Goodbye to the house Mike Kay built

By the time this issue of Stereophile arrives in your mailbox (and on newsstands), Lyric Hi-Fi & Video, the legendary symbol of male-dominated, uber-luxury hi-fi retail, will be closed forever.

This makes me sad. I wasn’t just a client of Lyric; I worked there.

Sometime after 1956, Michael Kakadelis, known to almost everyone as Mike Kay, went to work at a second-floor hi-fi shop called Lyric. In 1959, he bought the business and moved it a little bit north to a street-level storefront at 1221 Lexington Avenue. It stood there from then until now.

Lyric began selling hi-fi in the era of Fisher and Marantz. They continued into the era of William Z. Johnson’s Audio Research, Jim Winey’s Magnepan, and Mark Levinson’s—well, Mark Levinson. Until just a few days ago, they were still selling: dCS. Wilson. Still Audio Research. Still Maggies.

Kay, who died in 2012, took a different approach than most hi-fi dealers. He was an engineer, and he worked closely with better-known manufacturers and nurtured younger designers and engineers, encouraging them to sell their products through Lyric. Lyric had its own cabinet shop and built its own hi-fi cabinets and loudspeakers.

In the ’70s and ’80s, I frequented other NYC audio dens: Liberty Hi-Fi, Rabsons, Harvey, Leonard Radio, Sam Goody. I didn’t visit Lyric until 1982: I’d read a review of a SOTA turntable, and I wanted to hear it.

As soon as I walked in, a salesman insulted me. He refused to let me audition the turntable with an album I’d brought. “I hate that album,” he said. “But I know what it sounds like,” I said. He told me to leave, so I did.

Lyric opened a West Side location, and I became friends with the manager there, Lenny Bellezza, who apologized for that long-gone salesman. When that location closed, I became a client of the original, East Side Lyric. Later, Lenny became Lyric’s owner.

Lyric’s NYC location, Kay’s personality, and the emergence of literary, subjective audio writing by Harry Pearson of The Absolute Sound, J. Gordon Holt of Stereophile, and others created a new language and, with it, a new market. Lyric was ground zero for the emerging High End.

Over the last 20 years or so, I’ve walked into many hi-fi shops, from Tokyo to Australia and throughout Europe. When I tell the owner I worked at Lyric, suddenly they want my opinion about the gear they are carrying. Lyric set the global standard.

My band, Twisted Sister, stopped performing in 1988, after 15 nonstop years. I remarried, had a child, and stopped buying audio gear. But I wanted to stay connected to the scene, so I hung around Lyric. Sensing I was bored, Lenny offered me a job. It was a win-win: I’d get to play the gear, get to know the manufacturers, and be able to buy the products. Wholesale.

I had free rein to sell up to a certain level, but the big stuff—expensive Levinson, Audio Research, Infinity, Magnepan, Goldmund, Koetsu—was left to Lenny and Mike.

I had assumed that big-dollar buyers were audio experts. Listening to their component auditions taught me otherwise. I got a little bit cynical. By the time you’re rich enough to buy it, I concluded, your ears aren’t good enough to hear it.

Once, a guy from New Jersey came in to buy a CD player and walked out with $150,000 worth of equipment: Levinson transport, D/A converter, and preamp and a big speaker system. When we arrived at his house to set it up—in his bedroom—he asked me to connect his Sanyo cassette player. The new system, we learned, was for listening to Grateful Dead bootlegs on cassette. The only CDs he had to play on those Levinson separates were transfers of those bootlegs.

By 1998, audio cable was getting expensive. The main brand we carried was MIT. Their top-of-the-line speaker cable cost $12,000/pair. The company sent two guys in lab coats to lecture us for two days on the technical aspects of their cables, why they cost so much, and how we should convince customers that they’re worth the asking price. A month later, Kay announced that we’d be carrying another cable line, NBS, which topped out at an eye-popping $22,000/pair.

About a week after the delivery of the NBS cables, that company’s owner, Walter Fields, walked through the front door. I told him about the days we’d spent with the MIT reps. “If anyone asks you why my stuff costs so much,” he offered, “tell them it’s because there is a lot of good shit in it!”

“Look,” he continued, “when someone walks into Lyric, it’s like buying a Rolls Royce or a Mercedes. No one asks a Mercedes salesman how the drivetrain is connected to the tires. Nobody who owns a Rolls buys replacement spark plugs from Kmart. They buy from a Rolls dealer. You don’t connect Jadis amps and Infinity speakers with wire from Kmart. They want the best, period. If they want second best, tell ’em to buy MIT!”

That is how I learned to sell hi-fi: This is good, this is better, this is best, in increasing order of good-shit content. Will that be cash or charge?

RIP Lyric.

Footnote: Jay Jay French is the founder, manager, and lead guitarist for Twisted Sister.

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