What happens when a luxury audio specialist takes over the townhouse in New York’s affluent Chelsea neighbourhood previously owned by Lady Gaga and is given carte blanche to show off its gear in the best possible light? You get House of Sound, an ultra-exclusive demo space that helps properly minted music lovers visualise what millions of dollars of McIntosh and Sonus Faber kit would look like in their lavish homes.
Spread across six floors, there’s enough Hi-Fi equipment here to fill a mansion multiple times over, along with art and photography documenting the brands’ involvement in iconic music events like Woodstock. The McIntosh Group also brings dealers to the 11,000 square foot showroom to hear new products for the first time.
The House is normally open for audio tours by appointment only (largely to limit tyre kicker audiophiles, as you don’t need to provide evidence of your bank balance to secure a spot). I got to check it out on a recent trip to New York with parent company Bose, which acquired McIntosh in 2024. Directly following my Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar and Lifestyle Ultra Speaker hands-on session with a system that costs over $1 million was eye-opening, to say the least.
Ready for a road trip?
You really can’t miss the Lamborghini Temeraro casually parked in the garage; floor-to-ceiling glass makes it one of the first things you see as you enter the building. This is the second of the Italian marque’s supercars to offer a Sonus Faber sound system, following the Revuelto, and acts as a taster of the level of opulence to expect on the floors above.
The optional upgrade will set a Lambo buyer back an additional $6500 – though that’s a drop in the ocean for a car that starts at around $360,000. It has to be kept on trickle charge, because the speaker amplification would fully drain the 12V battery in just a handful of songs.
Sat behind the wheel and with the windows closed, it puts in an impressive performance up there with the best I’ve heard from a luxury car, despite having fewer speakers and no dedicated subwoofer (due to a lack of space and need to save weight). It sounds so immersive that I wouldn’t mind it drowning out the 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 behind my head.
What more than $1 million of Hi-Fi sounds like
The main event is on the first floor: the entire living space has been arranged around two giant stacks of McIntosh amplifiers, set into Hi-Fi units eight feet high and surrounded by thousands of vinyl records that spanned an impressive array of genres and decades. Each separate glows in McIntosh’s signature blue, with needles bouncing to indicate the insane amount of power being delivered to the Sonos Faber Suprema loudspeakers placed directly in front of them. The setup made the 65in wall-mounted TV look tiny and almost an afterthought.
These four floorstanders – two main columns and two subwoofers – will set you back $750,000 by themselves, though that does apparently include a flight to Italy for your to hand-pick the finish in Sonus Faber’s factory.
Each speaker unit has Eight front-firing drivers: four dual-drive woofers, one mid-woofer, one midrange, one mid-tweeter and one super tweeter, plus two back-firing speakers that improve staging and dispersion.
The music is absolutely the focus here, with the other furniture blending into the background – but importantly the room still felt like a living space rather than a dedicated listening room. The walls and ceiling weren’t acoustically treated. It just enough of the partner approval a lottery winner thinking about a home Hi-Fi upgrade would want.
It doesn’t matter where in the room you sit to experience the Suprema: it delivers an astonishingly wide stereo image with the kind of precision and detail that reveals layers you had no idea were in your favourite songs. Good luck spotting even the smallest hint of distortion, even at volume levels that would scare the neighbours. There’s simply no noise floor, even at 100% volume and thousands of watts being supplied to the speakers.
House of Sound the Audio Experience Manager Ricky Miranda hand-picked a bunch of tracks that showed off the system in its best light, demonstrating a neutral and crisp sound that was simply sensational.
Then he let our small crew of UK tech journalists loose to try and ‘break’ it, but even badly mastered tracks had an epic sense of scale. Everything from James Blake and Hans Zimmer to Godflesh and Snipknot got a spin, yet we could reveal no weakness.
Small doesn’t mean subtle
Climb another staircase (or take the elevator, because what multi-million dollar townhouse doesn’t also have one of those) and you’ll reach a more intimate listening room – but one that’s hardly short on McIntosh equipment. There’s a network streamer, an SACD player and a turntable, all hooked into a vacuum tube preamp and thousands of watts of amplification power.
It’s the ultra-limited Lamborghini x Sonus faber Il Cremonese EX3ME floorstanders that instantly drew my eye, though. They’re limited to just 50 pairs globally, each individually numbered, and finished in your choice of five Lamborghini hues. McIntosh rejected Arancio Egon (orange), Blu Marinus Matte (blue), Verde Mercurius (green) and Nero Nemesis Matte (black) in favour of the Giallo Countach (yellow) seen in my photos. The angular lines emulate the silhouette of a Lamborghini car and there’s also a charging bull emblem on the midrange driver’s dust cap.
That 7in speaker is joined by a tweeter made from Beryllium DLC (Diamond-Like Carbon), dual 7in woofers and two side-mounted 8.7in ‘infra-woofers’. There’s unsurprisingly some serious sonic shove on offer here, while also demonstrating sublime precision across a selection of test tracks. These were a lot more curated than what we’d been permitted to subject the Suprema system to earlier, but went a long way to showing why a pair will set you back $130,000.
Grab your popcorn
The last room on the tour rounded out my visit in spectacular style; to call House of Sound’s movie theatre a home cinema would be the undersell of the century.
The basement room is cavernous, with an expansive 204in screen covering almost the entirety of one wall. A Sony GTZ380 4K laser projector good for 10,000 lumens hangs from the ceiling; at $88,000, it’s one of the more affordable bits of tech here.
In one corner a floor-to-ceiling stack of McIntosh amplification supplies a ludicrous 22,400W to the 29-speaker sound system, which includes a ridiculous 16 subwoofers. Ten sit behind the screen while the other six sit at the back of the room. There’s enough rumble here that anyone in the kitchen directly above can feel the vibrations. Sonus Faber Arena custom install speakers are then built into the walls and ceiling.
Tucked out of view are an Apple TV for streaming video, a PS5 for gaming, and a Kaleidescape movie player with access to cinema-grade digital versions of the latest movies. We were treated to Top Gun: Maverick’s canyon training scene: I can’t say I’ve ever been inside the cockpit of an F35 fighter jet, but have to imagine it would sound almost exactly like this. The volume, sense of directional sound and the LFE from the subwoofers was an assault on the senses, in the very best way.
Will House of Sound ruin cheaper Hi-Fi for you forever?
Was listening to the Suprema ‘single tear rolling down my cheek’ levels of good? Not for me – though it was comfortably one of the most impressive, engrossing speaker systems I’ve ever experienced.
Where House of Sound succeeds is in putting home Hi-Fi on the same level as a luxury car or watch. A Lamborghini and a Lada will both get you to your destination eventually, but I know which one I’d rather drive; it’s the same for sound. If I had the budget – and the space to accommodate it – this is about as statement making as a stereo system gets.
Read the full article here
