"I make 2,000 tweeters and 2,000 mid-range speakers every year by myself," he said. "I make 500 woofers and hundreds of amps every year -- just one man!"
The only thing Hong does not make, he claims, is source equipment such as CD players or tuners. He brings out a piece of speaker paper from his travel case and places it on a table.
"I make this paper myself," he says.
He takes out the small driver of a mid-range speaker and its thin tin covering, too.
"I make this myself," he says.
He places his hand on the meter-wide horn of the woofer that fills most of the room. He made that, too.
"Hi-end audio isn't about high-technology," Hong said. "It's about design and craftsmanship. `Sun Yat-sen said: things aren't expensive, skill is expensive. (
Indeed, with all the vacuum-tube amps that look like relics from the 1960s and cherry-wood speaker cabinets, it would seem that audio technology has evolved little in the past half century. In fact, it hasn't.
Following the consumer-electronics boom of the 1980s which sold billions in solid-state audio equipment, musicians and audiophiles began missing the particular distortion and speaker-dampening characteristics of tube equipment. Among guitar players, the most sought-after and highest-priced amps are modern versions of Fender, Marshall and Vox amps from the 1950s and 1960s, thought to have generated some US$100 million in sales since 1997.
The trend now, it seems, is to employ the craftsmanship and quality materials of yesteryear in updated designs. A pair of NT$9,000 Audio-Technica earbuds are a good example of this. They essentially duplicate the same speakers Hong makes in titanium miniature. Do they sound better than NT$900 earbuds you might buy at a record store? Yes. Do they sound NT$8,100 better? Check out TAA's show and decide for yourself.
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