On this last part of the Thai trip story, I’ll describe my visits with some Thai audiophiles, introduced to me by my friend Kamon. After exploring the shops in downtown Bangkok, we took a taxi to the edge of the city. Instead of high-rises and dense side streets, the there is a more relaxed feeling, with more stand-alone houses and greenery.

We first stopped at “Music Labs”, a small shop that sold vintage audio equipment. We were met by Mr. Pae, who I had met during an earlier trip to Thailand in 2001. Mr. Pae has been building tube amps and winding his own transformers for a long time, but is now retired from the business. Here are Mr. Pae and Mr. Ood, who runs Music Labs, in front of the shop:

MusicLabs exterior

A note on Thai names: Up until the early 20th century, Thai people only had a single name, what we would call a “given” name or first name. To help bring Siam (as it was called back then) into the modern world, the king required all people to adopt a family or last name. Villagers would sit around and try to come up with an impressive sounding name, or if from a Chinese background, try to translate the family name. Thai culture is more influenced by India than by China, so learned and intellectual words tended to be derived from Sanskrit or Pali, which resulted in the family names being lengthy and completely different than the mono-syllabic Thai language. For example, Kamon’s family name is Jirasereeamonkul. However, people are generally called by their first name, with a status-dependent honorific ahead of it. When translated to English this comes out as “Mr.” or “Mrs.”, even though there are lots of variations in Thai, depending on the status of the people speaking to each other. Thus, Kamon would be called “Mr. Kamon” and I would be called “Mr. John”. I dropped the “Mr.” from Kamon’s name, due my familiarity with him. Nicknames and other qualifiers such as uncle are frequently used, although only with friends. All this care about names, status, and honorifics really doesn’t carry over to our Western culture, so I will use the names Kamon gave me for this posting.

In any case, back to Music Labs. I don’t have a picture of the showroom, but here is Mr. Ood’s back room. (In Asia, most small shops also serve as the owner’s house, so this room really is personal system.) Mr.Ood is on the left and Kamon on the right. His system is all-vintag: a classic turntable (I don’t remember the brand), a McIntosh MC275 power amp, Altec bass horns, and Vita-Vox compression drivers connected to RCA horns. The turntable is sitting on a JBL Paragon, the first one I have seen in the flesh!

MusicLabs interior

The sound of Mr. Ood’s system was vintage, but quite good, with good “presence”. My only complaint would be a lack of high-frequency extension. However, I could happily listen to it all day!

We then walked down the street to Pi Hat’s house (Pi, pronounced ‘pee’, means uncle and Hat is his nickname). He is a close friend of Mr. Pae. Here is a view of his system:

PiHat System

I don’t have the models of all the components, but the phono preamp is a Bellari VP129, the line amplifier is a custom one built by Mr. Pae, and the power amps are stock Dynaco Mark IV’s (each one essentially one half of a Stereo 70).

Here is a close-up of the horn loudspeaker. The high frequencies are handled by ribbons, and the large horn is driven by a Peavy compression driver.

Horn close-up

Here is Mr. Pae’s preamplifier. It uses original Western Electric audio transformers and 6900 tubes. The regulated power supply is on the right. He really does a beautiful construction job.

Paes Preamp

The overall system was quite good - nearly what I would call “world-class”. There was full frequency extension, excellent detail, minimal horn coloration, and clearly had the balance of sound that only comes from lengthy experimentation and tweaking. We listened to some CDs that were very good. LP’s didn’t fare as well, but I strongly suspect that the weak link was the Bellari preamp.

Here is our group shot. From left to right are: Kamon, myself, Mr. Pae, and Pi Hat:

Group photo

I really appreciate Kamon’s time and effort to show me around and introduce me to his friends. Since I will be visiting Vietnam more in the future and Thailand is just an hour away by plane, I hope to visit with Kamon more often.