Inside Track: Ricardo Franassovici

Posted on 24th June, 2022
Inside Track: Ricardo Franassovici

David Price talks to the famous founder of Absolute Sounds about going his own way… 

"Music is one of the healthiest addictions I have", says Ricardo Franassovici with a smile. I can believe him – this man is one of the hi-fi world's best-known lovers of life, shall we say? Despite nearly fifty years in the industry, he's still absolutely in thrall to music, across pretty much all the genres – and of course, the equipment with which to enjoy it.

Most folk will know him as the man behind Absolute Sounds, one of the UK's most prestigious hi-fi distributors for the best part of half a century. This is not just any old reseller of imported audio equipment; over time, Ricardo has carefully and continuously curated the Absolute Sounds portfolio to form one of the most impressive collections of hi-fi brands worldwide. 

He didn't build Absolute Sounds up to what it is today by hanging around and basking in the reflected glory of others, however. He fought tooth-and-claw to get his company to where it is now, launching it at a time when the UK hi-fi press had next-to-no time for high-end American hi-fi. Veteran audiophiles will remember that in the late nineteen seventies and early eighties, the British hi-fi scene was crazy for Linn Sondek turntables and Naim amplifiers – and most other brands seemed not to get a look in. Yet through Absolute Sounds, Ricardo offered UK audiophiles a genuine alternative. 

THE EARLY YEARS

As a young man, Ricardo was heavily involved in promoting rock bands in Portugal, Brazil and France. "I worked at record labels including Warner, Electra/Asylum and RCA before becoming head of PR at Ariola's Paris office. Later, I decided to move out of Paris because the scene was getting stuffy; I was asked to open a London office, so moved to the UK. Being young, newly married and in the rock business didn't combine well, so I left the industry and started Absolute Sounds in 1978, fuelled by my passion to seek out the finest equipment for musical enjoyment at home. Some of my former colleagues from the music business joked, 'Ah, Ricardo, you have embraced high fidelity', referring as much to how the hi-fi business might contrast with the music industry's party-loving reputation as to my passion for high-fidelity sound!" 

The British hi-fi world of the late nineteen seventies was very parochial – with a strong bias to domestic UK brands and a highly supportive press. "I knew from experience that the hi-fi world had more to offer than what was available in the UK at the time, and that gave me the drive", explains Ricardo. "I thank Ivor from Linn and Julian from Naim for accepting the competition I brought, because they took it on board, and it was very stimulating for all of us. Indeed, we were often seen, the three of us, having a drink together at the bars in shows. So, it wasn't like we were going to kill each other personally – but we were trying to kill each other in the market! It gave me a lot of energy. Experience told me there was another way of hearing music, not just their way…"

Ricardo brought his music industry background to bear in his promotional activities. "We were not shy about loading vans and going to hi-fi shows all around the UK in the late seventies, from Scotland to Cheshire to Manchester to Bristol to London. So, I guess that with the help of the UK magazines that weren't completely locked into 'Flat Earth' thinking, and all those hi-fi shows, we started growing nicely. Originally, we brought in very small brands like Jeweltone and Koetsu moving coil cartridges, then Counterpoint and Precision Fidelity valve lines. Then we had the fabulous Beveridge loudspeakers, Threshold, Krell, and so on. We grew organically."

He says that the British hi-fi market at that time was "provincial", which is one of Ricardo's more diplomatic turns of phrase. The truth is that there was an awful lot of groupthink among the manufacturers, dealers, magazines and indeed specialist hi-fi buyers. For example, anyone who championed tube amplifiers back then was regarded with equal scepticism to people who now preach about the dangers of 5G cellphone masts. "Yeah, it was almost embarrassing, the view about valves. Valves are not reliable, valves cannot play music, and so on", he remembers.

Audio Research REF160M
Audio Research REF160M Mono Amplifier

So as well as being a distributor of high-end hi-fi systems, Ricardo found himself countering a lot of the received hi-fi wisdom of that time – and an unwitting spokesman perhaps for those who didn't worship the turntables, amplifiers and loudspeakers that much of the UK press proselytised about. "Our breakthrough at Absolute Sounds was to bring in Audio Research, Magnepan and Oracle. It was an interesting chapter in my company's development. Oracle let us crack open the high-end UK turntable market, and I think Linn's Ivor Tiefenbrun was frustrated about it. I knew this deck was fantastic and I passionately demonstrated its virtues, but while some of the UK press recognised its talents, others refused to accept it. All the controversy in the press actually helped me to promote the product at a time when the Linn LP12 was very powerful."

