"Where to Find it"

Audio Equipment

I got the dog, but my ex got the stereo. Where can I go for a new audio system and not be made to feel like an airhead?

The experts at Innovative Audio (150 East 58th Street; 634-4444) love customers who haven’t a clue about stereo equipment. No, not because they want to take advantage of them. Such customers “trust what they hear and are not swayed by brand names or the advice of friends,” says Elliott Fishkin, who, after 25 years in Brooklyn, has opened a Manhattan outpost with five elegant listening rooms. It’s the friendliest, least forbidding of the city’s stereo shops. Tell the staff your budget (no amount is too piddling) and they’ll pick out, play, and help you decide on components to match it. Innovative is also the purveyor of equipment by well-known companies (Pioneer, Sony, B&W) and more esoteric ones (Spectral, Naim, Wilson Audio).