I saw my friend at CES (yes, I went for the day for a project not related to and had a little time to see the barely-there displays on the 29 th floor of The Venetian Hotel) and he taught me about this new world of audio goodness. It is very unclear how to get invited into the exclusive audiophile club. Logistics also suggest that you need two reel-to-reel machines to make a copy, thus raising the barrier to entry. If you wanted to make a copy, by definition you are getting farther and farther away from the analog master tape, thus a deterrent in the basic nature of the club. The reel-to-reel tape decks themselves aren’t easy to find, and require a certain amount of care and long-term maintenance that is found more in a recording studio than in an audiophile’s rig. Hell, getting access to high quality blank tape isn’t easy anymore. By design, copying said tapes can be tricky, if not a downright pain in the ass. The idea was to make backup, one-off copies of meaningful music and preserve them while also enjoying what is a damn-close-to-the-master-tape copy of an album. The name-less club deals in quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape copies of very significant music, and has been around since the launch of the Compact Disc in 1983.
I just heard about a clandestine, loosely associated crew that has been quietly operating on a global basis with significant ties to the recording industry. It is the ultimate in home theater, luxury, and convenience, and unless you hit Powerball and decide to invest in movies (I’ve tried it and I highly recommend against it), you likely aren’t getting into this exclusive little club–no matter how cool it is.īut what if there was a similar club for Audiophiles? A way to get analog master tape right into your life? I will warn you that, much like flying in a private jet the first time, you will never be the same after experiencing The Bel Air Circuit experience. These people don’t have home theaters like you and I do, by the way they have actual movie theaters in their homes, complete with projection rooms, fully vented $100,000 4K Christie or Barco projectors, and whatnot. Yes, these lucky few (I think there are a little over 500 people in the club now), mostly in return for investing in movies, get the key code and/or hard drive for a new, first run movie in 4K, complete with all of the theater-quality, object-based surround sound to watch from say a Friday through a Sunday night. If not, it’s basically a somewhat hush-hush club that gives some of the richest and most connected people in the world access to first run movies in their home on a day-and-date basis. If you read my articles over at, you might be hip to the crazy concept called The Bel Air Circuit.
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