I opened Chelsea Audio in 1976 after my previous employer refused to let me buy into
his business. Being 26 years old and not having a clue what starting a business would
entail I figured I’d just start my own and show him!
As a full-on music obsessed child of the 60’s, I thought a business selling great stereo
components and showing customers how close the sound could be to a live performance
would be a dream come true. And it was!
Then in the late 70’s came car stereos and video. Video arrived in the form of the Sony
Betamax. It was the first video component other than a TV and they were sold at first in
stereo stores. Over time it morphed into Home Theaters and all the associated equipment.
Car stereos were exciting because it was an opportunity to replace AM/FM radios with a
single speaker for CD players with multi-channel amplifiers and multiple speakers with
subwoofers. We could show how great music reproduction could be in a car as well as
the home.
At one point we had three car stereo stores in Portland and three Audio Video stores.
As the big regional or national stores like Magnolia, Circuit City and Best Buy started
coming to town I decided I couldn’t outdo those guys on quantity of stores, but I could
outdo them on quality. That meant better products and more knowledgeable people.
About that time Custom Installation of large home theaters and whole house music
systems came on the scene. I thought that was a natural extension of selling great stereos
for one room of the house and invested in people and tools to make Chelsea a serious
player in custom. That turned out to be a good decision until September 2008, when the
home building industry hit the wall.
About the same time, the car manufacturers started putting better stereos in cars and
placing radio controls on the steering wheel. I was concerned the car stereo business
would be damaged by the car manufacturers, so I contacted Car Toys in Seattle and made
a deal to sell them our three car stereo stores.
The changeover from analog to digital basically began with CD’s and progressed to
dvd’s, digital televisions, hard drive storage of music and streaming of music and movies
from the internet. Add in I-pods, I-phones and I-pads for control and it takes us up to
today!
I still love the toys we sell, and it’s still about great reproduction of music and movies
in people’s homes. Instead of competing with a bunch of other audio specialist, as in
the beginning, today it’s a couple of specialists and big box stores like Best Buy and
the Internet. It’s been an interesting 36 years and I can’t wait to see what comes next.
Thanks.