Curt Palme – My autobiography

Forward

“HOLY SHIT! I’m talking to Krist f’n Novoselic!” (And he called me!)

….But I am jumping ahead about 59 years of one of the highlights of my career.

This is my story, the tale of an introverted nerd that was obsessed with electronics since I was a toddler, starting around 18 months old.  While I worked for a small handful of businesses and individuals when I was first starting out, by and large I’ve been self-employed since high school. Other than mowing the lawn in late elementary school for a couple of neighbours, I bypassed having typical entry level jobs at restaurants. Instead, I had a good business selling second hand repaired televisions by the end of high school and into college.

By late 1993, I owned 3 companies, with about 35 staff total (I called them co-workers). By mid-1994, I was down to 1 company and personally was on the hook into the 6 digits to suppliers, wondering whether I should go through bankruptcy, or pay everyone off over time. (I paid everyone off.)

When I became self-employed full time in 1988, it took me about 15 years to figure out how to run a company only to find out years later that I really worked best on my own.

By telling this tale, perhaps I can help budding entrepreneurs avoid making some of the mistakes that I did along the way, or perhaps inspire someone to take the leap from being an employee to being self-employed. It’s a ton of fun – and a lot of headaches.

I have thought for a few years of noting down some of my strange travels throughout the audio and video industry. I became more inspired to do so after reading Peter Janis’ autobiography ‘Lessons Learned: A Rock & Roll Guide For Entrepreneurs’ (available on Amazon).  Peter owned a number of AV supply companies, namely Hafler, C-Tek, Jensen Transformers and a few others. Insanely successful over the years, he was a great example of how to treat clients, and having known several staff members of his, every one of them had positive things to say about him.

Hopefully I will be remembered in a similar manner.

AV = Audio/Video, Audio/Visual

The Beginning – 1963 to 1973

“LICHTER!” (lights!) That was me, when I was 2 years old, pointing at the Christmas tree that Santa brought a few nights before Christmas. I didn’t care about the presents under the tree: I scrambled under the tree to find the plug that lit the lights up. Signs of nerdism to follow…

I was born on December 3, 1963 at St Paul’s hospital in Vancouver, BC to Daisy, my mother that originated from Basel, Switzerland (Bottmingen, to be exact), and Kurt, my father that was born in Sudetenland, a part of Germany that bordered on the former Czechoslovakia.

Dad was recruited at age 15 by the Germans to fight the Russians during WWII. His older brother had already been recruited and ended up losing his life on the Russian front: his body was never found. As a kid, I thought that was strange: “What do you mean, his body was never found.  Did you look for it?” Dad didn’t like to talk about the war much, and I didn’t find out until my late 50s that he suffered from PTSD for years from the horrors of WWII.

Living in Switzerland as a child, my mother also went through WWII, but with Switzerland being a neutral country, she heard bombings and underwent food rationing, but didn’t experience the war at the level my dad did.

Dad had to flee Eastern Germany when it became apparent that Germany was not going to be the winner in the war, and did tell us that during his exit from Eastern Germany, there were days where he was lucky to get a raw potato from a sympathetic farmer.

After the war, Dad first went to Switzerland where he learned the hospitality trade.  As a German immediately after WWII he didn’t feel welcome in Switzerland and hence after 1 year made his way to Sweden.  While he appreciated his better treatment in Sweden, he was not enamoured of its politics and then made his way to Canada, and entered the hotel industry, finding work at the Banff Springs Hotel, where he ended up meeting my mom. (Mom had left Switzerland at age 19 to take a job as a nanny in Toronto, then as kitchen staff at the Banff Springs – all this was supposed to be the start of a trip around the world.) While at this point Dad was fluent in German and Swedish, Dad told me that he spoke broken English, so each day he would take a new English word, and use it as many times as he could that day, so he could put it to memory, and then use another word the next day. Both mom and dad were fluent in English by the time I was born, although both spoke ‘mit einem strong Cherman accent’ for their entire lives.  (Technically, my mom’s accent was Swiss, as she spoke the Swiss-German dialect fluently, but to me it all was a ‘Cherman’ accent.)

They ended up marrying, and Dad took a series of hotel manager jobs in the Caribbean (Antigua, Jamaica, and Bahamas) before I was born. Mom ended up getting pregnant in the Bahamas in early 1963, but my parents decided that they didn’t want to raise children in the Bahamas, so they moved back to Vancouver. My mom was a stay-at-home mom, and my dad got a job as the comptroller at the Grosvenor Hotel in downtown Vancouver on Howe Street. He worked there for decades, until he was diagnosed with cancer when he was 57. He was offered the managerial position of the Grosvenor hotel a number of times, but since it was typically more than a 40 hour a week job, he turned the position down in order to be able to be a father to us kids outside of Monday to Friday 9-5. He worked there until the hotel was torn down to make room for the continual downtown expansion of Vancouver, when it got turned into additional court rooms. Dad then got offered a job at the Listel hotel in Whistler as it was being built. (Since we kids had grown up, he took the job.) Just before it opened, he was diagnosed with cancer and had to vacate the position as he wasn’t given long to live.

I grew up at 1842 McDonald St in the Kitsilano area, on the west side of Vancouver. It was a great place to grow up as a kid. The neighbourhood was safe and my first school for kindergarten was General Gordon school, two blocks away. As a toddler, my favourite place to go (other than the stereo section of the local department store) was Tatlow Park. It was also about 2 blocks away. It had lots of trees to climb, which I often did. Towards the back of the park, it opened up to a small grassy area, whereas the area where the trees were was more shady and overgrown. As a 4-year-old I remember walking towards the open area, thinking “Oh, this is sad, it’s the end of the park; I see houses over there.” Many years later in my early 50s, I went back to Tatlow Park. It hadn’t changed a bit, and lo and behold, I got to the open area, and experienced the same melancholy feeling I had so many years earlier.

The house on McDonald was built in the 1910s. It had a basement with a coal furnace and a creaky swing-up garage door. The ceilings were 9’ tall in the living room, and as a kid, they seemed to go on forever. Being traditionally German, my parents were very thrifty, not wanting to waste anything, especially since they arrived in Canada with little more than a suitcase. Dad could build anything out of nothing, and had the most rudimentary of tools, usually bought at a discount store. I remember that he built floor to ceiling wall cabinets, and he put a swing in a doorway that I used a lot at age 4-5 or so.

To this day, the house is still there, but with the addition of a fence across the front of the property that was put there sometime in the 1970s. It’s otherwise unchanged from the outside. Perhaps the old coal furnace is still rumbling away in the basement.

Neither of my parents had anything to do with electronics, and in fact, I grew up without a stereo or a television. We did have a small mono record player, and I do remember buying it with my dad at some department store. I do also remember saying to my dad “It’s playing at the wrong speed” when the salesperson switched the Seabreeze record player to 45 RPM with an LP on it. We had a 45-record called ‘Babysitter Boogie’ that was a big hit in 1962 (it’s on Youtube – go check it out if you dare). I wore that record out. Even as a kid, I apparently had a bit of OCD and thought nothing of playing a record or reel-to-reel tape 20-30 times in a row. I still do that to this day.

We also had a Pentron tube mono reel-to-reel tape recorder. We used that to send tapes to my grandparents in Germany and Switzerland, and about twice a year we’d receive parcels from them, with a few reels of tapes in it, with my grandparents talking, some German music on them, and of course there was lots of German and Swiss chocolate in the parcels as well.

Apparently when I was 18 months old, I spent 2 full days in front of my parents’ reel-to-reel, learning how to thread it. I didn’t eat, I didn’t take a nap, I was obsessed with learning how to thread that reel-to-reel with my clumsy tiny fingers. By the end of the second day, I’d nailed it but had also ruined more than one German folk music tape.

Being of good German stock, my parents only drove VW Beetles back in the day. To my chagrin, none of them had a radio in it.

I remember being fascinated by anything electronic. Somehow, we managed to amass a few radios and record players, likely from friends. One day, one of the record players stopped working. My dad and a family friend opened it, and I saw the small amplifier with two tubes in it. They didn’t see anything obviously wrong with it, but my 4-year-old brain saw that both tubes were interchangeable, so I suggested that they interchange the tubes, to see if it worked. Not knowing any better, that’s exactly what my dad did. I was all excited, hoping that I’d ‘fixed’ the record player, but we all saw smoke coming out of the amp once they powered it up. I cried, my tiny ego was bruised, and I knew smoke was a bad thing, unless it was in a fireplace.

My favourite toy as a child was a ‘dashboard’. It was battery operated and had a car horn that would beep, a steering wheel, and various knobs and buttons to turn, and lights would go on and off and you pushed and turned things. More than once, my dad had the back off so he could change the batteries, or re-solder some broken wire that had fallen off a button.

My sister Monica was born when I was 3. We each had our own room in the upper floor of the house on McDonald Street. We had at least 3 cats during the time in that house. Two of them were black cats, names long forgotten, but ‘my’ cat was ‘Mutzeputz’, named after some German kid’s story. He was a silver tabby cat, and very much belonged to me, as did most of the animals that we acquired over the years.

I grew up on German music and spoke German long before I learned English. I remember having trouble in kindergarten understanding the teacher, as she didn’t speak German. I started taking piano lessons when I was 4 and discovered a couple of years later that I had perfect pitch and could tell the teacher what key she was hitting on the piano. I took piano until I was about 10 or 11, and by then I was into rock n roll, and the classical leanings of piano no longer interested me.

We visited family friends in Osoyoos, B.C. one summer, who had teenagers. We sat at the picnic table in their backyard, and they had a battery-operated record player, with a stack of 45s. This must have been 1969, so I was 6. They played a selection of top 40 hits off the 45s, likely Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin. I remarked to my parents that I thought it was a bunch of noise and would rather hear the German artists I was used to, like Heintje (OK, he was Dutch but sang in German) and Peter Alexander.

By 1970, Kitsilano was getting too ‘hippy dippy’ for my conservative parents, and we moved to North Vancouver, an upper middle-class area of Vancouver. I remember driving past our house on McDonald Street a couple of years after we moved, and there was a large Peace sign hanging on the front door. My mother remarked in her strong German accent: “Vell, it’s a good ting vee moved out of zat neighbourhood!”