Ricardo adds: "By the way, I do respect the Sondek even today – in certain systems people will get great pleasure from it. But I think there was something of a cult, an almost religious zeal attached to it as well. So, with Oracle we went head-to-head with Linn, and with Krell we went head-to-head with Naim. I was very competitive. I would not be told how to listen to music by the more myopic members of the UK hi-fi press – they were just fixated on one way of doing things, a little brainwashed perhaps. Their minds were closed to what the rest of the world was doing. I had ten years of live music business background, so I had a very strong understanding of what sounded right…"

By the way, for many years I aspired very much to the customer loyalty that Naim's Julian Vereker had gained for his products. My competition was never the Tom, Dick and Harry, man-in-a-van importers – I was influenced by the structure that B&W and Naim were offering their clients, and I aspired very much to that. It inspired Absolute Sounds to offer a service that's up to the level of this investment.

At that time in the early eighties, Ricardo says that some of the best sounds he heard were through a big pair of Apogee or Soundlab speakers, with Krell or Audio Research amplification, respectively. However, he began to think it was all getting too hi-fi. "It was a bit like life through rose-tinted glasses, everything – even Led Zeppelin – started sounding like Nat King Cole! We decided to experiment with other components including cables, getting rid of the biwiring bullshit, with good isolation platforms and racks, to recreate what the engineer is actually sculpting, rather than making it sound warmer and more rose-tinted. Nowadays we try to get rid of as much noise, resonance and distortion as possible so that people hear the music, not the equipment."

HERE AND NOW

Nowadays, Ricardo is still spreading the word about high-quality hi-fi with his characteristic evangelical zeal. "Hi-fi today is a word most people don't have in their vocabularies", he tells me. "Most modern audio systems are very lifestyle-oriented, made by engineers, following a particular blueprint about what the specs should be. Very few are soothing and musically correct. They are painting by numbers, the shape, the size, the features – whereas about ninety-five percent of them don't convey music in the correct way, it's like music has been sterilised."

He continues: "People are moving towards convenience. I have never seen iTunes, Spotify and all that as a bad thing, as it's a way to get more people involved in music. But what I am saying is stop wearing the cheap sandals, move up to another level and enjoy better music! It depresses me when people come to me and want to start playing music through their iPhone, but I understand that's all they know – and respect them for wanting to find something better. I just say to them that it's a bit like wine – once you start experiencing these colossally good wines, it's hard to go back!"

I notice that music doesn't generally have the same effect on the younger generation as it has on us, maybe because they don't have access to great systems to play it on. They would be engulfed in that stream of beautiful music that would change their mindset and their mood. Music on a great system has a wonderfully relaxing effect, a healing effect on mind and spirit. Music can be distracting, in a very positive way, but can also help your mind to focus and enhance your mood. I would encourage manufacturers to bring in some proper listeners, from the music community perhaps, to help make their systems truly sound like music.

Absolute Sounds Showroom
Absolute Sounds Showroom

Ricardo argues – I think rightly – that music has a supernatural ability to touch people. "It can reach any layer of society. Whether you are an expert or not, music comes and grabs you if it's properly conveyed", he tells me. "People think, "oh, we don't have the ears to hear the differences", but it's not true – everyone can hear the difference. We have an enormous archive of music throughout the world, and an obligation to share it with people in its true form."

For Ricardo, the problem is two-fold. First, he thinks that whilst there are a lot of specialist hi-fi manufacturers around, only a fairly small percentage of them – regardless of the price level they sell at – rarely take the musical end result seriously. The second worry is that the buying process for the customer is often a hit-and-miss affair, resulting in an ensemble of poorly matched or average-sounding components.

Wilson Audio Sasha DAW Loudspeakers
Wilson Audio Sasha DAW Loudspeakers

The process of acquiring a perfectly tailored music system for your home is like going to a consultant to have your clothes made. Each part of the system chain is a separate specialisation requiring specific skills from its maker. In other words, the amplifier guy isn't going to be the loudspeaker guy, and the digital source guy is definitely not going to be the analogue guy and vice versa. Look at it this way – amplifiers are a bit like going to a tailor, loudspeakers are like going to a shoemaker, and the source could be like having a shirt custom made. So, trust your consultant to assemble these systems and do not accept a proposal from a single brand that is a jack of all trades and master of none. It's a bit like getting a great piano maker to make an electric guitar; all these skills take many years to acquire. One-make systems are more like commercial ego trips – companies trying to show they can make everything without involving other brands. Absolute Sounds doesn't deal with the 'jacks'; only the 'masters'!

Ricardo sees his role – as one of the world's longest-established high-end hi-fi importers – as a kind of curator of excellent quality products, at a range of price points. His brands start with affordable audiophile names like Copland and PrimaLuna and span right up to ultra-high-end products from the likes of Audio Research, Dan D'Agostino, Dartzeel, dCS, Magico, Transparent and Wilson Audio. "At Absolute Sounds, we've assembled components that fit the aforementioned criteria of a tailor, a shoemaker and so on; our systems remove any layers of 'electronicity', that awful layer of artifice that many components suffer from."

