In 1974-'76 I worked part-time for Tasso Spanos at Opus One (Pittsburgh), mostly in his Indiana, PA store while an undergraduate student at IUP. Occasionally I'd slide down to Pittsburgh for a day or two of duty downtown. For everyone younger, in those days, hi-fi stores were vastly more common and distributed than today, and university towns had many competitors. We Boomers bought hi-fi in vast numbers then, usually before we bought our first used cars, and with a campus of 12,000 of us at the time, Opus One pushed a lot of audio into rural western Pennsylvania from Tasso's Indiana,PA outpost.
Opus One was one of the early retail laboratories for what came to be known as "high end audio" in the mid 1970s. We promoted the Double Advent system before Harry wrote about it. As someone else noted here, Tasso was an advocate of the double KLH 9 system earlier, and we always had a pair from trade-in against something newer, like Magneplanar Tympani III-a, or sometimes even a pair of Dahlquist DQ10. Or, of course, double Dahlquist DQ10s in the spirit of the Levinson Double Quads system. And yes, Opus One had the Advent Videobeam and the Betamax VCR.
We were very early sellers of Linn. We sold the Transcriptors Saturn and Glass Skeleton turntables, with the Vestigal tonearm. Early Nakamichi along with Tandberg, ReVox, Stellavox, Nagra tape machines. Early too with Audio Research, Mark Levinson, db Systems. Tasso had a long-time association with Marantz, which by the mid-70s was more powerhouse mid-fi brand than high-end, except for the fact that we did see and sell a mammoth Marantz 500 and later 510 power amp now and then. Pristine Marantz Seven ("c") preamps came through, often traded-in for an ARC SP3a-1. We were among the retail pioneers for Koetsu and Win Labs in the US, along with Supex, Decca, Micro-Acoustics, and we moved a river of Shure V15-III, ADC-XLM and Denon 103D cartridges. It was an exciting time to be in the business and specifically in Tasso's business since his relationships with primary vendors and the individuals who founded namesake firms ran throughout the industry. Saul Marantz was involved with Jon Dahlquist, so Tasso got DQ10s early. He was also one of the earliest recipients of the Sequerra tuner for retail.
In our campus store, a large craftsman-style house, for a couple of years our default centerpiece system was a pair of Dahlquist DQ10s driven by either a pair of Julius Futterman (real Julius, not the 1980s Harvey Rosenberg iteration) OTL monoblocks or an Audio Research Dual 76A. The preamp was usually either an ARC SP3a-1, Levinson JC-2 or a mint Marantz Seven. Sources were variously Linn Sondek with Transcriptor Vestigal arm and Denon 103D phono cartridge into a Levinson pre-preamp or a Monks step-up transformer, Thorens TD-126c with Shure V15-III direct into the preamp, or a Thorens TD-124 idler drive with Ortofon RMG arm carrying an SPU. We also had at all times a Nak 700 or 1000, and a Tandberg 10XD or ReVox B77 reel installed. For blasting the walls down, we sometimes drafted a Marantz 500 or SAE 2500 brute amp for untroublesome muscle.
The Dahlquist DQ10 was compact for a floorstander of the time, and versatile in the budgets, expectations and listening preferences it would satisfy. For a small extra charge we exactingly mirror-imaged the open-baffle array. A standard mod was to pull a Gold Toe black dress sock over the piezo supertweeter, which calmed its tizz and mitigated its tendency to beam. The Dahquist DQ10 -- at the time $695/pr. -- anchored ambitious student systems with Marantz 2270 or Tandberg 2075 receivers and Kenwood turntables with Shure V15-III cartridges, as well as audiophile or relatively deep-pockets serious music systems employing Audio Research SP3a-1/Dual 76A ($2000 at the time), Linn Sondek/SME 3009/Koetsu/Levinson step-up, and a Nak 700 or Tandberg 10XD lashed on as well. For its time, and given its 5-way crossover, the Dahlquist had tremendous appeal and ability to satisfy for its at-the-time revelatory articulation, soundstaging and - unlike Quad ESL - credible powerhandling for dynamics. At Opus One, your system choices were more often than not organized around an Advent speaker, the Dahlquist, or a Magneplanar, as resources and space allowed.
It was a time when over a roughly six year period, there was a sea change in tonal and transient fidelity over the most revered gear available a just half to full decade earlier. Those years set the stage for what became "high-end," and were in their way the years of greatest rate of change since the foundation years of hi-fi. On balance, the improvements introduced to hi-fi buyers between roughly 1972 - 1978 made improvements in any other six year period since seem just annually incremental. There have just been many, many relentless increments since then. The CD was a quake of sorts. There were landmark products earlier and later. But like rock between roughly 1964 - '69 when big steps forward seemed to come every week, hi-fi in the middle '70s was tearing away obfuscations of convincing musicality at a torrid pace. The DQ10 was one of the slashers. Ironically, it was about the same time I also heard the Rogers LS3/5a at Opus One, plus an open baffle full-range-driver array by a customer who worked at the Rola-Jensen factory in nearby Punxsutawney, using eight Jensen paper cone car drivers per stereo channel, the Gale 401A, various Altec and Lansing vintage speakers from Tasso's long trade-in history, and many other discoveries that hinted at the splintered paths to come.
Opus One's Indiana store was opened by Jim Wallace, who had been a young customer of Tasso's in Pittsburgh before moving to Indiana, PA, and its operation was continued by Jon Barletta until that store was closed due to loss of lease. Tasso lost Opus One in Pittsburgh in the great grind-down of independent retailers in the '80s, when hi-fi also lost its mass appeal.
My brother still has a pair of Dahlquist DQ10s that I sold to a customer/friend in 1976, and have been in continuous use since, along the way refurbed by Regnar.
Phil
