Free River Studios, Livingston

The listening room

This is what is actually in the listening room and plugged in. You can hear any of it for nothing, by appointment, on the third floor at 215 E. Lewis Street in Livingston. There is no shop window and no walk-in hours.

Almost none of it is for sale. It is our own gear, it is what we reach for when we want to know whether something new is any good, and a couple of pieces could not be bought at any price because they were never made in numbers.

What is in the room now

HeadRoom BlockHead

The first balanced dual monoblock headphone amplifier anybody built. Two complete amplifiers per channel, an absurd object, and the reason a lot of people think about headphone amplification the way they do. It is old and it still humbles things that cost more.

HeadRoom Max Balanced, prototype

I designed this one at HeadRoom and it never reached production. There is no review of it, no measurement of it, and no way to buy one. You can put it on your head in Livingston.

Grace Design m920

Our reference, and the one we would not give up. Inputs for everything, two headphone outputs, headphone and speaker level controlled separately, and a signal path honest enough that when something sounds wrong we know it is not this.

U-Turn Orbit and Pluto

The record end of the room.

Headphones

Sennheiser HD 800 and HD 650, Oppo PM-3, FiiO FT-1, and a Grado SR60x and RS1x. Several of those are discontinued and one is nearly twenty years old.

Microphones, too

The room is a working recording studio the rest of the week, so there are microphones and interfaces in it, and they are as available to listen through as anything else here. If you are buying a microphone and want to hear it against three others before you commit, that is a perfectly good reason to book an hour. Ask us what is in the cupboard, because the answer changes.

Jamey Warren at the desk at Free River Studios in Livingston, seen from behind with both hands raised, a mixer on the screen between two studio monitors and racks of outboard gear to the right

The room is a reference, not a showroom

It is the set of things we know so completely that we can tell what a new piece of gear is doing by listening through them. Some of what we sell will be here, some of it will not, and which is which changes from week to week.

So if you are coming to hear something specific, ask before you drive. We will tell you what we can put in front of you and what we cannot.

Recently, in the room