Elementary School

We moved to 990 Wavertree Rd in North Vancouver in the summer of 1970, and I started Grade 1 at Canyon Heights Elementary, about a kilometer (1/2 mile) from our house. We moved into a dead-end street, next to a creek (we argued as kids if it was rainwater or a sewer creek). By the time I hit Grade 1, I was into building crystal radios, either from scratch, or the long-forgotten Eldon brand kits found in the toy section of the department stores. Since we didn’t have a stereo in the house, I yearned for a stereo, and since I was discovering rock n roll via AM radio and the K-Tel records that were super popular in the 70s, I wanted it to be LOUD!

Family friends came to know that I had this ‘thing’ for electronics, so every once-in-a-while I also was given ‘donations’ from them, of old radios and record players. At one point, someone gave me an old mono tube amp, that couldn’t have put out more than 10 watts, and I was in heaven. For Christmas one year, my parents bought me a single ‘Electra’ 8” 2-way speaker.  It was a no name speaker company, driven by a no name amp, but I didn’t care. I could turn it to 11, and didn’t blow it up until a number of years later.

One of the early things I collected was speakers, the more the better. I knew nothing at the time about amplifier power vs speaker efficiency, but I reasoned that if one speaker was good, then 12 was better… 12 times better. At one point I mounted a bunch of random speakers to a wooden board, with very rough cutouts (my woodworking skills were not as good as my soldering skills at that time), and I wired them all together, in parallel. For those not technically skilled, this is like taking a 20’ trailer and connecting it to a Honda Civic. Whatever poor amplifier I was driving the speaker board with took pity on me, as it didn’t instantly blow up.

Around age 9 or 10, I also discovered rummage sales. We had two churches in Edgemont Village, the shopping center area within walking distance of our home. Every fall, the local Highlands United Church held a rummage sale which was massive – up until 2024, when they opened a year-round thrift store, which ended the yearly sale.  Highlands’ sale taught me about haggling as well. Who knew that if something was marked at $1.00, I could haggle it down to 50 cents? I ended up with all sorts of stuff to feed my electronics habit. The Catholic church, St Catharine’s, also had rummage sales, but the main one full of vintage spoils was Highlands.

An early purchase from the rummage sale was a 1950s turntable, with a ceramic cartridge in it. It had enough output to drive whatever amplifier I had at the time. I noticed that the power cord was a bit cracked, but thought nothing of it, and plugged it in, and all went well. The record player worked… until I moved the power cord. Then the frayed insulation shifted, one wire touched another, and sparks flew across my desk/workbench. Oops! I knew enough though, to get another power cord and solder it into place.

I probably attended 10 years’ worth of these sales, until I moved out on my own, and out of North Vancouver. Years later, in my 40s, I finally went back to Highlands, and braved the October cold, to stand in line starting at 8 AM, to get in first once the doors opened at 9 AM. Looking out of the parking lot, the lineup by 8:55 AM stretched around the block – it was that popular. While the magic wasn’t gone of the thrill of finding a bargain, in my brain I still expected the donations and offerings at the sale to be equipment from the 1960s and 70s. Instead, it had all turned mostly to BPC stereo stuff (black plastic crap) from the 1990s and early 2000s, much as you find at any thrift store to this day.

I didn’t have a lot of friends in elementary school. I wasn’t bullied per se, even though I wore purple cord flood pants and had coke bottle glasses in Grade 2. I just didn’t share any common interests with most of the kids due to my electronics bent. I also couldn’t relate to other kids talking about the newest TV show, since we didn’t have a TV at home. Spectator sports? I’d rather watch paint dry. Back in the day we had hockey cards to trade, which the local grocery store gave out for free with a purchase. Almost every kid had them, as did I, but I didn’t know anything about hockey. All I knew is that I liked the Vancouver Canucks logo, as well as the Boston Bruins one. I didn’t follow the players or any games. Ditto for any other sports. That holds true to this day. I wasn’t a bad student: I typically had a B average throughout high school and college, but I couldn’t wait to get home to spend yet more time at my desk/shop, tearing things apart… and maybe make them work again. It was guaranteed that anything I touched would be missing a screw or two when it was put back together.

In Grade 3, my parents (probably my mom) decided that we should switch schools, so I went to Highlands Elementary instead, right near Edgemont Village. She apparently thought the academics were better at Highlands. Again, I had little in common with most of the kids there.  However, there were some kids that formed a band, and they had a couple of concerts at the school in Grade 6 or 7. I was recruited to be the ‘lighting guy’, which consisted of nothing more than turning switches on and off for the colored stage lights. At one point I accidentally turned off the power to the bass player’s amp without knowing it. All I heard from stage from Bruce was “CURT, YOU BONEHEAD!” to make me realize what I had done, and I put his power back on.

In Grade 3, one of the teachers that taught Grade 6 or 7 discovered that I liked electronics, and when he had time, Mr. Gowe would spend time with me after school, as he had some basic electronic knowledge. By this time, I had a portable cassette recorder and put the mic next to a record player speaker, to record those KTel albums. Being thrifty, I always went to the discount store with my mom, to buy the cheapest 49 cent no name brand tapes I could afford, usually at the Army and Navy chain. I hadn’t discovered FM radio yet, and recorded lots off the top 40 AM stations, CKLG and CFUN, hoping that the DJ wouldn’t talk all over the beginning of each song, so I’d have a clean copy of the songs I wanted to hear. It never happened. DJs ALWAYS talked over the intros to every song.

One of my favorite things to do was ‘clean the AV room’, where all of the projectors, record players and tape decks were stored. More than once, I was chased out by the office staff to go play outside. The AV room was my haven from the typical Vancouver rain we had to put up for 6-7 months of the year.

In 1972 there was a stereo exhibition at a hotel in Richmond that my parents found out about and took me to it. It was typical for a small showcase/exhibition for stereo manufacturers, each vendor renting out a room at the hotel. I still recall seeing the large ‘STEREO 72’ banner outside of the hotel as we arrived.

I was mesmerized, and two vendors specifically stood out to me for whatever reason, the Tandberg room, where I saw my first 10.5” reel to reel (likely the X10 model) and the Sinclair room. Sinclair was a company out of the UK, best known for their compact handheld computer; however, they also offered unique looking stereo modules that people could build into furniture or make their own cases for. I listened to many systems, and most of the sales reps ignored me, thinking my parents were there and I tagged along.

At some point there was a commotion in the hallway on the floor that I was on, and a sales rep looked at me excitedly, and said “Kid, Muhammed Ali is down the hall. Why don’t you go down and get an autograph?”’ I had no idea who Muhammed Ali was, so I declined. The sales rep thought I was nuts not to get his autograph.

For one Christmas in elementary school, my parents bought me a VOM (volt-ohm-meter). It was a cheapie Radio Shack special, but I used the heck out of it. It was a big step between hooking up random speakers to radios and amplifiers, to getting to know how to measure voltages and resistances, crucial information when troubleshooting circuits, or when I built projects out of magazines or library books. I was also given several Heathkits between elementary school and the end of high school. Heathkits were wildly popular from the 60s to the 80s, when lots of people had interest in electronics. You could build everything from test equipment to a metal detector to stereo equipment, and the ultimate, a Heathkit TV. Each Heathkit came complete with every part needed to build whatever you bought, from the nuts and bolts to the circuit board and transformers etc. All you needed to do was follow their easy-to-understand manuals, that guided you step by step for the complete assembly of whatever you purchased. If you made no mistakes, you could turn on the unit, and it would work. As was typical of me, I went on binging sessions, spending 12-hour days on my workbench building them. My limitation wasn’t the electronics part, but rather, a somewhat incomplete set of tools. I lacked a decent set of wire cutters for one, and some of the fine intricacies of building circuit boards was lost on me due to lack of experience. Still, I did get every Heathkit running that I built.

The first Heathkit I built was a very basic transistor tester. It was $16.00 back in the 1970s. The last Heathkit I built was their tube tester, which I completed in high school. I used every Heathkit that I built every day until I eventually graduated to better and more complex test equipment in my 20s and 30s. I still have one of their power supplies and a signal tracer in the basement of my house today. They aren’t worth anything, and I’m pretty sure I blew up the power supply. Still, I can’t bear to throw them out, since they take me back to my pre-teen years.

Many years later, I went back to Heathkit, to buy a signal tracer kit for my boss’ son when I worked at the TV shop. To my chagrin, the Heathkit of the late 1980s (now owned by Zenith TV corporation) was a far cry from the Heathkits I built. The cases were plastic rather than metal, and despite the boss’ son building the kit correctly, it didn’t work. It turned out that the kit has a circuit board wiring mistake that I found and corrected before it worked correctly. Heathkit shut down shortly after we built that unit.

For our grade 7 graduation dance, the teachers allowed the kids to pick a few of us kids to organize the music. The aforementioned bass player brought his bass amp as well as a guitar amp to the school on the night of the dance for ‘MOAR POWAR’. To my disappointment, I didn’t get chosen to help with the music. I realized that I had no interest in attending the dance unless I was involved with the sound or the music, so while I stuck around for a few minutes, I left and walked home. I had work to do!

Somewhere around age 9, my parents enlisted me in Cub Scouts, probably in an attempt to get me interested in something other than electronics. There was nothing really remarkable about attending once a week; however, my inane drive for all things electronics reared its head during a bottle drive that we did, to raise money for said Cubs. Like almost everyone else, we teamed up with another Cub and went door to door collecting bottles. My mom volunteered to be a driver, and we spent the afternoon doing our best to collect bottles. For whatever reason, about halfway through the bottle drive, I got it into my head that asking for broken radios and record players would be a far better idea than collecting stupid bottles. To play fair of course, I’d only ask every second or third house, so it wouldn’t be suspiciously obvious that we had significantly fewer bottles than every other pair of kids. I asked at about 20 houses for broken radio treasures and ended up with nothing. I realized that this may have been a harebrained idea, so I decided to ask at one more house for radios before calling my idea a loss of epic proportions. The nice lady that answered the door said “Let me ask my husband”, and lo and behold, she came back to the door a couple of minutes later with not one, but two radios. Score! Some 52 years later, I still remember what one of them was: it was a German Nordmende radio, with AM, FM, and two shortwave bands. All that was wrong with it was that it had a broken battery holder, which I repaired, and I used that radio in the front basket of my single speed bike for over a year, to have music while I pedaled. At the end of the bottle drive, I had 2 record players and 6 radios, not bad for a couple of hours of ‘work’. To my dismay, my dad made me share the radios with whatever kid did the bottle drive with me, but I reasoned that 4 radios and one record player was better than the quantity of zero before we started on the bottle drive that morning. The rest of that weekend was spent tearing into the radios and record player, to figure out how they worked.

