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 a 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; in the foreground their oblivious host tweeks his hi-fi’s controls, a look of rapt absorption on his face.

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

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 tryouts were his new speakers, which, being large white orbs with a black oval, look like giant Felix the Cat eyes.

“Everyone got a pretty good chuckle out of them,” Firebaugh says.

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

Firebaugh, who hadn’t considered marketing the turntable, was deluged with orders and soon licensed the design to a company that pays him royalties. Thousands have been sold in 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 says, touching its platter, a massive disc of translucent plexiglass. He holds two patents on the turntable. One is for the tonearm, which is so smooth the needle just settles into the groove and goes to work.

Of course, not many people are especially familiar with turntables these days, because the compact disc has almost entirely supplanted records in the marketplace. Most major companies have stopped making them. Many stereo preamplifiers now don’t even come with phonograph inputs.

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

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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 says.

He grew up in 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 says.

He picked up an interest in physics while in the Air Force and eventually went 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 says. “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.”

Although 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 says, “The criterion I use is: If you experience musical satisfaction , you’ve arrived. There’s no way anybody knows where you’re going to re-create 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.

“So you go for musical satisfaction. On Thanksgiving Day, listening to Beethoven’s symphonies, I loved every millisecond of it.

“(But) 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.”