This desire for “knowledge through deconstruction” continued through to the family’s 8-track tape player, turntable, headphones, and speakers. Carlo subsequently spent a lot of time in his room. Toronto was a fertile ground for Hi-Fi in the 1970s and 80s and Carlo spent much of his wayward youth hanging out in downtown Toronto stereo shops, listening to all manner of gear and picking the brains of the various store owners. Through that formative experience, Carlo developed an appreciation for good music and good sound reproduction. Also, as a budding graphic artist, the aesthetic aspects of a given piece of gear became increasingly of interest to his eyes. It was at about that time as well that Carlo began purchasing “Audio Magazine” on a regular basis and came to appreciate, in particular, the writing and reviewing of the late Leonard Feldman. Later on, he was also influenced by the writing and observations of the staff at Sound and Vision Canada, helmed at the time by Alan Loft. Carlo graduated from Sheridan College with a degree in Classical Animation and was subsequently employed by Walt Disney Consumer Products for 10 years as a Character Artist and Art Director. Having become disenchanted with Los Angeles, he then decided to strike out on his own. Carlo started his own company and has been freelancing artwork, from his home studio, primarily for the toy and publishing industries since 2001. In 2013, on a bit of a lark, Carlo answered a “Call for Writers” ad from an AV website that he had been regularly reading for about 5 years called Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity. He had come to appreciate the website’s combination of subjective impressions along with the objective bench-testing available in several of the reviews. The “B-Team” must have been working that day because by some miracle he was hired as a writer and his first review for the site was published early in 2014. Carlo has been continually writing, editing, traveling, listening, and learning on the company’s behalf ever since. Carlo currently lives in Granville, Ohio with his wife, two sons, and a very old, but chill dachshund.