On the upper east side of Manhattan, known as the "Silk Stocking District", is a Hi-Fi store whose list of clients includes Cat Stevens, Marvin Hamlish, Isaac Stern and many other musical greats of the last thirty years. Under the direction of Michael Kakadelis, or Mike Kay as he is better known, Lyric Hi Fi has remained the world focus for the absolute best in audio equipment and a meeting place for musicians and music lovers alike who find their pleasure in the phenomenon called 'High End Audio'.

High End is as the name suggests, the extreme top end of the Hi Fi market; a 'designer range' of audio components which have been developed over the years by designers working independently from outside the commercial industry. What excites High End designers is the challenge of combining research into things electrical with a refined understanding of the art of music, its harmonic structure, inflections and ultimately its performance. The individual components, the speakers, turntables, amplifiers and even cables are designed to recreate sound flawlessly and often, by the nature of the challenge, the product design is allowed to continue to its ultimate potential without financial constraints. When the components are assembled, they are expertly tuned so that they themselves harmonise, enabling the listener to hear the delicate nuances of music in an almost lifelike manner, as though an orchestra is playing before you in your own 'listening environment'.

When Mike Kay arrived in America in 1958, there was virtually no such thing as High End. He had left his home town of Lesbos in Greece as a youth armed with a degree in electronic engineering and found work in Canada designing and installing audio systems.When his search took him further south, he met up with a fellow Greek in New York who encouraged him to stay in the Hi Fi market because it was escalating madly at the time. Kay began work at Lyric Hi Fi and despite having only a smattering of English, enjoyed quick and surprising success.

"The first time 1 was given a deposit Mike Kay for some work, 1 took the cheque for
$1,000 and when 1 showed my wife, I almost cried" Kay recalls. "Up to this
day, I can't understand why they believed in me. I did know my business and I could communicate my knowledge of electronics and music, even though my language was bad."

Mike Kay eventually took over the business just as a large influx of competitively priced Japanese equipment was forcing the less reliable American products out of the market. The 1960s was when Hi Fi became big business all over the world, and while most dealerships trained their salesmen in the art of selling, Kay was quietly and confidently preoccupied with providing his customers with a much higher level of musical quality. He selected his sales staff from either audiophile or musical backgrounds, and trained them to get the most from his systems, so that even if you had heard the same components in another store, at Lyric they would always sound better.

Not long after, Kay made the first of his discoveries which would establish himself at the top of the market and indeed set him up as a focus for the emergence of a whole new dimension of audio manufacturing. As he had to deal directly with the public, he also became the spokesman for a movement which dismissed all the talk of low distortion and highest power with the simple message: "Do not bother with specifications, listen to it. Does it sound real?"

"I heard that some kid in Connecticut (Mark Levinson) had made a preamplifier that made some sense for about $1,000 and nobody had heard of him," says Kay. "I asked for his number, called him and I went there, I found him sitting in the basement of his father's house fiddling with a preamp. He told me that he went to Harvard to study electronics and they had thrown him out. I bought the only preamp that he had and sold it in my store. The reaction from my customers was incredible because it was the first type of High End equipment in 1972. He didn't even know how to market it properly, so I helped him to decide a price and become a manufacturer."

Kay began to meet more of his future colleagues in a similar way.

"I first heard of Audio Research from a customer of mine and at that stage Bill Johnson was working for another company that had just incorporated an electronics division. Bill was doing modifications and retailing there. I told him that I had heard that he had some good equipment and that I wanted to be his dealer. After some time, he came to me and I became the epitome of Audio Research as far as tube equipment is concerned and the best there is as far as transistors with Mark Levinson.

"Harry Pearson had just started and he had just published the first magazine; he was told about me and came down to see me. He heard the Tympani speakers at my store and wrote in his magazine that the best he had ever heard the Tympani was at Lyric Hi Fi. That was good for a million bucks in sales! The first time that I met him I nearly threw him out of the store; he was obnoxious and didn't introduce himself. I had no idea who he was anyway. The system that I played for him was very primitive but it was far better than most of what was around.

Lyric became synonymous with the new High End market in New York and in the mid 70s onwards, there was no other stores like it. Whilst other dealers were interested in displaying inexpensive systems laden with futuristic looks and controls, Lyric spent $500,000 on refurbishments to create separate, sound absorbing rooms composed of floating platforms sandwiched with sound deadening, insulating materials to completely acoustically separate each listening room. These 'listening studios' became popular with many recording studios who would send many of the famous musicians and popular recordists of the day to meet with Kakadelis. A natural transfer of the Lyric philosophy to these performers would eventually inspire them to improve their recording quality.

"The studio sent Cat Stevens over because he needed a place where he could hear different speakers with different equipment and he used to spend many nights here listening and making notes about what he should change in terms of the equalization etc. He is one of the loveliest men I have ever met. He used to say that he didn't think he had a good voice, that he was just a poet, a dreamer ... He was very sick then and had advanced tuberculosis. He knew that if he continued to run around he would die. He is now a Moslem in London and he teaches the kids in their school about music and religion. It is a crime that he left the music scene because he could have contributed a lot more.

"C.B.S. sent Isaac Stern over to select a pair of speakers by Dalquist for his studio. I saw that he wasn't enjoying them and after a while, I accidently (supposedly) pressed a button for the Tympani speakers and he went wild. He loved them and we became friends after that. Actually he did me the honour of opening my store after we had done the renovations. Everyone who was anyone came around in those days and 1 was more than helpful to the music industry in this way. Almost all the musicians of the sixties and seventies passed by here' "

Today's Lyric Hi Fi has not changed very much from the halcyon days of the sixties and seventies. It mirrors the refinement that has occurred over the past 20 years in audio and caters to the more knowledgeable customer of today in the same way as to the music lover of yesteryear. Dealing with audiophiles from all over the world, it is not unusual for Kay to receive orders from wealthy shipping magnates in Greece, mineral tycoons in Brazil and even interested audiophiles from 'down under' in Australia. In all instances, Kay sends a technician with the systems to set them up, or for very unusual installations he travels with the system himself.

Whilst a few thousand dollars were entrance into the realm of High End -in the early seventies, today's systems can cost anything from $20,000 to as much as $250,000, the most expensive system that Lyric has sold to date.

"I have just finished a $250,000 system in a private theatre in upstate New York. With an architect and my knowledge of studio work, 1 designed the studio for this man. 1 used a pair of Infinity IRS speakers and a lot of strapped Mark Levinson amplifiers because it was a large room, about 36 by 55 feet and needed a lot of power to drive it."

Even though male customers predominate at Lyric, the rapport with a customer's wife can also influence a sale. "I usually try to get into the good grace of the wife. You know that you can sell a husband, but you must try to charm the wife into letting you into the house. Most of the time I succeed, but sometimes both myself and the husband have been kicked out."

For those who find it difficult to come to terms with parting with such large amounts purely for musical enjoyment, the oracle at Lyric relates Hi Fi to a very personal experience.
"Hi Fi is a private affair, unlike an expensive car which is a public one. The customer with the private studio bought a Degas for $1.2 million and it is a beautiful work. An exquisite painting is a private satisfaction you cannot share with anyone else. It is the same with music, you have to love music more than public acknowledgement. You do it to please yourself and nobody else"