Artistry in Sound.(Jackson Pollock's stereo system)(Brief Article)

Have you seen the movie Pollock yet? I haven't, but I'm looking forward to it, partly because of the very small connection I have with the hi-fi rig that's still installed and working in Jackson Pollock's home.

A few years ago, I happened upon the website of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center (http://www.pkhouse.org). The center is in East Hampton, NY and the University at Stony Brook presides over its preservation and development. The site description of the house mentioned that the house contains Pollock's hi-fi sound system and hundreds of jazz records. That caught my eye and imagination so I sent a fax to ask for further information on both what gear Pollock used and what jazz LPs graced his collection. Helen Harrison, the director of the center, replied and put me in contact with Chuck Pancake, physics professor at Stony Brook and the person who has accepted responsibility for keeping Pollock's half century old hi-fi in good condition.

Chuck let me know that Pollock's music system starts with a Garrard RC-90 record changer and GE RPX cartridge. The artist opted for the gold finished deluxe model cartridge, making him one of the earliest hi-fi buyers to fall for an eye-catching pricey tweak that certainly had no effect whatever on sound quality. (GE's ads claimed otherwise, of course.)

Coincidentally, I use precisely the same changer in my own system so I can play 78s in an appropriate fashion. I even have one of the gold RPX cartridges. But I use a standard uncoated mu metal RPX, mainly out of laziness. I'd kind of like to have the gold one in there, but just haven't gotten around to making the switch. Anyway, the plain vanilla one works just fine.

Pollock's amplifier is a Bogen DB-20, providing 20 watts of power at no more than 0.3 percent THD. It's what collectors of vintage tube gear call a "bowling alley" model, presumably because of the unenclosed tubes that stick up out of the top of the chassis like so many bowling pins.

The wildest part of the Pollock system is the speaker installation. For this let me quote directly from Chuck Pancake's e-mail: "The speaker system is very interesting. It consists of a woofer and multi-cell tweeter mounted on a closet door. The closet, which forms the enclosure, is actually the space under the stairway leading upstairs. This is a narrow closet ...