Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Some guys express their joy (or bewilderment) over being a dad for the first time with the cliché of the cigar. Other guys drink a lot of beer. Some name their fishing boat after their new kid. But when Randy Kunin was feeling the fidgetiness of impending parenthood, he went into his workroom and began sketching blueprints for a set of speakers. By the time his daughter was born, he’d built “The Elise”—a high-fidelity audio system with rounded baffles and tiered horns. It looked like sculpture, but had that clear, crisp sound that turns music lovers into full-on audiophiles.
Mr. Kunin is one—an audiophile, that is—and freely admits it. He bonded with his dad listening to vinyl records on a state-of-the-art stereo system, and developed the family “sickness,” a.k.a. an obsession with high-end audio systems, at an early age. Though it took the birth of his daughter to constellate the construction of his first pair of art speakers, the idea had been knocking around in his head for years. He points out that music is art, and listening to music is a highly emotionally charged thing; so why should speakers be ugly?
“If it looks good, it probably sounds like crap, because the manufacturing costs to make something look pretty take away from the costs to make it sound good,” Mr. Kunin says of mass-made speakers. “And then even the ridiculously expensive speakers, they’re not aesthetically pleasing. They’re more function than form.”
Because Mr. Kunin builds every speaker from scratch in his home workshop, and doesn’t have to work with injection-molded templates, he can make speakers that are “wild or creative aesthetically, that also perform functionally.” And at a comparatively lower cost, too: $4,500 to $20,000.
“On the high-fidelity side, there are $30,000 speaker cables out there—just cables!” Kunin says. “And there are speakers that are $300,000 a pair. So if I’m into that stuff, I can buy something that a bunch of other people have, or you can buy this one-of-a-kind system that’s made for you. Time and material, the way I charge my pieces, it’s material used, plus time put into it. That’s the price. It’s not just ‘Ehhh, OK, how about $20,000?’”
And if you want to drop 20 thou, you’ll get a completely customized set of speakers like the Blackmore, which Mr. Kunin built to meld perfectly with the commissioning client’s interior. The silhouette is part Charles Eames, part AT-AT, with panels faced in a burled walnut veneer. Mr. Kunin created a second-generation version, the Blackmore V2, which he says “takes its styling cues” from the original version, but can have “a different base, and can be tailored to be a wider-use piece, and can be different colors.”
“Suede, veneer, paint… We’ll do aluminum, all kinds of metal laminates, fabrics. It’s endless variations,” he adds. “Anything you can imagine, I can do it. I want my pieces to get passed down from generation to generation, because it’s not a commodity—it has value. It has meaning.”
Because his pieces are more like sculpture than audio equipment, he’s currently in the process of planning some gallery shows, one at ArtDimensions, the other at Concrete Ocean Art Gallery. Though he has drawers full of designs—just check out his Facebook page—these first few exhibits will show off what he’s built so far, including the Elise (models of which are certainly available for purchase, even if your daughter’s name is Tammy); “The Marek,” named for his son; “The Deuce,” inspired by Mr. Kunin’s days of hanging around hot-rod shows; and “The Pops,” designed, as you’d guess, in homage to his dad. “It’s going to be burgundy with walnut veneer and some chocolate vinyl—a very pretty piece,” Mr. Kunin says. After all, “I owe it all to my old man,” he continues. “It’s kind of like, ‘Thanks, Dad, for ruining
my life!’”
See Kunin’s latest designs and keep track of his gallery shows at facebook.com/pages/Sounds-By-Design/157227755010.