I decided to try my luck every 3-4 months or so, going on ‘radio drives’ in various parts of the neighborhood over the next 3 or 4 years. I collected a large number of various electronics items, and also gained a lifelong mentor and friend. One house I went to was answered by a lady who told me that her son was also into electronics, and that he could give me a bunch of stuff. She took my home phone number and promised to call. Sure enough, a few days later I was down at the Grosvenor hotel that my dad worked at. Mom called him and said that there was a surprise waiting for me on Glenora Road.

On the way home, we stopped at the house, and sure enough, the lady was there, as was her son, Drew, who was about 26 years old at the time and who worked for BC Hydro.  He had gone to college at BCIT, the British Columbia Institute of Technology, the college that I would go to years later, and he loaded me up with a station wagon full of stuff that I’m sure his mom was glad to see gone. It included tubes, parts, a partially torn apart 2-way radio that I was determined to get going again (I didn’t), and a lot of other stuff.

Drew also offered to help me fix stuff that I couldn’t figure out, and every 6 months or so we’d get together in his workshop and dissect some of the pieces of stereo gear that I couldn’t fix. Usually, we succeeded with his advanced knowledge of circuits, and sometimes we didn’t. About 10 years later, he started bringing me items to repair, as he proclaimed that I now had a better grasp of repairing consumer electronics than he did.

Since there were very few people anywhere near my age that were into electronics, I give Drew a lot of credit (and blame) for taking me down the path of electronics that I took in life.

Drew also gave me a Knight Kit shortwave receiver that he had built as a teenager. While the shortwave radio listening bug never bit me, I did climb onto the roof with the assistance of my dad, and installed a 100’ long antenna, from one end of the roof to the other. I don’t know that the Knight Kit shortwave receiver picked up a station further than Portland, Oregon, but at least I knew it worked. Listening to static-y radio reception didn’t appeal to me much though.

There was one other classmate that was into electronics, and his name was Ming. He was a recent transplant from Hong Kong, and while he spoke English, it was with a strong accent. We bonded over electronics, although Ming was more into designing circuits rather than repairing old stereo equipment. He was cutting edge; I was trailing edge. Still, when there’s no one else around, you take whoever you can get, and while we did socialize, our main mission was to attack electronics. We remain friends to this day.

One day I was out, and my dad was home. I came in the door, and he told me that Ming called, wanting to know if I had some weird part that he needed. My dad said that he asked Ming three times what the part was that he wanted, and Ming kept saying ‘subminesia’. My dad, being far from an expert with anything to do with electronics, had no idea what ‘subminesia’ was, but repeated it as close as he could, based on Ming’s strong accent. I looked my dad in the eye, and explained “Ming wants a SUBMINIATURE’ plug.” I shrugged my shoulders, wondering why my dad couldn’t figure out what Ming wanted. It was SOOO obvious

Sometime in late elementary school, I finally managed to get a second Electra speaker (given to me by my parents for yet another Christmas); however, the second one was a bit larger, as the exact copy of the first one I received was now discontinued. I had saved enough money to buy a small stereo amplifier, from the large electronics conglomerate called Carr’s Furniture (I’m being sarcastic) on Granville Street. I spent $49.95 to buy a Monarch amplifier, that couldn’t have put out more than 5 watts per channel, but I didn’t care: it was STEREO!

Searching for this obscure Monarch brand, I believe the amplifier above is the exact model that I purchased. If not, mine was really damn close.

Granville Street around the corner from the hotel that my dad worked at had about a 6 block stretch that had a lot of stereo stores on it, and I spent countless hours in all of them, from A&B Sound, to Miller’s (later called the Sony Store), Kelly’s Stereo Mart, and House of Stein.
Both Kelly’s and House of Stein were significant dealers of Akai and Sansui, and I spent many hours at each location, staring at all of the equipment that I couldn’t afford. The thing was, every salesperson was paid via commission, and I’m guessing no salary, so every person that walked in the door that asked even the simplest of questions was asked by the salesman “Are you planning on buying today?” I think eventually they figured out that I didn’t have any money to buy anything, so they left me alone to drool over the Akai 10” tape decks.

The House of Stein was somehow related to Kelly’s Stereo Mart, as each location had their own house brand, called Steintron. The distribution location was also located on Granville Street, in the basement of one of the warehouse buildings. It was their service and parts centre as well, back in the day when there were actually repair depots to fix televisions and stereos. One Easter, my dad went down to that service center, talked to the staff, and they loaded him up with a bunch of parts, controls, switches, etc. That Easter morning, instead of hunting for Easter eggs and chocolates around the house as my sister did, I found all sorts of electronics parts hidden along with the chocolate. It was a great Easter. To this day, I swear there are some of the old switches and controls in my parts bins that I’ve carried around for 50+ years now (one day I’ll use them!) I did figure out over the years that these parts came from the Steintron location, not because my parents told me they did, but because I recognized the components from the various stereos that I started to repair. Most of the parts came out of early 1970s Sansui and Akai receivers.

Somewhere around Grade 7, I was introduced to the Lougheed Drive-In Sunday Swap Meet, courtesy of our postman who said he’d go there every once-in-a while to sell off stuff from his home that he didn’t need. He mentioned that he’d made $200 over 4 hours on a Sunday morning. $200!! That was a small fortune to a kid in grade 7.

There was a $4.00 entrance fee for every car that wanted to use the drive in to sell stuff, so my dad and I loaded up our VW station wagon with a bunch of my stuff, and off we went. I likely had everything priced far too low, as I made a whopping $16 profit after paying the entry fee. We went to the swap meet several times while it was still open, and on our final trip, I too, cleared about $200 in profit. Not bad for a 12-year-old.

Secondary School

In September of 1976 I started Grade 8 at Handsworth Secondary School. There were around 1200 kids attending Grades 8 to 12 at Handsworth. One elective that I took was band, but I wanted to play drums instead of piano. The music teacher, Bob Rebagliati, had also been transferred to Handsworth in 1976. He happened to be a killer instructor with a deep jazz background and also happened to be a drummer.

Bob started up a ‘sound crew’, a group of students that would be responsible for setting up the sound system for the annual school musical, and the various concerts that were given throughout the year. I was in! Unfortunately, being in Grade 8, I was low man on the totem pole, and a Grade 12 student named Tom pronounced himself the head of the sound crew. Still, since I was in the band, and he was not, I ended up going on several senior band trips where I was solely responsible for setting up and running the sound system at the few concerts we gave during the trips.

Several of Bob Rebagliati’s students went on to have exceptionally successful careers, including Renee Rosnes, now a world-renowned jazz pianist, and Norm Fisher, a fantastic bass player that ended up touring with Bryan Adams for years, as well as Jann Arden, Colin James and a number of other artists of note.

Despite being the nerdy introverted kid with coke bottle glasses, I always had a cassette player with me and knew how to wire the guitar amp speakers into my cassette deck. I was therefore tolerated by the older students, as I had the music.

While I kept up with the drums, I had more interest in sound and rock n roll, not jazz.  The music room, and not the smoke pit at the back of the school became my hangout point. Handsworth had a ‘modular’ class system, where classes could start as early as 8:10 in the morning, and if you were unlucky, would end as late as 3:20 PM. Depending on the course and electives you took, you could get out at 12:20 one day, or have a 3 hour break in the middle of the day, until the last class of the day that everyone stuck around for (sarcasm, again). I was a decent student and managed to get on the honour roll at the first term report card in Grade 8; however, I never achieved that feat again. Getting top marks was never my priority. Between electronics and band class and rock n roll, that was all I needed.

One thing that my friend Ming and I shared was the love of stereos, and we were determined to build up one good stereo between us. We studied all of the Stereo Review magazines that we could afford, and bought stereo equipment based on amplifier power and specifications rather than on looks, or what it sounded like. We were convinced that if one amplifier had 0.08% distortion rating, and another one had 0.03% specs, we HAD to get the one with the better specs. It wasn’t until a few years later that we discovered that the typical speaker has 0.5% distortion, and a typical human ear can’t hear less than 3% distortion. While Ming and I met at Highlands elementary school, we didn’t really spend a lot of time with each other until high school.

We listened to the typical rock music of the time: Elton John, Supertramp, Boston, some disco (we each had the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack), and I believe it was Ming that introduced me to Renaissance, a band out of the UK with a female soprano vocalist. The band was a combination of folk with classical and progressive rock, with epic 8-to 11-minute songs, and Ming and I ate that up. In fact, Renaissance was my first big RAWK concert that I attended in 1976. Their biggest song (that didn’t hit the top 40 in North America) was called Ashes are Burning, and they did a stellar job playing it live as the final song. I was hooked.

There were obvious cultural differences between my German/Swiss parents and Ming’s family who came from Hong Kong. One summer, Ming’s parents announced that they were going to Europe for a month, and my mom being very pro-Swiss and pro-Europe, was all excited for them. As was typical for that time, people would get together for an evening of slides or photos. We all went down to Ming’s place, and they showed us a bunch of the pictures that they’d taken there. My mom asked them what they thought of the German and Swiss food, and Ming’s mom, in her broken English said “Oh, Dim Sum not very good in Germany.” My mom was crushed, and I remember her complaining on the drive back home that they shouldn’t go to Europe expecting good Dim Sum; they should have tried German Schnitzel.

By Grade 9, I had a solid grasp of doing basic electronics servicing. From North Vancouver, I’d take the bus to downtown Vancouver to a large electronics supplier called RAE Industrial Electronics. With the help of Drew, I assembled an RAE kit called a color organ, which would flash lights in time with the music, with three outlets flashing lights slightly differently depending on the frequency of the music: one outlet was for bass notes, one was for midrange, and one for treble. Connect it to your stereo, and the lights would flicker in time with the music. I built several of these over the years, looking for parts that would handle more lights and more power. While my soldering skills were adequate with my Radio Shack soldering irons that I’d buy and burn out regularly, my woodworking and metal working skills were nonexistent. My assorted projects were built into various nefarious looking boxes.  Fuses or circuit breakers? Who needed them? They cost money!

