About me
Once upon a time
and that short wait made everything more mysterious. It took me a short time to realise that I was in front of an extraordinary piece of equipment and to fall in love with that magic, voices that sounded real and music that made me dream. At Christmas, I was 10 years old, the gift was a portable mini cassette tape...all mine. I remember as if it were now a trip with my father and my request to buy a new cassette, it was 3,500 Lire for an English group called PinkFloyd....the cover had a black background ...and the magic of DSOM did the rest. Curious as few I had repeatedly opened the tube radio and did the same with the Mini Cassette Fair Mate... the aim was to make my cassette music sound as good and loud as the radio programmes. I don't know how I didn't get electrocuted, but after a few attempts Pink Floyd, Elton John, Cat Stevens ...but also Lucio Battisti came out loud through the big radio speaker.
from passion to profession
None of my friends had a system of that quality and from that moment on, all the house parties in my compound were in my room. I completed the system with a tape and a tuner ... in Italy in those months the first local 'Free Radio' began ... practically anyone could at least try to be a DJ ... and I tried with a certain success that led me to do it for at least two years in two different radio stations that broadcast from my city throughout the region....Tuscany. The transition from the console of a radio station to that of a disco club was natural at that time of rampant Disco Music. Another three years dedicated to music as a professional... and paid much more than my father who was a manager in a small factory.
My stage name was LUKAS. While music at work was Disco my love for R&B, Soul, Funky...and then Jazz was unstoppable. From that moment on an huge sequence of HiFi equipment became part of my life and once again their fate was to be opened, studied, analysed and...modified. Everything seemed me to be built cheapy (and in part for many devices this was true then as it is now) so.... change that capacitor, replace that cable, remove that " useless" fuse ...making a lot of mistakes I learned many things, but it became indispensable to study, i wanted some academic edecation...and I did so by taking all the necessary private lessons at my own expense from an Electronic Engineer who was teaching in a Florence Technical School... from scratch to everything in 'low frequency' as the audio industry is technically called.
With the knowledge I acquired everything seemed even more fascinating...but also approximate. A real fixation for upgrading, which at that point was done with more success and less smoke from burnt out components. The valves that had ignited my passion for music were also my main interest along with turntables and of course loudspeakers. In the meantime, my profession that gave me a living was in the field of audiology and hearing aids, the decibels of the hearing impaired detected with audiometries and treated with hearing aids always kept me in the topic of the magnificent world of sounds... of those who could no longer hear very well to those who enjoyed music at concerts or reproduced.
Then began my journey towards 'the art of playback'.
music as the aim not a mean
It was the time of great HiFi...it was the time when the term Hi-End was coined by US magazines to refer to equipment that promised
'Theabsolute sound'.
The performance was high, the prices too, but back then, even an 'average' income person on a budget could still think of buying such Hi-End equipment.
That was the time (1990) when a race was on for all manufacturers to find the 'transparency' of the sound that was meant to be absolute... and a drift began (in my opinion) that slowly drove many enthusiasts away and certainly did not favour the generational change.
My thoughts on the matter can be found here PHILOSOPHY .
That was the time when, with maturity, I began to 'question' not only how technologically commercial audio products were made but, more importantly, the very concept of HiEnd. So it was that I went to live in the USA in NYC and got to hang out with the great collectors and dealers of vinyl records, which at that time (1999) was probably experiencing the lowest production and sales of black records in history.
The Golden Age of USA production (in the Jazz and Classical genres) were the object of my interest and trade. When I returned to Italy After the events of Sept- 11 2001, after a period of re-adaptation, I undertook the construction of an e-commerce site (www.onlyvinyl.net) for the exclusive sale of used vinyl records using a powerful relational database and offered to the music lover a consultation and purchasing experience that at the time (2004) had no equal in Europe. This was also the time the Eastern market of the 'new rich' was emerging and helped what would become a true renaissance of the black record. From 2006 to 2009 I moved to Germany ...in Baden Baden and then to Berlin. This adventure lasted until 2012 when I decided to go back to equipment design and building.
Since 2019 I have been living in Spain, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria where I have my own workshop to design and produce my equipment design strictly on demand for the various customers who live mainly in Europe.
To understand the peculiarities of my offer I refer you to the FAQ