by Steve Dollar | December 5, 2024
How Chris Baus Is Fueling a Hi-fi Revival
How Chris Baus’s vintage hi-fi refurbishment hobby fueled a listening movement across Florida.
Audio designer Chris Baus isn’t afraid of a weird niche. When he and his wife, Eylin, launched their hi-fi studio Cathode Bias in Miami amid the COVID-19 pandemic, they wanted to break the norm. “Our philosophy is that hi-fi and PA systems in particular have gotten pretty boring,” says Baus, who currently runs his business out of Cocoa Beach and Reno, Nevada. “It’s a black box in the corner.”
Not so, however, for Cafe Sound, the line of vintage-style speakers Chris Baus custom builds for bars, DJ pop-ups and home systems as well as hi-fi lounges, trendy new spaces where vinyl records spin amid fancy cocktails and the glow of refurbished tube amplifiers. One recently updated La Modesta, the signature model they work with, is as citrusy as the state that spawned it, boasting a lime-green cabinet topped with a cast aluminum horn in bright orange. One of the couple’s larger-scale systems comes in pink. “My wife’s a big influence,” Baus says. “She’s from Venezuela—bright colors are in more common play.”
For my generation, and other generations before there was the internet, music was part of our culture a lot more than it is now.
—Chris Baus
Baus posts photos of the speakers and various works in progress on his Instagram account @cathodebias, a handle that references vacuum tube electronics lingo. The account also steers the curious to two related Instagram pages and a website. He was surprised at the response. “Turns out people actually want them,” he says. “We’re also working on another pair that’s going to be bright yellow and green. It was kind of an experiment. But honestly, we got a lot of interest in what we’re doing.”
If the bold colors grab the eye with innovative flair, what catches the ear is a throwback to a classic era in audio. Baus takes cues from the kind of old-school analog systems popular in Japan, where dedicated fans of record listening frequent cafes known as jazz kissa. The tradition dates back to the 1920s, when jazz, among other American cultural exports, found a fascinated audience in Japan. The concept has traveled back to the United States (and worldwide), with dozens of spots across the country like Bar Shiru in Oakland, California; Shibuya HiFi in Seattle; Public Records in Brooklyn; and Miami Sound Bar and Dante’s HiFi in Miami.
A vintage hi-fi enthusiast for more than 30 years, Chris Baus looks back to the cabinet design of JBL speakers, a brand launched after World War II, and Altec Lansing, famous for its Voice of the Theatre speakers, a 1940s standard for America’s bijous. “But we bring sort of a modern componentry to it,” he explains. “Modern woofers, modern compression drivers, modern horns.” Because the speakers are high-efficiency, they can be driven by low-watt tubed electronics—another throwback to technology that predated the market takeover by solid-state electronics in the ’60s and ’70s. The Cafe Sound speakers, which can be made to order, range in cost from $3,200 for the La Modestas to $15,000 (and up) for a large system such as the vintage Altec A5 bass cabinets Baus recently “restromodded”—restored with handcrafted birch veneer, vintage components and multi-cell horns fashioned in Baltic birch from a design first in use in the 1930s. Besides looking cool, the horn design widens the sweet spot for anyone not sitting right in front of the speaker. Baus also discovered another benefit. “They smooth out even rougher-sounding vinyl. You’ll be able to fill the room but also to naturally attenuate some of the noise that you get from vinyl on typical speakers.”
This back-to-the-future aesthetic has leapt beyond the hobbyist and audiophile realms to a newly fashionable status. Devon Turnbull, who designs and builds distinctive hi-fi systems in New York, often collaborates with fashion houses and art galleries and counts numerous celebrities as clients (along with selling DIY kits on his ojas.nyc website and out of a Soho storefront).
Baus hopes to offer guidance to any entrepreneurs who get the bug. “A lot of people in this market make the mistake of using standard hi-fi speakers and finding they don’t fill the room quite the way they expect,” he says. And unlike in Japan, where silence is the golden rule among patrons who listen intently, Americans like to talk a lot. “In a lot of ways, the music is a background to what other people are doing.” Nonetheless, the music cuts through and makes a connection.
“For my generation, and other generations before there was the internet, music was part of our culture a lot more than it is now,” Baus says. “People are wanting to return to that a little bit. I think the momentum is growing.”