One early project I did build that worked for a couple of decades was a home alarm system. Our neighbors had a professional alarm system installed that was always malfunctioning, as the company did a sloppy job installing it. It broke down several times, and of course that inspired me to build one that worked better.

Working off a project in an early Popular Electronics magazine, I put a bit more care into this project than I did my other disasters, and actually assembled a chassis, a perf board, and components scavenged from various things I’d torn apart, and put together a single zone alarm system that was wired to two very large speakers that fired out of the attic vents on either side of the house. They were powered by a 10-watt amplifier, and a siren module that Drew had given me a few years earlier. There was a key lock to turn it on at a front panel by the main door, with a push button with a lamp, that would light once all the doors were closed, indicating that the alarm system was ready to be armed. My dad helped me install magnetic switches in the door frame, fishing wires from the attic down to the reed switch mounted into a wine bottle cork, tapped into a hole drilled into the doorframe. I was pleased to no end when that alarm system worked for at least two decades before going intermittent, and it was finally replaced by a professional system.

I’ll digress here for a second by adding that my dad knew little about electronics, but he was a true handyman and an excellent woodworker and drywaller. He could make something out of nothing. One year shortly after we moved into our new home, my parents decided to buy a modular teak wall unit that was quite expensive for its time. They wanted to build up the wall unit around the fireplace, and once they carefully measured and went back to the furniture store, they realized that the teak unit was exactly 2” too wide to fit into the indented part of the wall where they wanted to fit it. I could see the color draining out of the furniture sales guy’s face, as he was realizing he was about to lose a significant sale.

“No problem”, proclaimed my dad, “I’ll move the wall”, which is exactly what he did. He opened up the drywall down to the studs, and moved that indentation by 2.5”, and by the end of the weekend, the wall modification was complete, and the paint was drying. The teak wall unit was delivered later that week.

Other than some ability to do electrical work, I inherited none of my dad’s traits of DIY. I hire trades to do what I should really have learned to do decades ago. I had better things to do: I had electrons to tame.

Sometime around the end of Grade 9, the next-door neighbor, Mr. Harrison, gave me an old tube B/W TV. He knew someone at the Motel 6 chain, and he grabbed one of the old TVs when they upgraded one local hotel to color sets. It was a low-end cheap Admiral TV. It actually worked but needed some adjustment. I was in heaven, although we had no cable TV in the house since we had no TV. I got a set of old rabbit ears from somewhere and fired up the TV. Since our house was close to Grouse Mountain, on a good day you could get 3 TV stations fairly clearly, and if you were really lucky, you could get 4, however, not without turning and twisting the rabbit ears, dialing in the fine tuning on the TV, and probably holding onto one of the rabbit ears for at least one channel.

I was in heaven, and I was determined to know all about this TV. Back in the day, the downtown Vancouver Library had all sorts of books with circuit diagrams in it. I took the bus downtown with a bunch of nickels and photocopied the schematic and service info that I could find on the TV. I spent more time with the back off that TV than I spent watching it; however, I did see my first set of B/W boobs thanks to that TV.

For whatever reason, Canadian television laws were more lax than those of the US. We had a station called VU13 that aired soft core porn movies in the late 1970s at midnight. Despite no internet or cellphones, word of this got out throughout our high school within a nanosecond, and as with every other high school boy, I was tuned in at midnight sharp. They played the first Emmanuelle movie, along with Jane Fonda’s ‘Barbarella’, including the nude scene

 

Sometime in Grade 9, my dad let me know that the radio station in the basement of the hotel he worked at was switching from tube equipment to solid state and were throwing out a bunch of the old tube equipment. I lit up, and he brought home two station wagons full of old radio station gear. There were all sorts of strange industrial-looking connectors (Cannon predecessors to XLR), well over 40 low noise 12AX7 new old stock tubes by Rogers, and tons of other stuff. This was back in the day when radio station engineers would custom build equipment as they needed it, as not everything was available off-the-shelf. One such item was a home brew 2 channel microphone mixer that they apparently used at the horse racetrack to send the live signal back to the station via telephone lines. I ended up learning a lot about this high-end equipment and stripped most of it down for parts.  I amassed a large collection of tubes, resistors, capacitors and other items needed to build and fix other items I received, all more or less carefully stashed in parts drawers or boxes. Some of those new old stock tubes are now worth well over $100 each. Oh, if only I had saved them…

Towards the end of Grade 10, Handsworth had a massive garage sale in the school gym. Parents and neighbours all donated unwanted goods for a fundraiser for the school. Naturally, I was asked, along with a guy a couple of years older than I was, Dave, to man the electronics section. Dave was also into electronics but leaned more towards computers. At the end of the day, we had sold a ton of electronics; however, there was a lot left over as well. The teacher in charge looked at the two of us and said “All of this is going to the dump tomorrow. Take home whatever you want.” SWEET!

My mom showed up with our station wagon, and I loaded it full of radios, along with a small color TV that had a problem with it, and thus it didn’t sell. It was an AGS brand, and it was full of tubes. Having gotten my way around my small B/W TV, I was now hell bent on graduating to color. (Barbarella would look so much better in Technicolor!)

I got the set in the house, plugged it in, and found that the picture was blue and green only, with no red to be seen. I went down to the local library and signed out the COLOR BOOK OF TV REPAIR. Studying it carefully, I read that if there was no red color on the television set, it could likely be the R-Y tube in the color reproduction section of the TV. Looking at the tube chart on the back of the TV, I saw that it needed a 12AX7 tube. Well, I happened to have 40 of those in stock, having inherited them from the radio station haul a few months earlier. Lo and behold, after I installed that tube, I was greeted with a full color picture. I was an effing genius at age 14. I was also determined to become the world’s greatest TV repairman, and one day I would be able to fix any problem in any TV.

I pulled out a bunch more books out of the library and studied the various magazines such as 1960s Radio/TV Experimenter, Popular Electronics, and Radio Electronics, learning all about setting up a proper color TV picture using the various controls on the back of the TV. I practiced on that AGS TV that I’d repaired, and by the time I was done, I had a good-looking picture on it.
I did find out long ago that working electronics doesn’t interest me a lot. I wanted the broken stuff: the challenge was in fixing it. Once something was repaired, I lost interest in it, looking for the next victim to repair… or to pull apart. That sentiment holds true to this day.

About 2 months after I repaired that AGS TV, one of the phys ed teachers, Mr. Kirk, approached me and asked if I had any TVs for sale, as he was looking for a second TV for his house. I told him that I did have the AGS one that was working well. At the time, a basic color TV was $500-600, and Mr Kirk asked me what I wanted for it. I figured that $125 was a good deal for him and for me, since I got it for free, and it cost me nothing but time to fix it.

He came over, handed me $125, and he took it away. I was paranoid for weeks that the TV would fail or stop working. It didn’t. Seven years later, when I was working at a TV shop, Mr. Kirk dropped by with a very familiar-looking AGS TV. It had no sound. It was the first time since I’d sold it to him that it stopped working. $56 later, he was back in action. Considering that minimum wage at that time was just over $2.00 an hour, $125 was a pretty good income for a kid in Grade 10.

That rummage sale gave me another kick start in my continuing education in electronics. Televisions were a whole new challenge, far more complex than an AM tube radio (called the All American 5, as most American made AM radios were built very similarly, using the same 5 tubes, and almost identical circuits). Televisions usually had upwards of 20 tubes, more complicated circuits, including the tuner, and the high voltage section that had all sorts of warning stickers on them, indicating the potentially lethal 27,000 volts that could send you flying across the room.

Handsworth Secondary School got about eight Apple II computers in 1980. Computers were a big deal and ‘THE FUTURE’ of the world, and I did take Computing 11 that year, as I too wanted to learn about computers. I’d seen pictures of some original IMSAI and Altair computers in the various electronics magazines in the 1970s, but flashing lights and switches didn’t really appeal to me at the time. We were taught the computer language BASIC for the Apple II, and while I learned the ‘BASICS’ (pardon the bad pun!), it wasn’t my thing.  As I tell people to this day “If I have an audio problem, I can hear it. If I have a video problem, I can see it. If I have a computer problem, I get a blue screen of death, with some gibberish on the screen, and even a computer expert can’t tell me what it means.”

My friends Ming and Dave completely took to the Apple II computers, however, and left me and the two teachers in the dust. Since computers were new, Mr. Broughton, and Mr. Kokoskin were basically new to this whole world as well and were probably only a chapter or two ahead in the textbooks as they were teaching the first classes. One thing that we were taught was about REM lines in our computer programming. A REM line literally stood for REMARK and would allow the programmer to put in a dummy line that didn’t affect the computer program but would tell anyone looking at the programming what the program was doing and why the programmer wrote the program the way he did. I understood this concept and added REM lines. Ming thought it was stupid. His thinking was that if the programmer had to explain his programming to a supervisor, then the supervisor had no place being in that position. Ming definitely lost points in our computer class for not putting in REM lines. Ming, however, got into ‘machine language’ way ahead of the instructors; in fact, machine language wasn’t even taught in our computer classes. Ming did some reading of advanced textbooks and one day made the computer screen strobe quickly between black and white, something that I hadn’t seen before. I asked him how he’d accomplished that function in the BASIC programming. Ming smiled, and said that he’d done it in machine language, and kept it a secret. Ming ended up designing computer chips in Silicon Valley in the US, and worked at Elon Musk’s SpaceX for some years.

My first Job – not in the food service industry

There were several TV repair shops in North Vancouver, including Gregg TV in Edgemont Village, and several more on Lonsdale Avenue and Marine Drive, two of the main roads in the area. I started getting the used trade-in televisions from Gregg TV, as well as a couple of other locations. Back in the day, these TV stores in upper middle class North Van didn’t want to sell used TVs, which would take away from the profit realized from selling new TVs, plus a used TV on a new showroom floor would take away from the look of gleaming new TVs. As a result, I’d usually get one or two sets a month to drag home and repair.

I’d call various TV shops in the area, asking if they had any broken TVs. By fluke, I called a different number in the Yellow Pages, which ended up calling a repair shop that I’d never called before. Somehow, the Yellow Pages had made a mistake in one of the ads, and I called this small shop at the bottom of Lonsdale due to the wrong phone number on one of their ads.

