Tri Mai is a bachelor, though not of the beer-and-babe-poster variety. He keeps his South Minneapolis foursquare house immaculate. Precision and aesthetics rule the roost in equal measure, and this balance is everywhere. It’s in the play of light through three stained-glass panels suspended in his front windows. It’s in the careful arrangement of living room chairs, all nine of them, into intimate groupings.
At thirty-five, Mai runs his own business building high-end audio equipment in his basement and selling it worldwide. He’s also an accomplished culinary artist, creating savory delights with little more exertion than other guys might put into heating a can of chili. Still, he hands me chicken wings and cheese bread in the lid of a to-go carton before we settle in to spin some records.
Mai’s stereo occupies as much space as a grand piano or the couch a future girlfriend might want to move in. Two speakers masquerading as bookcases anchor the room. Each is driven by a power amplifier the size of a steamer trunk. A rack of brushed steel components, topped with a granite slab, provides a solid foundation for the turntable.
Watching the needle descend onto the first record of the evening, I am hypnotized by the tonearm silently tracing the groove. I’m conjuring images from under the hood of a sports car as the dulcet voice of Annie Lennox drifts out into the room. Every nuance is audible: the soft intake of breath, even the creak of shoes on the floor.
“Women have all sorts of ways to be flashy: shoes, jewelry, hairstyles, clothes,” Mai muses. “But what do men have? Cars, watches, gadgets—that’s it. Strength is no longer the essential trait, so either our brain, wallet, or dick is bigger.” He gestures at his stereo and says, “I guess these are my beautiful peacock feathers.”
The amplifiers he built for himself glow with electrostatic tubes like a peacock’s iridescent courtship display. But the prime feather in Mai’s fan, the flagship product of his business, is the Tri-Planar Mark VII Precision Tonearm, or simply, the Tri-Planar Ultimate. Among audiophiles it is considered one of the best in the world. One reviewer for the Absolute Sound magazine complained in jest, “Hell hath no fury like a reviewer scorned by a component that refuses to let him down in at least one or two areas.” You can purchase your own Tri-Planar Ultimate from Mai’s website (www.triplanar.com), but at four thousand dollars, turntable not included, it’s not exactly for the average listener.
Mai, however, would love to see that change. “Too many people waste their money on crap,” he says, lowering the arm onto another LP. “Why not spend a little more on something well made, take care of it, and have it last the rest of your life? Everything I make will last a hundred years.”
When Mai was ten years old, he boarded a boat and left his family and his native Vietnam behind. Faced with little opportunity besides mandatory military conscription at fifteen, he set out in search of a better life. After spending more than a year at a refugee camp in the Philippines, he was finally welcomed into a foster family in Coon Rapids, Minnesota.
“Myron and Thelma Nash showed me the good life,” he says. “They showed me unconditional love. If I ever get to heaven, it will surely be because of them.”
While he had some exposure to music from the Nashes—mostly in church—Mai admits he wasn’t really captivated until his freshman year at St. Olaf College. There he dated a German classical violist named Katrine who played him the first vinyl record he’d ever heard.
“It was Heaven or Las Vegas by the Cocteau Twins,” he laughs. “The sound was different from anything I’d heard before. It was fuller but incredibly subtle. It showed me that music could have a body. I was hooked.”
Over the next decade, vinyl addiction would take him into the Twin Cities’ burgeoning rave scene and through a two-year stint building amplifiers for Atma-Sphere Audio. Mai eventually earned a graduate degree in sculpture from MCAD, and ultimately ended up building tonearms with the inventor of the Tri-Planar, a watch-maker named Herbert Papier. When Papier retired in 1999, after a two-decade quest to perfect the Ultimate Tonearm, he handpicked Mai to be his successor.
“I’m privileged Herb had the confidence in me to pass on his business, that I’ve been able to make something out of it, something successful.” He pauses to set the needle on the last record of the evening. “I’ve set up a pretty nice life for myself. I’m surrounded by beauty.” He glances round the room. “Though I’ve been thinking I should get rid of one of these chairs and get a loveseat.”
—Sam Ridenour
Leave a Reply Cancel reply