THEORY AND PRACTICE

Fascinatingly, Ricardo has invented a word to describe something that I think is very real and tangible with many of the hi-fi products on sale today. 'Electronicity' is what he calls the 'hi-fi virus', which gets into systems through the use of averagely engineered or poorly matched components. Ricardo says this manifests itself as a layer of electronic noise and artifice that is absent in the finest, carefully assembled systems, which reveal the music in its true form and enable us to connect with it emotionally.

Electronicity is a rather metaphysical sounding term, but don't let that put you off – I think many of us recognise it when we hear hi-fi systems that seem to tick a lot of boxes (i.e. power, detail, tonal smoothness) yet simply aren't musically communicative. "At Absolute Sounds, we are noise-busters – removing all electronicity from systems and allowing the music to flow," says Ricardo, with the zeal of a sonic superhero fighting his arch-enemy, audio equipment that fails to do justice to the music!

Dan D'Agostino Amplifier
Dan D'Agostino Momentum Amplifier

There are two main culprits, in Ricardo's view. First are equipment manufacturers themselves, which engineer 'products' whilst ignoring the 'art', failing to properly voice their wares. Second, you can end up with electronicity in your system by being sold poorly matched components by hi-fi dealers, who may target easy sales of components based on things like press awards without fully considering system synergy or understanding the requirements of the customer.

"If tomorrow, I want to experience a great cigar," he says, "I'm not going to choose one myself, I'm going to go to an expert – and say, 'what is a great cigar, which is the one that's going to give me a great experience?' It's only when I've smoked fifty that I can say to him, 'Listen, maybe this one was a little bit this way or that' – and it's the same with hi-fi… I think of great audio equipment as musical instruments, playing music back in the home in a way that captures the whole of the original performance – the detail, the character, the spirit, the ambience – whether the recording was made in a studio, or a symphonic hall, or an opera house. With a great audio system, the experience of music becomes greater."

Magico S7 Loudspeakers
Magico S7 Loudspeakers

Interestingly, although Ricardo's stock-in-trade is selling expensive hi-fi, sometimes his choices can seem parsimonious compared to some high-end distributors I've visited, in countries such as Japan, for example. "I think an intelligently assembled hi-fi system delivering a high quality of sound can be obtained for around £15,000 – this is the level at which you can start to achieve low electronicity if a system is well thought through. Of course, you can also pay more and get a much worse sound if the system is poorly chosen. It's about balance and synergy – don't expect one expensive component or cable to solve problems by itself. If there are issues somewhere else in the signal chain, it may only make things worse."

Copland CTA408 Integrated Valve Amplifier
Copland CTA408 Integrated Valve Amplifier

Ricardo tells me: "It is a balancing act, a bit like cooking a great recipe – you don't put too much of this or too little of that. In terms of what people spend on cars, kitchens, bathrooms, etc., then £15,000 is not elitist I think. In the world of high-end luxury goods, I think cigars, wine, food and hi-fi are in the same category – we go for experiences; the experience comes first, and the money comes second. I think things like cars and jewellery are completely different, they're more about showing off that you have status. So, you drive around the King's Road with a car that goes 170mph because it feeds your ego. That's the wrong approach for me, these are not our people!"

It's all about unlocking a world of experience, then. "You will find there are a lot of cigar smokers in our world – you get a beautiful piece of music, you prepare your rum and light up your cigar. You don't have to do it like that – the rum and cigar are not obligatory! But they are complementary experiences, and you excite all these senses at the same time. They get that mental ambience that plays such a big role in the experience. Please, it's all about the experience. And at least with a great audio system, you can return to it the next day, whereas the cigar and the wine are all gone! It's all about unlocking a world of musical experience."

Transparent Audio Cables
Transparent Audio Magnum Opus Cables

Ricardo points out that 'bad' audio systems can make music sound boringly 'pleasant' (as opposed to engaging) or irritatingly 'hard'. "When the sound is overly pleasant, I call it the Nat King Cole effect, because everything sounds romantic and sweet. Equipment is engineered to sound this way, to mask the electronicity. It may sound 'okay' across all kinds of music, but it will never set your heart racing and it makes everything sound the same – homogenised. A great audio system will reveal the true character of a recording – from Neil Young to Mozart, from Massive Attack to Jay-Z, you can experience all of these with a good audio system, and you don't need to have half a million pounds to spend. I could put together something really good at around £15,000 – and the pleasure is immense when you have a good system. Synergy is so important!"