This shop was called United Electronics and was owned by a nice individual called Bill. I took the bus down to see him, on one of those days that I got out of school at 12:20 PM. Bill and I got along just fine, and he loaded me up with enough stuff that we had to come back on the weekend to pick it all up with the trusty VW station wagon. As I was about to head back on the bus to head home, I asked him if he wanted any part time help, and Bill said “Sure, come by on Saturday, and I’ll get you started.” I was super excited and elated. I jumped off the bus, ran into the house, and exclaimed to my mom “I got a job working at a TV store.” Mom, being ever concerned, asked what the pay was.

“Umm, I don’t know, but I’ll be fixing TVs!”

“Does he need your social insurance number?”

“Umm, I don’t know, but I’ll be fixing TVs!’

We went down on Saturday morning to pick up my loot, and my dad met Bill, who assured him I’d do fine. So that’s how things went for about 8 months. I’d hop on the bus after school on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and would walk in the door and start repairing things. What I didn’t realize is that Bill was also a very happy alcoholic Scotsman. When I’d walk in the door, he’d walk out, leaving me to attend the shop, and he go 2 doors down to the St Alice hotel [with separate men’s and women’s (and escorts’) entrances]. He’d always be back at 5 PM though, to pay me in cash, and I’d take the bus home. No social insurance number needed!

Eventually he let me sell some of the used TVs at his store, and I’d give him $20 commission on a set that I’d mark up an extra $20, and I’d take the rest of the cash home. United was in a fortunate location, as it was close to the local First Nations reservation. I had many customers as a result, and while Bill was out, I sold as many new as I did used TVs. The thrill of the sale was on!

Eventually, all good things must come to an end, and the owner of the building and the city decided to do a massive renovation to the entire block. The St Alice hotel got torn down, as did United Electronics. I ran into Bill years later at another repair shop by fluke, and he was still the same happy guy as he always was. I had a ton of fun working for him.

As for school, I did OK and was a B average student throughout all five high school grades. My least favorite subjects were English and Social Studies. My attitude was: If the sky is blue, then the sky is blue, and I didn’t need to learn Creative Writing 101 to come up with 2 full paragraphs describing said sky. THE SKY IS FUCKING BLUE. (I didn’t do great in English.)

Social studies was similar. I didn’t want to learn about history – that’s old stuff. I wanted to move forward and look towards the future, not the past. I had a hard time accepting that when it was summer in the Northern Hemisphere, that it was winter in the Southern. I flat out refused to believe it, and it took many years after high school for me to accept that as fact. I enjoyed Physics and Math, especially the Physics labs, where we experimented. I always aced any practical exercises, which made up for my lesser grades for the written tests. I did well in Math, as it generally was logical, hence something I could relate to.

I became friends with Raymond in Grade 9. He was a year older than I was, had a sister a year younger than myself, and an older brother named Cliff, who had a Toyota Corolla. Raymond also had an interest in electronics, and we both dove into television sets at both of our houses.  We built a siren that we installed into the Corolla, but realized that this was highly illegal, so we pulled it back out. Both of our basements became littered with electronic equipment, and televisions that we’d both get from Gregg TV. More than once, Raymond managed to snag a cool TV because he got to the TV shop to collect the throwaways before I did. Regardless, the friendship remains to this day.

I was always surrounded by music in high school. Whether I was playing the drums in the band or listening to music on my radio or portable cassette player, I was happiest when I was listening to something. One day in Grade 11, I decided that always buying batteries was a waste of money, and if I could power a cassette player from the light generator on my 10 speed I would have accomplished something great.

Sometimes, school shenanigans had nothing to do with me… ‘but I was there, man!’ I was always involved with the sound system setup for the two or three concerts we had at the school, so that our doting parents could hear us play our instruments… badly. We also had a lighting department, and a kid named Eddie was the one in charge of setting up floodlights, or whatever lighting effects the school had. On occasion, the school would rent lighting effects as well, as the budget allowed.

In Grade 11, Eddie discovered ‘flashpots’, which in essence were some form of gunpowder that would give a big flash and a bang when lit. Bands like Kiss used them in the 1970s to great effect, and Eddie wanted a part of that action. The igniting of the flashpots were simple. Eddie got a couple of blocks of wood, chiseled a trough into them, hammered a nail into each end, and strung a thin magnet wire between them. Each nail was then attached to lamp cord, then to a switch at his control area, and powered by 120 volts. When the switch was flipped on, the magnet wire would vaporize, igniting the gunpowder.

Handily enough, there was a theatrical lighting supply company a few kilometers from the school, and Eddie went and bought some flash powder. With the teachers’ permission, he mounted the blocks of wood far enough away from the audience and the bands, and during the grand finale of the concert, he’d flip the switch.

Sure enough, at the end of the concert, he flipped the switch… and only one flash pot went off. Perhaps the magnet wire came loose from the one nail, or he didn’t strip the wire enough – who knows. After the show as I was dismantling the sound system, Eddie walked over to the non-functioning flash pot, touched it… and the flash pot went off in his face.  He hadn’t turned the switch off, so the 120 volts was still sitting at the unignited flash pot.

I don’t recall how much damage Eddie sustained, but he was picked up by an ambulance quickly, and I recall seeing his soot covered glasses on the floor next to the flash pots. I know he did recover, but he was out of school for some time.

I inherited a small car cassette player from my buddy Raymond’s older brother, Cliff, as he had upgraded to a better player in his Toyota Corolla. One channel kept cutting out on the cassette player he gave me: that was a bad solder connection that I ended up repairing. I got a pair of small car stereo speakers that I bolted to the top of the car stereo player and mounted it onto one of those quick release brackets from the 70s that you mounted under your car dash. That was so you could remove your stereo from the car at night so it wouldn’t get stolen. I reversed the mount, so that the quick release part was mounted onto the bottom of the cassette player assembly, and the part normally mounted under the car dashboard was now mounted on top of the handlebars. That way I could ride the bike to wherever I wanted and then pull the cassette player and speakers off for safekeeping. The problem of providing power to the 12-volt cassette player proved to be more daunting, as all the bike light generators I found were only 6 volts, not enough to power said cassette deck. Thanks to the Highlands Church rummage sale, I managed to find a 12-volt bike generator. I couldn’t believe my luck.

With a couple of parts, and a lot of electrical tape (I did say my skills outside of soldering were very limited), I wired the bike together, and as long as I was going about 8 MPH or faster, and didn’t turn the stereo up too loud, which would slow down the cassette tape motor, I had stereo sound on my bike. (Keep in mind that in 1979 the first Sony cassette Walkman had just been released, and they were too expensive for this cheapskate kid.)

Everything went fine, until one fine spring afternoon of 1980, towards the end of Grade 11. To get to my home from the school, I had to cross a ravine right at the school, then push my bike up the other side, and ride home. As I got to the top of the ravine, I saw 3 kids standing on the bridge over the creek. I couldn’t identify them, but I knew there was one of me, and three of them. With my precious stereo mounted on my handlebars, I was afraid of theft, as this wimp couldn’t take on one other kid, let alone 3.

I made the decision to ride the long way around, adding a kilometer or so to my ride, but that was a far better option than getting harassed on the bridge. I rode towards the back of the school, listening to Boston’s Don’t Look Back. I made a left-hand turn, and all I remember is seeing the front bumper of a Honda Civic, thinking “Oh SHIT!”, and then nothing. I vaguely remember rolling off the car hood with a splitting headache and seeing a big dent in the windshield of the car, not believing that my body had done that much damage.

An ambulance was quickly summoned, and I was rushed to the hospital with a concussion. Luckily it was a Honda, and not some American land yacht, or the outcome could have been a whole lot worse. My bike was folded in half, and the car stereo assembly was in more than one piece. All was saved for me by the people who called the ambulance. I missed a day of school, and promised my mom that the stereo would no longer go on the bike, since it was 100% my fault that I hit the car (the driver was doing the speed limit).

Worse was the circumstances of who exactly hit me. The guy in his late 20s was down from Prince George, a city about 10 hours north of Vancouver, on a sick day from work, so he could apply for a different job in Vancouver.  To this day I don’t know what story he told his employer to explain why he was in Vancouver with a car that would need a few days’ worth of bodywork before it was drivable again.

Six months later, I quietly installed the rescued and repaired car stereo assembly onto my next bike, but I was sure to check for oncoming traffic before making future left hand turns.

By the time I got to Grade 11, I had gotten fairly proficient at repairing televisions, and my parents gave me a cable TV connection so that I could properly test all 12 channels, and not rely on rabbit ears. I would make handwritten ads up on pieces of paper, and bike down to the Village, and put my ‘TVs for sale’ ads on the community bulletin boards, and word got out pretty quickly that there was this kid selling repaired TVs out of his parents’ basement.

By Grade 12 I was selling a television per weekend, usually for $100-175 each, so a cash income of $500-600 a month was REALLY good! There was no starter job for me like McDonald’s.
I also became really good at accidentally touching the ground portion of the cablevision connector to the live chassis of the cheaper TV sets that didn’t have the metal chassis isolated from the 120-volt AC power line.  Once every few months, I’d get a big spark as the cable line touched the chassis, and each time, the cable would go out, as I’d blown up the tiny transformer out at the power pole.

The same cablevision tech came to the house more than once, and he’d laugh with my mom at my misadventures. He’d replace the transformer, and I’d swear never to go it again, only to do the same thing a few months later. I finally built myself a cablevision isolation box, so that the ground of the cable line was isolated from the connector even if the connector touched the TV chassis, and I’d solved the ongoing problem. Years later, when I finally moved from home, my mom cancelled the cable service. The same cable tech showed up and proclaimed “I won’t bother climbing the telephone pole, as your son will just climb up and reconnect your cable, so I’ll just disconnect it at the house here.” Little did he know that I was afraid of heights, never mind the mystery wiring on the top of those telephone poles, so there’s no way I’d climb that damn pole. He was right though: I did reconnect the cable line at the house, and for a bunch of years until my mom felt too guilty about it, she had free cable. She finally re-subscribed as a paying customer.

By this time, Ming and I had built up a decent stereo. In Grade 11, I bought a brand-new Akai GX-630 10.5” reel-to-reel tape deck for $1,000 CDN, with money that I had made repairing TVs. My parents thought I was nuts, but since it was my money, they didn’t have much say.
Ming bought a new Technics turntable. He built a SWTPc (SouthWest Technical Products Company) preamplifier. In the 1970s, all sorts of stereo kits were the rage, and SWTPc were one of the more successful ones. The first circuit board was defective [it wasn’t properly made (etched)], so Ming wrote to them and they sent a replacement. Once again, we bought our equipment based on specs alone. I purchased a used Reimer power amplifier that was home-made, in Nanaimo, BC. It was supposed to put out 250 watts per channel, but I suspect it wasn’t more than 150. Still, it was enough power to blow my Electra 10-watt speakers, cranked to Boston’s second album.

