Brian Slattery Photo
Cortigiano at Take 5.
For owner Ralph Cortigiano, Saturday’s last day of business at Take 5 Audio isn’t a memorial. It’s a victory lap.
Take 5 has been in business for 42 years and is an anchor of its block of Whitney Avenue.
But this isn’t a story about business being driven out by advances in technology, or a local operation falling to a chain. It’s about a man retiring after a good long run and selling a business to someone else, who’s moving its location.
As Cortigiano wrote on Take 5’s website, it will “continue and expand as a business, in Middlebury, CT. We are selling Take 5 Audio to an audiophile with wide and varied business experience, Dr. Dean Yimoyines. Dean will incorporate Take 5 Audio into one of his existing businesses, Middlebury Furniture & Home Design. He is building a new Take 5 Audio store within his 52,000-square-foot business,” in Middlebury.
“The past couple years I’ve been looking for someone to buy who will enjoy what I do,” Cortigiano said in an interview Thursday. He found that man in Yimoyines.
“Adding an entertainment section to his furniture business — it’s a perfect fit,” Cortigiano said.
As he wrote, Cortigiano expects that Yimoyines “will continue our tradition of better music and video systems, expertise, and customer service.” That begins with retaining both of Take 5’s sales and installation managers, Bob Carissimi and Mirek Frankiewicz, who have been working with Take 5 for over 20 years and will continue to do so. Just not in New Haven.
“I didn’t know it would be this hectic,” Cortigiano said of selling and moving the business amid the bustle Thursday in his space at 105 Whitney.
“Everybody here has to be taken care of,” he said, from employees to ongoing clients. The deadline is even tighter than usual. “We have to have all our Christmas installations finished by the 14th,” in time for Cortigiano to be home for the holidays.
It was nearing the end of another week — but also a chance for Cortigiano, at the age of 68, to reflect on how he got into audio in the first place, and found a lasting niche in a changing industry.
From Hobby To Business
“Loosely, it’s a lifestyle,” Cortigiano said of being an audiophile, or in plain English (as he prefers), a music lover.
Growing up in Waterbury, “I had stereo systems as soon as I had a paper route.” He got hooked on rock music and particularly the British Invasion bands — the Beatles, the Who, Led Zeppelin — listening on WACN, a commercial-free underground rock station. He started haunting record stores, too. “In those days, in the record stores, you could actually listen to the music,” he said. He started collecting 45s and listening to those.
First, “it was your mom and dad’s consoles.” Then it was his own.
By the time he was in college at Central Connecticut State, where he majored in history, “I had a beautiful stereo,” he said.
He threw a party. The sound quality at it caught the ear of a fellow partygoer who worked at Fred Locke Stereo, a New England chain of stores that dealt in high-end audio equipment from 1973 to 1994. Cortigiano got offered a job. He met his business partners working at Fred Locke. They opened Take 5 Audio a few years later, in 1977.
For Cortigiano, the rise of high-end stereo equipment went hand in hand with the rise of experimentation in rock music, from Led Zeppelin to Pink Floyd and other bands that began to push the capability of stereo systemsf. “There was a need for it,” he said. “You couldn’t listen to that music on a transistor radio. You had to have a decent system to hear it.”
But as the market matured, Cortigiano, “tastes change. Tastes become eclectic.” Audiophiles branched out into classical music, jazz, and other genres. They began to expect stereo systems that reproduced those recordings at the highest fidelity possible — perhaps even to the point that it was possible to close your eyes to imagine that you were hearing it live.
Take 5 was there to serve, eventually working almost entirely by referral, which it does to this day.
“If you do a good job, they’ll tell maybe one or two people,” Cortigiano said. “If you do a really good job, they’ll tell everyone they know.”
Take 5’s niche meant that the business evolved naturally as tastes changed. At first, it was strictly about fidelity. “We didn’t care what it looked like” — the speakers, the consoles, the various components to the systems. But that changed. “Then it had to look good. It had to be smaller and better looking. Then the equipment had to be housed in cabinets.”
That’s how Take 5 moved to installing systems in people’s homes, sometimes as those homes were being built.
The home theater trend in the 1980s only intensified their business. “People’s TVs keep getting bigger,” Cortigiano said. “It’s America.” Take 5 helped new customers design their theaters and helped ongoing clients integrate the visual components into their existing systems.
The business evolved further as clients wanted to be able to control music systems from room to room. In new homes, they installed systems side by side with lights and alarm systems.
“Today’s trend,” he said, “is more portability and ease of use, which is wireless.” That allows more people to do it themselves, though Take 5 still found plenty of clients for its expertise. As radio and CDs have given way to streaming, Take 5 has created systems that integrate this as well.
Take 5 also responded to people who still want a fuller sonic experience. It starts with the bass. “Bass is the foundation of emotion,” Cortigiano said. “That impact of air on your chest — that’s the thrill.” And for many of Take 5’s clients, that’s still important.
Cortigiano is thus one person who isn’t surprised by the resurgence of vinyl, for the “past 11 years,” he said. “It’s a cool thing. It’s a counterculture thing. My daughter finally asked me for a turntable.”
But from his perspective, vinyl never entirely vanished, either. “It’s always been there to some degree,” and his customers have been among those keeping it alive, playing records and maintaining and upgrading their audio systems.
“If you’re a person who buys $50,000 speakers, chances are you bought $25,000 speakers before that, and $15,000 speakers before that,” Cortagiano said. “People want their music to sound better, so they buy better equipment, and that explains 42 years.”
Kitchen Opera
Cortigiano is looking forward to retiring. “It’s time,” he said. His wife retired seven years ago after 33 years as a reading specialist in New Haven’s public schools; the last school she worked at was John S. Martinez Elementary School in Fair Haven. His children are adults. He has grandchildren now between the ages of 2 and 4.
“It’s time to spend time with my wife and kids,” he said. As grandparents, “we get to relive the things we were too busy to enjoy as much as we could have” — say, from running a successful audio store. Now, he said, “you have the time to do it, and you can see it clearly.”
Cortigiano remains as in love with music as ever. “It was never a business,” he said. “It was a hobby that we turned into a business.” And “culturally, I don’t think there’s anything that binds us together more than music,” he continued.
He listens to music in the house all the time. He listens to opera when he cooks sauce because “that’s what my grandmother did.” And “I don’t think I’m unusual because I own a stereo store,” he added. “Everyone likes music. We don’t get together at the holidays and read books. We’re not painting to people’s birthdays. We play music. It’s something we need.”
Take 5’s last day of business at 105 Whitney Ave. is this Saturday, Dec. 14. Its new location will be at 1101 Southford Rd., Middlebury.
Living in NH over the course of some forty years, I always look forward to spending some time in several special places, mostly downtown — some remain, some soon to be departed and some are simply memories of time well spent, such as The old Yale Bookstore, The Heidelberg, Kavanaghs, David Dean Smith, the Brass Button, Cutlers, etc. to name just a few. All of these stores had things of great interest to me — good food, good reads, good music, unique, inviting atmospheres and of course, some excellent merchandise (sometimes way too expensive for my budget). But, beyond what these stores sold, and more importantly, all of these places had great service and gracious, personable, wonderful people, be they the owners or the staff. Take Five was a truly great store, (repeat — sometimes way too expensive for my budget). Over the years I purchased several pieces of equipment from "Take Five", some of which are over twenty-five years old and still working. Ralph Cortigiano, a real gentleman, was a great person to talk to, about audio equipment, about music, about the sound of music, and about the wonderful town of New Haven. "Take Five" will be missed. Thanks, Ralph, enjoy!