This was the introductory email I received from this installment’s guest, Jesus (pronounced like a call to a Greek god—”Hey-Zeus!”): “Hello Robert, just read your [latest installment of “No, I Have the Best System…”] and loved it! I live in St Marguerite du lac Mason (in Quebec, north of Montreal), and I have my little system which I love! Hope we get in touch.” I imagined that little system having four, maybe five, components. So, imagine my surprise when the list he subsequently sent me was as long as an ancient scroll that had unfurled to the ground. Listed on it were over 25 components, including 6 subwoofers and 13 speakers, enough to accommodate Jesus’s 7.6.6 surround-sound Atmos system adjunct to his stereo.

When I wrote back and asked where he found the place to put all that stuff, he replied: “My house has become too small! We bought this house as a project to renovate it and we will start the construction of our new one next year. I will have a dedicated room for all this. In the meantime, I am taking a big part of our living room and wife is not very happy.” I bet.

“I will have a nice Japanese whisky ready!” he added, as if to entice me further. “‘Nice,” I thought. “A perk.” I packed my bags and set the controls for the heart of the sun—toward the bucolic Laurentian Mountains.

It was a maze-y drive to get there, all twists and turns on upward-slanted roads in a semi-forested area that eventually led into Jesus’s gated community. Greeting me at his home was Jesus himself, looking dapper in a perfectly fitting beret and handkerchief-bearing blue suit over a Maxell “Blown Away Guy” T-shirt. As we sauntered into his open-concept listening room, I got a flashback to his wife’s gripe. The stereo / home cinema setup takes up a good portion—all of it, really—of the couple’s living room. There were speakers everywhere! On the walls, floors, and ceiling. It was like staring at a shrunken version of the inside of the Las Vegas Sphere. I thought: ‘Man, Jesus’s wife is so lucky!’.

While I was keen to hear the surround-sound setup with music—for my visit, Jesus had set aside an Atmos Blue-Ray version Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon—my primary focus, for this article, was on the stereo side of things. Equipment-wise, that included a ToneWinner AD-1PA 2-channel amplifier, an Emotiva USP-1 preamplifier, a Graham Slee AMP 3 Fanfare phono stage, a Music Hall MMF-11.1 turntable with Hana ML cartridge, two SVS 1000 Pro subwoofers, a Sony 4K UHD Blu-Ray player, and a pair of Focal Electra 1038Be speakers (Jesus: “The Focals are my babies and I love their sound).

A native of Venezuela, Jesus immigrated to Canada in 2004. The first thing I asked, at his home, was when he got bit by the audio bug. “I was very young,” he said, handing me my glass of Japanese whisky (more like butterscotch—that’s how smooth it was). “My father, who listened a lot to music, was the first person who influenced me in my taste in music and audio. We had a very nice stereo at home that had an Optonica receiver and tape deck—do you know Optonica?” When I shook my head, he added, “It was a high-end range made by Sharp. We also had a Lenco turntable. I thought the sound was amazing, and I started buying records when I was 12 years old.

“Then my brother went to live in the States to study,” he said. “When he would return to Venezuela, twice a year, he brought music. He introduced me to Rush, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, and stuff like that.” Bobbing his head as if he was hearing the music for the first time again, he said: “I was like, okay, this is nice music. And the funny thing is, I couldn’t understand English. So, I used a dictionary, and I would translate the lyrics on the vinyl sleeves. That’s how I started to learn English.”

Following his love affair with his father’s system, Jesus experienced another pivotal moment in his audio awakening, again due to his US-based brother. “He came back with a JVC CD player. At the time, it was the best-selling CD player,” said Jesus. ”This was in the ‘80s, and I was the only one in my neighbourhood to have a CD player, so all my friends would come over and say, ‘hey, what is that?’. They were curious.

“So, after buying vinyl for 2-3 years,” Jesus said. “I switched to buying CDs. It’s only when I came to Canada that I started buying vinyl again. I worked in downtown Montreal, and I was always walking by this store that had a Thorens turntable in the window. I’d stop and look at it and say, ‘one day you’re going to be mine.’ And when I had the money, I bought it.

“The first vinyl I bought in Canada was Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms at HMV. After, I discovered the (record) store Aux 33 Tours on Mount-Royal. I used to go there all the time, but now that I live [in the Laurentians], I buy my vinyl mostly online.”

Did that mean that he listened more to vinyl now than digital? “It depends,” he said. “I do a lot of streaming—in the car, or with my family in the kitchen. It’s background music. To sit down and listen to streamed music? No, I can’t do that. For [serious listening], I listen to vinyl. I like the ritual of standing up, pulling out my vinyl from the shelf, taking it out of its sleeve, putting it on the platter. Sometimes, I clean my records. It’s a lot more personal than streaming.”