In 1980, a local speaker manufacturer in North Vancouver went under. Web Sound used the CTS speaker brand and made really nice speaker cabinets. I saw a small classified ad in the local North Shore News advertising 15” woofers for $25. I ended up with an unfinished 12” 3-way pair of speakers and the drivers and crossovers to fit. Ming bought some dual 12” woofer cabinets that stood about 4’ tall.  With the combined system, we’d lug it to each other’s houses every once-in-a-while and would critique albums and whatever tweak we’d done to our equipment. Every now and again I see a pair of Web Sound speakers advertised on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. I actually have a pair that I used in my shop for years, until the one mid-range driver started distorting. They are now sitting under my workbench. I still have the Reimer amp and the Akai reel-to-reel as well.

There was a large home and pro sound company in the middle of downtown Vancouver called Commercial Electronics. They occupied three floors of a large building right on one of the main Vancouver streets, Burrard St. They started out in the 1950s as a home stereo store, and eventually moved into doing pro sound installations as well. They were well known in Vancouver, and if you wanted a high-end stereo, chances are you at least stopped into Commercial.

Commercial Electronics was less known for their ‘Omni Q’ surround sound system which they developed for planetariums. The Vancouver Planetarium had one such system, and as I found out many years later, that division kept Commercial afloat at times where the consumer and pro divisions hit slow times. They sold that Omni Q system worldwide for lots of planetariums, as it was state of the art innovation, decades before the consumer 5.1 surround system became the norm.

I have two distinct memories of when I visited Commercial Electronics. The first was when I was in early high school. I went there just to look around in their large retail space, with lots of large, loud, and high-end stereos. While I was there, a customer was looking at a top-of-the-line pair of Sansui speakers, complete with the 1970s wood lattice that acted as the speaker front. At the time, tons of speakers of that era had wood latticework as the grille, and as I walked in, the salesman cranked the heck out of these Sansui speakers for the client. Now, typically the consumer level of Japanese stereo manufacturers wasn’t considered high end (with some exceptions), but since companies like Sansui and Pioneer sold a ton of turntables and cassette decks, they had to complement their lines with their own brand of speakers. So, as this salesperson is cranking these Sansui speakers to their limit, he yelled to the customer “THESE SPEAKERS ARE UGLIER THAN MY GRANDMOTHER’S UNDERPANTS, BUT THEY SURE SOUND GREAT!” I thought that was a very strange way to sell speakers, and here we are, 45+ years later, and I still remember it.

The second memory dates from around 1980, when I spotted a ¼ page ad in the local newspaper of Commercial having a blowout sale. They listed a bunch of equipment with pricing, all of which was too expensive for me, but on the last line was ‘Maxell UDXL 10.5” reels of tape, $3.99 each, limit 1 per customer.’ I called up my buddy Ming and excitedly told him to come down to Commercial with me on that Saturday morning, so he could also buy a reel for me. I didn’t know how many they had, but I was determined to get as many as I could. We got down there by bus on the Saturday morning, and to our dismay, there was a long line of people already, waiting for the doors to open. We got in line. At 9 AM, the doors opened up, I asked where the tapes were, and was told they were in the basement, where the service department was. Considering this was 1980, the demand for reel-to-reel tapes had passed a few years earlier, and there wasn’t anyone really there who wanted them. So, I grabbed one, Ming grabbed one, and then I had an idea. Since other people weren’t there for the tape, they were buying higher end stereo gear, maybe I could convince them to buy more tapes for me. Since back then, the retail price of a Maxell UDXL tape was $56 Canadian, (to this day I have no idea why Commercial was blowing them out at $3.99), their sales price was a steal.  With the sales tax, the sale price total came out to $4.25. I offered other customers there $5.00, and ‘keep the change’ to buy me a reel of Maxell tape. Within 10 minutes, I had 11 reels of tape in my arms and the sales guy finally said, “OK kid, I see what you did, but you have enough and we’re cutting you off.”
I smiled and walked out the door with 11 reels of Maxell tape. To my recollection, I also bought my allotment of Maxell cassettes that day. I still have all of those Maxell tapes. Four of them have the top 99 albums of 1980 and 1981 recorded on them, which I taped all day and night off the local rock radio station, CFOX.

At the end of Grade 11, I ran the sound system for the Grade 12 graduation ceremony. Never to be one for pomp and circumstance, the early 1980s were the start of the politically correct era, something I never had time for. I saw little Johnny and Susie (fictitious names) sit on the stage, ready to receive their graduation certificates, even though I knew that a bunch of the kids there weren’t graduating. I had a problem with that. If you don’t pass your classes, you shouldn’t get to go to the graduation ceremony. I’d heard stories of the after-parties, lots of underage drinking and subsequent vomiting and hangovers, and decided then and there that I would have nothing to do with my own graduation ceremony, even though I was still holding a strong B average. I simply didn’t care for the partying and socialization that was a large part of graduating high school. I knew that I was going to go to college or university, and applied to both UBC and BCIT, the main university and college in Vancouver.

I let my parents know that I wasn’t going to attend grad, and both had no problems with that. Come March of 1981 though, my dad approached me, telling me that my mom was upset that I wasn’t going to the grad ceremony, and would I reconsider? Reconsider? RECONSIDER? I made my statement back in September of 1980 about not going, I’m not changing my mind NOW. My dad let me be. All my mom said to me was “You’re going to regret not going, being there with all your classmates.” I thought about it. I really only had one friend in high school, my electronics buddy Ming, who also didn’t want to attend the ceremony, and I really didn’t care about anyone else, and they didn’t care about me. The thought of finding a date for the grad dance also didn’t appeal to me as I had no idea how I’d even go about getting a date. Nope, not appealing to me in the least.

Around that same time in the spring of 1981, the grad sponsor teacher and Phys Ed teacher, Ms. Martin, took it upon herself to have a showdown with me right after home room, about me not going to grad. Ms. Martin was a social butterfly, and there was a wide rumour about her dating another Phys Ed instructor (Mr. Pierce). To my knowledge, the rumour was true, but that didn’t concern me either.

She came up to me right after homeroom and the following conversation took place:

Ms. Martin: “Curt, I understand that you’re not going to the grad dance or ceremony.”

Me: “Yes, that’s correct. I see no reason to go.”

Ms. Martin: “But you’re going to miss celebrating with all your friends and classmates.”

Me: “I only have one friend here at high school, and he doesn’t really want to go either.”

Seeing that she was getting nowhere fast with me, she dropped her final punchline:
“But if you’re not going for yourself, then go for all the other classmates that will miss you being there.”

Me: “Ha, no one at this high school cares whether I go or not. If they want to get ahold of me after Grad, I’m listed in the phone book; they can call me.”

Ms. Martin knew when she was defeated, threw up her hands in disgust, and walked away.

+1 for Curt.

My mom ended up going to the graduation ceremony with a couple of her German friends. I remember the night of the grad ceremony, I was in the basement, working on a TV. Sometime around 7 PM, it dawned on me that this was the night of the grad ceremony. I put down my tools, thought about it for 10 seconds, shrugged my shoulders, and got back to work. I repaired the TV that night and was also correct that no one bothered calling me that summer save for the couple of friends that I already had. To this day, I have no idea how the grad ceremony went, and I do not regret being absent from the whole thing.

I’ll go back a bit in time to outline the relationships that I had with my parents and my sister. My mom very much wore the pants in the family; my dad was the provider. A few things of note: my mother was a terrible cook. My favorite meal was Shake and Bake chicken; my least favourite was anything that came out of her pressure cooker, with the release valve on the top that swung side to side. Late afternoon, if I heard the pfft, pfft, pfft of the pressure cooker, I knew I was in for some mushy overcooked potatoes, mushy red cabbage, or worst of all, beets. To this day, I will eat almost any food and will try something exotic on a regular basis if we’re going to some ethnic restaurant. But… if there’s a drop of beet juice on the plate, it ruins the entire meal for me. To be fair to beets, I have tried them several times since, and I may as well go outside and eat some dirt. My opinion hasn’t changed. I also know I am not the only one that thinks this way.

My mom had a rather large German friend who was a great cook, and her lack of a girlish figure showed it. Every meal was a 5 or 6 course meal, so I came up with a theory of Germans that escaped Germany at the end of WWII: either, they want their  kids to suffer the same hardship as they did, so they cook badly, as my mom did, or they did exactly the opposite as my mom’s friend did, overcompensate and provide killer meals for their kids. Am I right? You decide.

Another childhood food story of note: My friend Ming’s parents invited me out to Victoria Station one evening, Victoria Station was a steak house restaurant in downtown Vancouver. I googled it, and it was actually a US based chain restaurant with around 100 locations at their peak. My parents always told me to order the cheapest thing on the menu when invited out by my friends’ parents, so I ordered spaghetti and meatballs. Ming’s dad said in his broken English: “No, you have a steak.” Steak? What the heck is a steak? I’d never had one. I was in grade 10. So OK, if you insist, I’ll have a steak. The waiter asked me “How would you like it cooked?” Oh, damn – I didn’t know… so I said “Medium”, hoping that it was the right answer. Soon enough, the waiter brought me this slab of meat. I took one bite and was over the moon; this was one of the best things I’d ever tasted. That night, I went home and asked mom “Why have you never made steak? It’s amazing!” In her German accent she said “Oh, vell, I didn’t tink you’d like it.” She never made steak. I went back to requesting Shake and Bake.

My mom and I had an adversarial relationship, starting around 10 or 11 years of age. We grew up with German traditions in our home: as kids we sang German Christmas carols around the Advent wreath, St Nick’s day was on December 6, with Santa bringing chocolate and a tray of nuts and German gingerbread. The thing was, as I approached adolescence, and abandoned German folk music for Queen and Elton John, it just wasn’t cool any more to sing those Christmas carols. As my sister reminded me while I was writing this tome, I no longer enjoyed ‘gawking at the candles’.

