Icons of Audio: Bill Low of AudioQuest

This is the first in a series of interviews with icons of the audio world. Here, Ken Micallef interviews AudioQuest founder Bill Low. Check out AudioQuest's website at https://bit.ly/3zljnOr for more information.

0:00 - Intro
1:00 - Emotional transportation
1:43 - Narrow down the variables
5:50 - It's the little things
6:18 - Speaker crossovers
7:32 - On Richard Vandersteen. speaker designer
7:49 - On Garth Powell, Senior Director of Engineering at AudioQuest
8:50 - Emotional vs. analytical listening
10:42 - The process of evaluation
13:00 - Humans are phase-sensitive instruments
16:00 - Back to speakers, phase and crossovers
18:00 - Bill's take on how the brain parses sound in the first 50 milliseconds
19:38 - The effect of going from a first-order to a fourth-order speaker
21:33 - Greenwood Sound: 1975 and Bill's history as a Linn dealer
23:35 - What inspired Bill to make better cables
25:12 - At the time, music was changing so fast... it was an incredible evolution
26:33 - Enter the Walkman and personal audio
27:14 - Back to Bill's early customers and cables
28:13 - The misapplication of knowledge is a very big bugaboo in audio
29:27 - 1976, Chicago, CES... Polk introduces Cobra braided Litz cable
30:22 - A wakeup call to the industry
31:20 - Fulton cable
32:24 - Bill's time as a manufacturer's rep
36:05 - The value of benchmarking
38:25 - Why Litz cable exists
40:30 - The "original recipe" 12-gauge twisted-pair Litz speaker cable
42:15 - The story of AudioQuest
44:02 - Bill has an epiphany
46:40 - Cold calling and selling cable out of the trunk of a car
47:30 - Executive/Encore Audio and the origin of the AudioQuest logo
48:10 - At first, Bill was the labor force
49:40 - What was in Bill's stereo system at the time
53:15 - Music for evaluating cables, then and now
55:44 - Vocals and comparing amplifiers
58:03 - The biggest challenge in audio is not exaggerating distortion in lesser recordings
1:01:00 - "Damped" recordings and its effect on high-end sound
1:02:58 - AudioQuest music recordings
1:06:50 - "If I hadn't recorded jazz, we could have avoided losing money"
1:07:56 - Mighty Sam McClain
1:10:42 - The role of studio monitors
1:11:26 - Why people used Yamaha NS10s as monitors
1:12:34 - The differences between the Folk Hero and Mythical Creatures speaker cables
1:14:35 - The naysayers and skin effect
1:17:00 - Cables and phase
1:19:15 - The subjective rollercoaster and the funhouse effect
1:22:16 - The tyranny of the machine
1:23:17 - ABX testing is the audiophile enemy because of how it is used
1:23:55 - The sunglasses analogy
1:32:13 - That which does not change, our brain suppresses
1:33:52 - Listening to music in bed
1:38:31 - Digital streaming vs. vinyl records
1:41:07 - One the "gifts" of car audio, hands and eyes is how we define value
1:41:46 - What Bill says to cable naysayers

This video is sponsored by Fidelity Imports: https://fidelityimports.com/

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