Introduction

As a home based business, we do have demo rooms set-up in my home along with my home office of course were I take care of the daily duties of running a small business. Also, I have a small network of close local customers with certain special/specific gear who I can make special arrangements with to arrange demo's of certain unique stuff that I may not have on hand as well!. The goal here of this page is to give you an idea of our set-up in a kind of virtual tour which we hope you enjoy. As well, and unlike other dealer Websites you may visit on the web (on a number I've visited you can't even find the street address, the name of the owner, or whether they are full time retailer or not - all your get is an e-mail address!),  I do not hide the fact that we are a home based, full time, Hi-End Audio retailer.

Rich Brkich, Owner - Signature Sound

Where Are We!

Signature Sound is located in a suburb of the city of Syracuse, New York. We are about a 10 minute drive north from exit 38 (Route 57 Liverpool) on the New York State Thruway (I90). Because we are a home based business, demonstrations are by appointment. We are available almost all days, evenings, and weekends. So, even if you are just passing through, chances are we can accommodate you even if it is on short notice. Around holidays, it is recommended to give us a call a few days in advance to see if we are available (we may be closed, traveling, or busy with other customers during those times). Once you make an appointment, we will provide you with detailed directions, our you can just Google Map us to get direction right to our door!

Still don't have a clue where we are? Maybe these approximate drive times to Signature Sound may help:

• Less than 1.5 hours (east) from Rochester, New York.
• Less than 2.5 hours (east) from Buffalo, New York.
• Less than 2.5 hours (west) from Albany, New York
• About 4.5 hours (north) from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• About 5 hours (north-west) from New York City.
• About 5 hours (west) from Boston Massachusetts.
• Less than 1.5 hours (south) from the Canadian Border (I81).
• Less than 1.5 hours (north) from Binghamton, New York.
• About 1 hour (north-east) from Ithaca. New York.

The Office :-)

Be it ever so humble . . . My office area occupies what used to be the dining room area in my home and were is my LP collection is parked (which you can see a glimpse of on the right edge of the picture - it takes up that whole right wall).  If you look carefully, you can see my all Rega office system (Radio tuner, Brio or Mira integrated amp, and Rega RS1 speakers) which I listen to most of the day.  Not exactly optimal speaker positioning, but it is not a critical listening set-up. If I'm not on the phone, most of the time I am usually listening to NPR talk radio while working as music is too distracting (i.e. my attention gets drawn to the music playing instead of focusing on answering e-mail, doing paper work etc etc).

The Main Listening Room

The main room is just over 11' wide, 20' deep, and has a 7.5' ceiling. This room is used for demonstrating our best high end gear. Note the various room treatments on the side walls, back walls, and in the corners of the room in the pictures below. This room has dedicated high power electrical circuits to power the system in this room. Speakers are situated well out into the room to allow them to deliver their best possible sound staging performance for a dedicated listening room of this size as well as taking into account the space needed for equipment and equipment racks which have to be behind the speakers in my set-up. I've spent about 20 years with this room and after many experiments over the years, this layout delivers the best results for a room this size. The speaker placement, which appears far out into the room (it is), places the listening position about eleven feet from the plane of the speakers. This does place the listener about two to three feet out from the wall behind the listening couch, but that wall behind the couch is covered with some custom made diffuser/absorber panels I designed some years ago.  The overall result (as many customers can attest to) is quite good. The picture below is several years old, but I'll have something more up to date up soon....its hard to have a "typical" picture of the room as gear gets changed around a bunch, so the selection on the racks over the years varies widely.

I always keep only one pair of speakers set up at a time in the main listening room, though for this picture I could not resist showing off both the Merlin VSM and TSM speakers. This is one of the reasons why demonstrations are done by appointment here at Signature Sound. When a customer makes a appointment, we set up in advance what electronics and speakers they wish to listen to. The listener sits on comfortable couch which can seat up to three people and faces our coffee table that is always cluttered with various magazines, CDs, etc. while listening. You will note the distinct absence of ANYTHING video from this room. It is meant, and will continue to be, a audio only listening room.

A look at the old listening couch in the main listening room and the audio geeks coffee table (which is usually a bit of a mess). The CD storage rack behind the room tune contains a little more than half of my CD collection and to its right are other room tune and customer made diffuser/absorber panels to handle side wall reflections since this room is a bit narrow. The old listening couch is getting long of tooth and is due for a replacement soon. Anyone know where I can get a good deal on a nice couch?

Is that it??? At times I have had an additional 2nd listening room set-up as well upstairs, but I have eliminated it for now as I am using that space mostly for equipment storage and I have a long term re-modeling project going on up there as well which I will finish up someday. Here is a picture of some of the gear we have stored on hand in inventory.

A Picture from the Past

An older (circa early 1997) picture of the main listening room showing the Merlin VSM
speakers set up in near-field powered by the Blue Circle BC-2 mono-block amplifiers.