As for my line of work, my mom envisioned us kids to take after what they did, be white collar workers of whatever choice we wanted, and my mom would often say “If you don’t get good grades, you’ll be a ditch digger out in the rain, digging ditches.” I’d look out the car window and see the construction workers in their raincoats, thinking “Yeah, I don’t want to do THAT”, but at the same time I didn’t realize that construction workers make good money.

My sister Monica did exactly what my mom had hoped: she obtained her BSc and PhD in Chemistry at UBC, worked for several biotech companies as a researcher, and ended up working for Pfizer as a project manager supporting oncology R&D programs. (She gave me a Viagra T-shirt from the research team that developed it).

On the other hand, I was repairing broken TVs, some of which were trade-ins from shut-ins, who chain smoked Marlboros, 2 packs a day, and those TVs were covered in nicotine.  When I got those sets in, I’d hit the top of the screen with a healthy bunch of shots of Windex, and by the time the drops got to the bottom of the picture tube, the liquid was a dark brown from all the nicotine the high voltage of the old CRTs attracted. Once I’d wipe the screen clean, the brightness increased by 20% just from cleaning it.

My mom was a staunch non-smoker (she apparently smoked in her 20s), so she hated when I dragged in a smoke-filled TV. I think my mom got more upset the older I got, still being hell bent on doing electronics servicing as compared to a true white-collar job, so every once in a while, she’d head into my shop, which admittedly wasn’t the cleanest shop/basement in the world and would randomly take items and throw them out. There was never any rhyme or reason to it. One day I realized all of my circuit diagrams and service manuals were missing off the bookshelf where I had stored them at. Sometime later, I couldn’t find the back cover to a television I was waiting on parts for, so that set was now useless. Mom was very passive/aggressive about it to boot, never giving me a straight answer whether she threw something out or not. All I’d get was “Vell, zee garbage men were here yesterday, zay may haf taken something.”

Granted, mom and dad asked me to keep my electronics collection down to a dull roar, to throw out or sell some of the items in the basement before bringing in more; however, I was amassing knowledge on how to fix things at a significant rate. Sometimes (well, a lot of the time!) I had to put things aside that I couldn’t quite yet repair, in favor of other things that I could. To this day, I will for months put things aside that I am stuck on… and sometimes for years. I will go back to the item, and on a regular occasion, I will repair the unit within minutes the second or third time around, either due to a fresh look, or by applying knowledge that I’d gained since I’d looked at it last. Alas, I am but a tortured technician: no one understands me.

One afternoon, I just lost it, breaking down in hysterics in front of my sister, mom and dad. Dad didn’t come to my defense or ask my mom to give me a straight answer about where a couple of electronics pieces of mine were. He simply said “I just want to keep the peace.” The net result of this random torture and decimation of some of my electronics was my resolution to get out of the house as fast as possible, and I just distanced myself from my mom and my dad. It pushed me deeper into electronics, as electrons were always logical – people, not so much. I found out early on that when I was working on a ‘tough dog’, whether it was a unique or rare problem, or I just didn’t have the knowledge or experience yet to figure out a simple fault in a device, once I went back and looked at the circuit diagram and analyzed why that defective part caused the problem, it all made sense.

To this day, when clients ask what’s appealing about electronics, I just tell them “It’s like solving 1 or 10 murder mystery ‘whodunnit’ cases a day.” Sometimes one of my cases takes weeks to figure out, and I will put the unit aside and come back to it another day (or year); other times I’ll get 3 or 4 easy cases to solve, and I’ll do 10 in a day. No two days of work are ever the same.

One minor disaster that I had while working on TVs at home was getting zapped on occasion by high voltage. While I was relatively immune to shocks from 120 volts, getting nipped by 5000 volts or more from the high voltage section took on a different result. One day I was working on a tube Zenith TV that had a metal cabinet around it. I had the back off, and was adjusting the focus on the set, which had 5000 volts on the control. Next to the focus wire was the horizontal output tube, with an anode cap of around 3000-volt spikes on it as well, at a frequency of 15.75 Khz, the standard frequency of all TVs in North America. I was leaning over the front of the set, with my hand on the focus control. Other TV shops have a mirror that you’d look into, so you could concentrate on the back of the TV, but I was too cheap to buy one, so I’d lean over the TV. My hand slipped, and I brushed up against the anode cap of the tube. My reflexes kicked in, and my hand flew upwards… right onto the sharp edge of the metal cabinet. More reflexes, and my hand went back down – right back onto the horizontal tube. Back up to the cabinet edge. My brain put up with this three times before I had the sense to pull my hand out of the TV. I looked at my hand. I had cuts on the top from the metal cabinet, and small pinpricks of burned skin from the anode lead. I went to get rubber gloves and finished the focus setup.

In Grade 11, I walked into the music room, and there was a kid that I hadn’t met before playing drums. It was pretty clear that he was better at playing than I was. I sat down, introduced myself, and he said his name was Ryan. Turns out he was in Grade 8, and it was definitely unusual for a nerd in Grade 11 to befriend someone in Grade 8. Soon enough, we were spending quite a bit of time together, the bond of music being common ground.

Ryan had cool parents. Ryan’s dad had a massively loud home stereo that Ryan and I took every opportunity to crank up when his parents weren’t home, and Ryan had a pretty decent stereo and a drum set in his room as well. He took drumming a whole lot more seriously than I did (and having a drum set at home gave him plenty of opportunity to practice). We hung out often, although once I entered the work force after college in 1983, we drifted apart, only to be reconnected a few times, especially once Facebook went online. To this day, Ryan and I get together at least once a year, go for a nice dinner, and pretend that we’re 18 years old again.

In grade 12, I spent a fair bit of time in the smoke hole around the back of the school, by the ravine. I had a ghetto blaster that I’d bring to school, and one or two cassettes. Despite not smoking, I never got harassed by the smokers, and since they generally listened to the harder music of the late 1970s, such as Black Sabbath or Ted Nugent, that’s what I listened to, and they accepted me because of the stereo. My grades still stayed at a B though.

During the spring of 1981, I made overtones to Ray, the owner of Gregg TV in the village, to come work part time for him that summer. By this time, he knew me well, as I’d picked up lots of TVs and stereo equipment that he threw out over the previous couple of years.  He agreed to try me out, and I’d get paid $5.00 an hour. That was just fine by me. He put a couple of easy repairs in front of me, a cassette tape recorder that needed a belt, and a stereo that needed the controls and switches cleaned. I worked carefully but quickly, and by the third day, he told me that I knew a whole lot more about electronics than he figured I did. By the second week, I was changing picture tubes in televisions, which was a relatively advanced procedure when it came to TV repairs.

I thought I had it made during the summer of 1981. I was working 5 days a week at the TV shop, making good money (twice that of what friends made at McDonald’s), I was getting regular trade-in sets from a couple of TV shops in North Vancouver, and had a 1979 VW Rabbit that I cruised around in, that I bought for $4,300, with the money I made selling TVs.

That summer, I listened to two albums incessantly, that I recorded on a Maxell UDXL90. One side was Rush’s Moving Pictures; the other was AC/DC’s Back in Black.  I wore that cassette out, although I might still have it in my collection of 1000+ cassettes. I bought tons of blank tape and would regularly make mix tapes on both cassette and reel-to-reel, and still have most of them to this day.

College – BCIT

In the fall, I went to BCIT, into Telecommunications. I didn’t know what job I was going to have: at the moment, repairing TVs made me more money than probably anyone fresh out of high school, so I had lots of disposable income. Looking at the BCIT 4 course options, Telecom seemed the most logical choice. Someone that I had known since Grade 3 was another Chinese guy named Arden, and we bonded in Grade 12. He became my best friend, and due to my income (and his), we’d go out to the Keg a lot, catching up on all the steak that I was denied as a child. Ditto for their French Onion soup and their escargots. I believe that may be all I’ve ever had at    the Keg – and always topped off with a Billy Miner Pie.

BCIT was a bit of an eye opener. I was 17 when I entered, the average age was 24, and as the instructors said on our first day “You paid good money for your education. If you’re not getting it, let us know.” This was a far cry from high school, where you were stuck with whatever education you got… or chose to take away from it. Thanks to my practical experience repairing electronics, I flew through the first semester, without really needing to study much. I aced every lab, not so much the theory and written tests, but I averaged out at a solid B as well. I became friends with Michael, who was around 23. He was far too good-looking and spent his weekends partying. He drove a 1973 Duster, with a tiny steering wheel and oversize mag tires, and regularly got pulled over for speeding, to the point where he lost his license for a bit. As a result, he moved down the street from BCIT so that he could bike to school. Problem solved.

Mike didn’t show up for the midterm due to a hangover, and predictably he dropped out at the end of the first term. He went on to become quite successful, being a part owner of a now defunct company called ‘Computer Clinic’, who would service computers and the first-generation computer servers and networks.

Mike and I also had an interesting conversation about cocaine, shortly before the first mid-term. I knew what cocaine was, but had never seen it, and the movie Scarface was still years away from being released.

Mike: “Ever tried cocaine? It really helps you concentrate; you’ll ace your midterm.”

Me: “Nope, never tried it, sounds interesting.”

Mike: “Oh, it is.”

Me: “Well, if cocaine allows you to ace midterms, why doesn’t everyone do it?”

Mike: “Well, if your brain decides to concentrate on your shoelaces, then you won’t write a thing on the midterm, as you’ll be looking at your shoelaces for the duration of the test.”

Dammit, a quick fix to get high grades has been foiled again: I guess I needed to continue to study the regular way.

I ended up becoming study partners with another guy, close to the top of the class, named Ed. My coasting through the BCIT classes came to a screeching halt sometime after the first mid-term, as now we were getting into uncharted territory. I hung onto Ed, and we did well together, but he had significantly better grades than I did.

On weekends I continued to work at the TV shop and still had a decent disposable income.
One of the requirements at the end of the second year of BCIT was to do a 2-week practicum/work experience at a high-tech employer of our choice. Traditionally, BCIT was known as a great place to recruit techs from, so a company called Mitel, based in Ottawa, did a presentation at BCIT about coming to work for them. Rather than have set hours, they worked on a ‘jobs to be done’ basis. As the recruiter explained, “If you finish the job in 10 hours, then you have a lot of free time left over until the next assignment, but if it takes you 50 hours, then you’ll need to work extra time to finish it.” (Something may be lost in translation here as it was 43 years ago.)