I asked how he chose his equipment. “I did research on the Internet,” he said. “I wanted to improve what I had, so I started looking around for speakers and I found the Focal Electra 1038Be. When I heard them, I was like, ‘wow’. They weren’t cheap but the quality is very good.”

I told him I very much liked the look of his component racks. “The guy who made them is from Quebec,” he said. “But I don’t think he makes them anymore. It wasn’t cheap, either, but I like the style.” I thought it enhanced the look of his system, much like how the clothes Jesus was wearing made him look spiffy.

“You know, everything costs money”, he said, glancing at his system. “Even the cables. You hear some people say that cables are very important. Others say, ‘nah, a cable’s a cable. Why do you spend $5000 on a cable when the cable in the wall isn’t a good cable?’ I’m in the middle. I have cables by AudioQuest, Klipsch, and Furutech—but $5000 for a cable?” He cocked a suspicious eye at me and said: “I don’t know. I think some companies take advantage of people.

“It’s also very subjective,” he added. “What may sound high-end to me may not sound high-end to you. And if you can’t hear the difference, you shouldn’t buy an expensive cable.”

Any good tweaks or accessories he could recommend?

“The PS Audio PowerPlay IPC-9000 AC conditioner. I used to sometimes hear a ‘ground’ buzz from my system and it stopped when I put it in. I also have a Panamax conditioner, but it’s nothing compared to the PS Audio. Again, the PS Audio wasn’t cheap, but I could hear the difference. The quality of the electricity here is very bad and the PS Audio helped a lot.”

Was he content now with the level of his system’s performance?

“I can tell you I’m happy with what I have,” he said.

So, no compulsion to upgrade anything?

“There are always upgrades,” he said.

Because there was something he wasn’t happy with?

“No, it just hits the nerves sometimes,” he said, making his hands tremble like those of a jonesing addict. “I need to, I need to, I need to. You know what I mean.

“For example, my Thorens turntable was good. I sold it. I replaced it with a Pro-Ject RPM 1 Carbon. Then I moved the Pro-Ject to my office system and bought the monster Music Hall 11.1.”

The Music Hall is a very nice ‘table, I told him.

“It’s a monster,” he replied, affectionately, making the Music Hall rig sound like a keeper. “It came with the carbon-fibre tonearm and I added a Hana ML cartridge. The sound is something. It’s like… it’s like this,” he said, raising his glass of Japanese whisky.

I asked what it was about his system that he liked best. “I like the deep bass the speakers deliver and just the quality of the sound. I had different speakers in my life, and I can tell you the sound quality now is ‘wow’—for me.”

I took a smooth sip of my whisky and plunked myself down on the listening couch. With his system in 2-channel mode, Jesus the emcee spun a series of silver and black discs. On a Miles Davis LP, I heard sweet, textured trumpet tone and a spacious, musically bold presentation. I heard power, drive, and a wall full of sound erected in front of me from a Depeche Mode CD. And on a Mobile Fidelity version of the first record Jesus bought in Canada, Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms, I heard a wealth of scintillating detail and instruments that popped out from the background with shape and aliveness. Over other tracks across different LPs and CDs, the most notable characteristic I would attribute to the system’s overall sound was its fullness—of notes, soundstage size, low-end energy, and an underlying sense of musical synergy.

I heard a similar fullness, but one very much different in the way the music was spatially distributed in space, after Jesus flicked on his Atmos surround-sound system with its six subs engaged and via a Blu-Ray Atmos disc played the pulsating heartbeat—actually, Nick Mason’s bass drum hits—that opens side 1 of Pink Floyd’s DSOTM. I felt myself submerged at the centre of it, with the heartbeat growing deeper and larger and then looming over me. “Money” was just as big and enveloping, with powerful bass and sound effects that clanged and spun and soared in a sphere around me—a shrunken Las Vegas Sphere. It was trippy, for sure.

By the end of it all, I was reminded of the 3-letter word Jesus evoked a couple of times before: ‘Wow’.

When I complimented his setup, Jesus smiled and nodded appreciatively, then said: “I will probably keep the Focals, but the rest of my system for sure I’m going to change.”

“Whaa?” I asked, taken aback. “You would only keep the speakers?”

“The speakers and maybe the ToneWinner amplifier, which replaced a McIntosh MC462.”

“You’d change the turntable?”

He shrugged. “I’d like to have an Oracle, or something like that.” Then, with a sheepish smile, he dropped his head forward, and mumbled something with the words ‘wife’ and ‘approve’ in it. I thought: ‘Did Jesus just say his wife approves? What a lucky guy!’.

Advice for readers?

“Go to the store and try several systems to see what you like,” he said. “Here in Canada, it’s easy—you can go to the store and say, ‘okay, I want to set up those Focals with this, or that’. If you buy often from the same store, you can get advantages, like returning equipment if you don’t like it. If you’re a good customer, they don’t want to lose you.”

If you have a system you’d like to talk about in our “No, I have the best system in the world!” series, let us know by dropping us a line here.