PrimaLuna Amplifier
PrimaLuna EVO 300 Tube Preamplifier

FAMILY VALUES

Ricardo says he is very proud of the family of brands that is Absolute Sounds. "I see myself as an impresario, I go around the world discovering people, put them through a vetting system. We're responsible for the strength of Krell on an international basis, we're partly responsible for making Audio Research known worldwide, we were the first to discover Sonus faber, we were the first to explore Devialet's amp technology and present it to the world – we're delighted to have helped companies become very successful. We'd like to be seen as the keepers of Bosendorfer pianos, or Guarneri violins, or Gibson guitars – you know, the original instruments." He speaks lovingly of Dan D'Agostino – "who has kept to his philosophy and now has a very successful company in his own name", and Dartzeel in Switzerland – "which is the perfect instrument maker, by far the best manufacturer there." 

While Ricardo appreciates the role of the hi-fi press, he says its guidance should only be taken so far when it comes to purchasing decisions. "Sometimes buying solely off reviews is a false economy," he tells me, "and I think many reviewers would admit that because they're not claiming to put together a system – they are generally reviewing a component in isolation. The better reviewers explain in which context they reviewed it so that the person can understand it. Reviews should be used as an entry point, but then you need to go immediately to an expert dealer or consultant. Tell them I am prepared to spend so much, this is my room, what can you do to make it an enchanting place to listen to music? I always say, just listen to your heart. Do you feel anything? Does it give you the thrill of that live transcription, or not? Don't be afraid to be radical – if a system doesn't give you that emotion it's not the system for you, no matter how good people tell you the individual components are!"

FUTURE SOUNDS

Having built a highly successful empire of sorts, Ricardo is now thinking hard about what the future has in store. "I wonder whether the mainstream end of the audio industry will still be here in the same format in the next ten years; perhaps not, because that's going to be sucked down by the Amazons, the Apples, and all that – but I think the high-end audio industry as a sector will continue to prosper. The desire of passionate people to invest in exceptional experiences will remain." 

He's a little equivocal about streaming, however, echoing his sentiments about creating an experience and making the appreciation of music through a fine hi-fi system a kind of ritual. "While streaming is very important in this day and age, and can sound fantastic with the right equipment and source material, one of its issues – and this is a personal view – is that there's no physical contact with the music. In contrast, the opening of a great album is like opening a great bottle of wine. You get ready, get in the mood, there's a ritual to it – it makes listening to music more of an event. It's a lovely pleasure, a genuine treat to have in one's life, especially in tough times – it can transport you to another time and place, and enhance your state of mind."


Absolute Sounds Showroom

Indeed, he's a dyed-in-the-grain vinylista. When the two of us sat down to play some music in his listening room, it was to his Continuum turntable that he turned – and not his £75,000 streaming digital front end. "I have lived on several continents, in several countries, but my vinyl has always followed me – and as it grows in age it becomes even more interesting. A casual Spotify user might not understand, but vinyl remains a vital source of pleasure for people who want physical and emotional contact with the music they love", he tells me.

Even though Ricardo has been in the hi-fi industry for most of his adult life – nearly fifty years – I came away touched by his passion. He has a childlike fascination for music and the process of playing it properly. His three all-time favourite LP records are Bill Withers' Just as I Am, Shuggie Otis's Inspiration Information and Mozart A Paris. Allied to this is an evangelical desire to communicate why he loves it so much. It's frankly not normal for someone who's old enough to retire to put his feet up and forget about everything!

"Try to get some space back into your environment," he tells me. "Create a musical space – and one that people can share, by the way. People should be in touch with great albums – oh and please young ones remember these are all part of history, just like buildings and palaces, they are things you should be in touch with. I don't want to be like where we were with our parents, who said "kids, your music is rubbish". No, you enjoy it but please don't be restricted – just discover what a great jazz ensemble is, what a great classical music performance is, it's what has made the world go round!"

AND IN THE END

Ricardo concludes: "The great thing about hi-fi is that a well put together hi-fi system can give you so much pleasure. I was saying to some of the guys who work for me, "stop watching BBC news and go and listen to some music", because music can bring a profound change in your emotional state. I am a happy person because I have been fortunate enough to have always inhabited the world of music. When I started promoting rock concerts, I was seventeen or eighteen years old. Ever since then I have been in direct contact with artists, collectors and music aficionados – and I am very pleased to help music fans connect with the music they love."

For more information visit Absolute Sounds

David Price's avatar
David Price

David started his career in 1993 writing for Hi-Fi World and went on to edit the magazine for nearly a decade. He was then made Editor of Hi-Fi Choice and continued to freelance for it and Hi-Fi News until becoming StereoNET’s Editor-in-Chief.

Posted in: Hi-Fi | Industry

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