FIXATIONS : Spin Doctor : Bill Firebaugh of Laguna Hills calls himself a ‘fiddle-diddler.’ Hi-fi-faluntin ideas come to him, and he gives them a try.

One of the greatest album covers of the Space Age, in my estimation, is one particular hi-fi demonstration record, used in the early ‘60s to show off high-end bachelor-guy audio equipment. It depicts a living room crowded with women in sultry poses, while in the foreground their oblivious host tweeks his hi-fi’s controls, a look of rapt absorption on his face.

While Bill Firebaugh says he certainly enjoys the company of women, he also didn’t mind spending his Thanksgiving alone with his stereo, playing Beethoven’s nine symphonies from beginning to end. When the music particularly moved him, he’d get up and conduct.

And, unlike most hi-fi nuts, Firebaugh designed and built his own turntable, pre-amp and speakers, not to mention the wire connecting them. His vintage tube amp was also heavily modified.

He explained: “I don’t buy anything commercial, because if I did then I wouldn’t know it. This way, if something happens to anything I own, I can fix it. I’m not comfortable with things otherwise.

“Nowadays they call people like me researchers, but I’ve always been a fiddle-diddler. Ideas come to me; I build them up and give them a try.”

We were directed to Firebaugh by John Bazz of Audio by Design in Costa Mesa (Bazz also plays bass with the Blasters), where Firebaugh likes to take some of his new gear for a test spin. The latest things he brought to the audiophile outlet were his new speakers, which, being large white orbs each with a black oval, look like giant Felix the Cat eyes. “Everyone got a pretty good chuckle out of them,” Firebaugh maintains.

The 60-year-old former aerospace physicist has gotten far more than giggles out of his designs. After constructing his turntable--with four years and 87 prototypes involved just in designing its unique tonearm--a friend in the audio business urged him to demonstrate it at the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas five years ago.

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Firebaugh, who hadn’t even considered marketing the turntable, was deluged with orders for it, and soon licensed the design to a company that pays him a royalty for each sold. Thousands of his turntables have been sold over the past four years--bearing the name Well Tempered Labs, there are two models at $900 and $2,500--and some audio magazines and other experts rate it the world’s best, an estimation with which Firebaugh is inclined to agree.

“This is my baby, and I mean that sincerely,” he said, touching its platter, a massive disc of translucent plexiglass. He holds two patents on the turntable. One is for the tonearm, which unlike the mechanical pivots of most, is suspended from lengths of six-pound-test fishing line. It’s packed with sand and is attached to a small plate suspended in a gooey silicone liquid. “I facetiously offer a free oil change every 100,000 miles,” Firebaugh said.

The purpose of the liquid is to damp the motion of the tonearm, a function that Firebaugh likens to the shock absorbers of a car. Anyone familiar with turntables knows that if you drop most tonearms from their full height onto a record, they will bounce and skip like crazy. Firebaugh’s is so smooth the needle just settles into the groove and goes to work.

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Of course not many people these days are especially familiar with turntables, since the compact disc has almost entirely supplanted records in the marketplace. Most major record companies have discontinued making them. Many stereo preamplifiers now don’t even come with phonograph inputs. “That’s all right with me, because I’d be glad to sell one of my new phono pre-amps to people,” Firebaugh said.

While CDs were touted as the ultimate in audio when they came out a decade ago, Firebaugh and other audiophiles say they have reasons to prefer turntables.

“Audio magazines around the world actually have staged contests of my player going head to head against CDs and against other turntables--there are some out there costing $25,000--and I’ve never been embarrassed. Many people have written to the effect that mine’s the best.

“With a fairly good system, a simple thing like a phonograph cartridge can detect excursions on the order of X-ray dimensions. It’s an amazing truth. That’s why good analog systems are far better than digital systems. The closest spacing digital systems get is a wavelength of light corresponding to the red laser, which is, say, 800 nanometers? That’s very coarse compared to what vinyl can resolve. It’s been developed to such a high degree that I believe a phonograph record is one of man’s very highest achievements,” he said.

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Firebaugh’s quest for good sound began in his youth.

“I was crazy about the Mills Brothers when I was a young fellow, and to hear them better I used to listen to those 78 records with my ear right to the speaker. Then I built a crystal radio set when I was in the fourth grade, where you’d move a little ‘cat’s hair’ wire over crystal until you found a station. We had a big baseball field nearby, so I’d use the backstop as an antenna,” he said.

He grew up Eaton Rapids, Mich. His father was an engineer on the Wabash Railroad. “One of my earliest recollections is of being scared to death of the firebox on the steam engine,” Firebaugh recalled.

He picked up an interest in physics while in the Air Force and eventually came to work for Ford Aerospace in Newport. When not protecting the American way by designing state-of-the-art classified defense systems, he built two sailboats (the fiberglass technology later came in handy when crafting his spherical speakers), was into photography and worked on his stereo gear. Since taking early retirement he’s studied foreign languages (Japanese texts and a book titled “Let’s Learn Mandarin” were scattered about his small Leisure World condo) and has been working on a novel treatment for the common cold.

“In aerospace there are lots of smart, creative, capable people,” Firebaugh said. “I believe in the coming decade that those guys who have now been released from making defense weapons and protecting our country, who knows what they’re going to do? There’s a tremendous pool of talent which has been liberated. It’s them, not the big corporations, that are going to make changes.”

Something else that must be said for physicists is they aren’t hesitant to make use of the materials at hand. While talking, Firebaugh rubbed the side of his nose, using the oil as a conductive fluid on an audio connector. I know another scientist who uses the same substance to lubricate O-rings. “Nose oil is a very high-quality oil,” Firebaugh maintains.

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He keeps a small lab in his home where he does his audio experiments. Following his most recent studies, he claims that when it comes down to the wire, good sound reproduction literally does come down to the wire.

On his tiered lab bench he had a length of copper wire through which he was running an audio signal. By monitoring it with the stylus of one of his tonearms he’s able to observe minute changes in the wire. He claims that musical passages can alter the dimension of the wire, sort of like a mouse passing through a snake, and that the way the wire responds to that can degrade the sound, something to do with a “resonance in the crystal structure of the copper.”

“There are certain little unpleasantries in some hot musical passages that I’m convinced now are caused by wires. But I can play material that usually has a nasty, raspy effect, and it completely disappears with this wire of an alloy I’ve conjured together. I hear a tremendous difference,” he said.

While Firebaugh’s setup does indeed sound remarkably defined and spacious--whether playing Swedish jazz or a Bach organ blast--one can’t help but wonder if the quest for audio perfection will end with guys just running wires into their brains.

Firebaugh said, “The criterion I use is: If you experience musical satisfaction , you’ve arrived. There’s no way anybody knows where you’re going to recreate the wonderful circumstances of a live symphony. I don’t believe you can even re-create the sound of someone going up to a Steinway grand and going ‘plinnnng’ on a C note. There’s no hi-fi system I know of that actually re-creates that sound. (Firebaugh, incidentally, has found that the best sound at the Orange County Performing Arts Center is to be found in the cheaper seats, specifically in the middle of rows R or S in the third tier.)

“So you go for musical satisfaction. On Thanksgiving Day listening to Beethoven’s symphonies, I loved every millisecond of it. You can only do that if your sound system permits you to experience that musical satisfaction. If there’s any unpleasantries in there, after an hour those unpleasantries will drive you insane. They drive me insane, at least.”