A Piece of My Life in B48

By Dylan Scarzafava

Growing up as Anthony Scarzafava’s son meant spending a lot of time around paintings in various states of completion.

I watched my dad paint for most of my life, often with what I would have called “avant-garde” music playing in the background. In our second house in Teaneck, he had an old two-channel stereo system that filled the room while he worked. I still remember the sound of that space as much as I remember watching the paintings take shape.

I also grew up knowing that my father has a hard time throwing away anything he finds visually interesting.

Over the years, I started trying to contribute to that collection.

As my own career developed in the audio industry, I would occasionally bring him things from my world: convention passes, show booklets, advertisements, packaging and other scraps that I thought might catch his attention. I would hand them over without much explanation and hope that some strange piece of audio-industry ephemera might eventually find its way into a painting.

I had seen him save computer components, photographs, printed material and all kinds of other objects, so I figured there was always a chance.

One contribution, however, turned out to be considerably more expensive than the others.

At work, I had been dealing with a broken STAX SR-009 electrostatic headphone that had been sent to us by our distributor in the UK. The SR-009 is not an ordinary headphone. Introduced in 2011, it is an important piece of high-end headphone history—both because of its engineering and because of what it represented at the top end of personal audio.

Since the headphone was already considered broken, I decided to take part of it apart for educational video content.

Electrostatic headphones work very differently from conventional dynamic headphones, and most people will never have an opportunity to see one of their transducers disassembled. I wanted to show what was inside.

Once I had finished, I was left with pieces of a very unusual piece of engineering.

And naturally, I thought of my father.

One of the components I gave him was part of the circular plastic assembly that held the electrostatic diaphragm in place. To me, it was a piece of headphone engineering. To him, apparently, it was something else entirely.

For years, I had been quietly trying to funnel physical pieces of my own life into his collection of materials. Beyond the childhood drawings of mine he had already saved, I wanted something from my adult life to make its way into his work.

Eventually, it did.

I discovered it during the opening of B48.

Looking at one of the paintings, I suddenly recognized part of the STAX headphone. The circular assembly that once helped hold an electrostatic transducer together had become a frame around an old computer CPU, positioned on the face of a clock.

There it was.

A work from Anthony Scarzafava’s B48 series incorporating part of the STAX SR-009 transducer assembly.

After years of handing my father pieces of my world and wondering whether any of them would ever become useful to him, something finally had.

The object had completely changed context. It was no longer a headphone component. It was part of one of his paintings, mixed together with technology, memory, discarded objects and the other accumulated pieces that make up B48.

There is, however, one final part of the story.

Months later, I was asked if we could send the STAX headphone back.

Apparently, our distributor was going to receive manufacturer credit for returning it.

That was when I had to explain that the headphone was no longer exactly…serviceable.

Part of it was now permanently attached to one of my father’s paintings.

So, sorry Mark.

It turned out to be a fairly expensive misunderstanding on my part.

But I also have a hard time regretting it.

For most of my life, I had watched my father collect fragments of the world around him and eventually transform some of them into artwork. This time, one of those fragments came directly from my world.

A piece of headphone history became a piece of Scarzafava family history.

And after years of trying to sneak some part of my adult life into my dad’s artistic space, I finally succeeded.