Quiz a hi-fi enthusiast about radical speaker design and you’re bound to get a disquisition on Oswalds Mill Audio. Known among the analog cognoscenti simply as OMA, this boutique company manufactures the kind of rarefied components that audiophiles drool over: 7-foot-tall loudspeakers with conical horns, glowing tube amps nestled in walnut chassis, and turntables with slate plinths as thick as phones books. It is here, in a 19th-century stone fortress in rural Pennsylvania filled with enough vintage audio hardware to stock a museum, that OMA founder Jonathan Weiss envisions, assembles, tests, and tweaks his next masterpiece.
Tour the Amazing Workspace of an Audio Gear Wizard
Enter the lair of speaker and audio component designer Jonathan Weiss, CEO of Oswalds Mill Audio.
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Reed Young
Groove Crush Weiss’ record collection is big. Conservative count: 12,000. His go-to reference discs for setting up a turntable system are Será Una Noche and La Segunda, both produced by Santiago Vazquez and Todd Garfinkle. In the jazz stacks, “Mood Indigo” from the reissue of Masterpieces by Ellington, paired with “a good mono cartridge,” gets a lot of play. Those giant horns, an OMA signature, are designed to work with Weiss’ low-wattage triode tube amps.