This concept greatly appealed to me, but I remember grumblings from other students around me “Eff that. If I work, I demand to get paid.” So, a few weeks before the 2-week work experience started, I called HR at Mitel, asking if they could find me a non-paying position for 2 weeks. HR was all confused, as they said that no one had ever asked this of the company before, and they wouldn’t cover the flight or accommodation costs. “No problem” I said as my buddy Arden had accommodations for me.  He had moved to Ottawa to take law at Carleton University. After some discussion, they said to show up, and I booked a flight to Ottawa, paid for by my parents, probably in the hopes that I would stop repairing TVs. I still wasn’t really sure what Mitel did, but I was game.

Mitel built telephone switching systems for medium to large sized businesses. They built the main computer cores, so that telephones at the various desks and locations in a large office could access outside lines, and to act as intercoms between floors and various telephones. I remember two things from my arrival: Ottawa was REALLY cold compared to Vancouver in April, and one of their guys showed me some basics, and put me to work testing circuit boards. This was all cutting-edge computer-controlled stuff, as Mitel was at the forefront of phone systems, so this was all foreign to me.

About the only thing I remember from my two-week stint there was that one day several of their staff were looking at a diagnostic PC board. Other boards were plugged into it, and the diagnostic board would run a bunch of tests on the board plugged into it, to pass or fail inspection and testing. For whatever reason, the diagnostic board wouldn’t work, and they only had a limited number of these boards, so it was holding up production. Apparently, this defective board had been through several of their techs, and none could figure it out. I asked if I could take a shot at it and asked also to get one of the working diagnostic boards to compare the bad board with. My thinking was that perhaps something was missed in the assembly of that defective board, since it wasn’t a regular production run item. Within 20 minutes, I saw that the defective board was missing a set of jumper wires, so for fun, I added them, and then plugged the board into the test jig.  Sure enough, the LEDs on the defective board started doing what they should, so I called over the guy that had given me the two boards and asked if that’s what the board should be doing (since I really had no idea). His eyes widened, and he called the other techs over, telling them that I’d repaired it. It was a proud moment for me, doing what their techs couldn’t (more on what I call ‘tech ego’ later on).

In the end, I flew back to Vancouver and was indeed offered a job at Mitel. I did read in the news that the flagship telephone switch system that they were working on was late to production, due to startup problems, and as a result they lost a significant contract to supply them. Their stock dropped as a result, and figuring that the last man in would be the first to be laid off, I declined the offer to move across the country, to take my chances elsewhere for a more local job opportunity.

BCIT was recognized as typically having a greater than 80% job placement rate at graduation. For whatever reason, in my graduating year, it was about 20%. The instructors all came to the front of the class close to the end of the year, and apologized for having such a low placement rate, even though they really had nothing to do with it. I sent out around 200 resumes, with only one job offer at a sketchy (to me) testing lab, that really didn’t appeal to me. Since I was making good money at the TV shop, and loved what I did, Ray offered me $10 an hour if I’d come and work full time. So that’s exactly what I did. I repaired hundreds, if not thousands of TVs, stereos, and other consumer electronic goods.

 

Before I started working at the TV shop, I drove across Canada 2 days after finishing the final exams at BCIT. I was pretty sure I passed, so I wasn’t concerned about getting the results. I drove solo across Canada to see my friend Arden was going to university in Ottawa. He ended up in the page program at the House of Commons, where selected first year university students would act as runners for the various politicians while the government was in session. As a result, Arden had access to a lot of places that ‘regular folks’ didn’t, and I got a good backstage tour of the House of Commons, while the House of Commons was in session, and not. Arden had made a good number of inroads with various politicians, so many of them knew who he was. He also was good friends with most of the other pages, who would socialize (aka drink) when parliament wasn’t in session. As a result, we had free places to sleep, and we planned to drive all the way to Newfoundland and around the maritime provinces over a 5-week period. My parents were a bit concerned that I was driving solo across Canada. They had done the journey several times and were afraid that I’d fall asleep at the wheel in the prairies, where everything was flat, straight, and boring. Far from it! It was during that trip that I fell in love with road trips. Junk food on the passenger seat, a can of soda, and tons of cassettes, and I was set to drive for hours.

We did indeed drive all across Canada. We did about 12,000 Km in that 5-week period in my 1979 VW Rabbit.  The only hardship we endured was the poor clutch in the Rabbit, as I tried to teach Arden how to drive stick shift, and he just couldn’t get the hang of it. The clutch hung on for dear life though, and didn’t fail during the 5-year duration that I had that car.

Drew warned me that eventually I’d burn out of repairing consumer electronics, and he cautioned me to find work elsewhere. I ignored his warning.

I did a number of things while I was working at the TV shop. It had a tenant above the store, and Ray was a part owner of the building, and one tenant worked for a local taxicab company, in what position exactly escapes me. One day the tenant came down and asked if we’d work on taxi meters that were made in Australia. The taxicab company had a ton of spare parts for these meters, along with full schematics and a phone number to Australia if we needed tech support.  Normally this was way out of the league of a TV shop, but I asked to take the meters on, and got really good at repairing them. I never had to call Australia for assistance. Looking back, they were fairly simple devices, but for the 3 or 4 years we worked on them, we made good money doing so.

From my time at United Electronics, I found that I really liked the picture of the Hitachi TVs that they sold. Gregg TV sold the Zenith brand, which were good sets, but had a more subdued picture than the Hitachi which was bright and vivid. Sure enough, Ray took on the line, and as I suspected, the local clients were very polarized to one brand or the other depending on what kind of image they liked. Sales went up as a result. When I started, the TV shop also didn’t take in Sony TVs for repair. Ray found them to be difficult to service, but I asked to take one or two of them in for me to try. I got really good at repairing Sony TVs.

After BCIT, I moved out of my parents’ place into a basement suite close to the TV shop, and about 2 Km from my parents’ place. My parents moved my things into the basement suite while I drove across Canada, and rather than stop off at their place when I arrived back in Vancouver 5 weeks later, I went to my new home, showered, realized that I didn’t have a towel, changed and went to work at the TV shop. I let my parents know the next day that I was successfully back from my trip.

The basement suite was pretty spartan, by my own design. I had a bed, a TV, a VCR, a stereo, and a workbench that I’d fix TVs at. The fridge was unplugged, and used to store electronics magazines in. The only meal I ever made at home in the first few years that I lived on my own was Campbell’s soup, in a battered pot that also doubled as the bowl. The problem was, between 1981 and 1985, the price of televisions went down significantly from $549 for a 12 channel, non-remote 20” TV, down to $299 for that same 20” TV, but now with a TV converter built in that could get the extra cable channels that were appearing with the cablevision providers, as well as a remote control. Over the span of a couple of years, it wasn’t worth repairing televisions any more to sell on the used market.

RCA was the driving force behind the cheap TVs, as they dropped their pricing the lowest, and they had a large billboard outside of their large parts warehouse, proclaiming ‘THE NUMBER ONE BRAND IN CANADA’. I’m sure it was true, as neither Zenith nor Hitachi could match the price, and the large superstores Future Shop and A&B Sound got pricing discounts that the smaller mom and pop TV shops weren’t eligible for. Times were a-changing, and I didn’t like it one bit. At one point I had to rent a 1-ton truck and take a bunch of TVs that I had stored in my basement suite and at the TV shop and take them to the dump as they just weren’t worth fixing anymore.

Zenith started cutting corners on the construction quality starting around 1983 to compete, and during one Christmas rush, probably 1984, we had to unbox all of the new TVs that came in, to test run them. Many of them failed out of the box, and we and the other dealers were submitting tons of warranty claims on the work we had to do to them to get them going. At one point, Zenith ran out of replacement modules, so in desperation, I started repairing the modules so that we could get sets to customers, even though Zenith didn’t want dealers to be repairing them.

Those RCA TVs were also failing right out of the warranty period, with significant failures such as picture tubes, transformers and tuners, so many of those sets got written off at the 4-5 year mark. That was a far cry from the typical 15-20 years that TVs would last in years gone by. There was one saving grace from Zenith. In early 1985, they introduced their first large screen projection TV. I was 22 years old when I saw the set at the Zenith dealer sales meeting, and I was impressed with the large 8-foot screen that this projector produced, with a reasonable picture quality. The Zenith sales rep approached me, since I was the techy young nerd, and asked me if I wanted to help sell this new projector, that retailed for $3500, to multi-millionaires and to sports fans. The original units even came with a roll-away cart, so that someone could roll it out of a closet for game day, watch sports on the white wall in the basement, and then to be wife-friendly, it could be rolled away back into the closet. That’s the idea that Zenith had when they marketed the projector initially.

I went to the BC Home show in my only suit and coke bottle glasses, and brushed up on my sales skills, while being completely technically proficient with the install and setup aspects of the set.

I’ll get back to how the Zenith projector related to my work, but to digress for a moment.  During high school, I was in band class with another drummer named Lorne. Lorne and I weren’t really friends, but he was a much better drummer than I was, and he was heavily into jazz, whereas I was more into rock. Therefore, he played the jazz songs on the drum set, and I’d play songs with more of a straightforward rock drum beat. In 1979, at the end of Grade 10, he moved to Richmond with his family, and I figured that was the end of our semi-friendship. To my surprise, he started calling me, and once I got my driver’s license and he had his, we’d drive to each other’s homes with our newfound independence in the form of said driver’s licenses, and would go for dinner and hang out.

Lorne became a liquor sales rep at Potter’s Distillers, the company that his grandfather started, and that he and his dad worked for. One of Lorne’s jobs was to call on night clubs, to get their liquor into the bars. Night clubs were a thing that I wasn’t really familiar with, other than one time, where I ran a sound system for a one-off show for a small reggae band while I was in high school. They managed to get a gig at a local club in North Vancouver called Fast Eddie’s, and I was sternly instructed to stay at the mixer and not move around the club in case the police came in for a patrol that night. I was 2 years under the legal night club/drinking age.  The police never showed up, and the band gig went fine.

By 1984 I started wearing a pager, so that people could get ahold of me. 667-9627 was the phone number. I had that pager for years, until cell phones were invented. One Friday night in the summer of 1984, Lorne paged me. He said that a newish night club in Richmond had one channel of their sound system go down, and they were in trouble so could I come out to see what the problem was. I jumped into my Rabbit and headed out with a meter and a few hand tools with me. I went into the club that barely held 200 people, and quickly found a bad solder connection on one of the connectors in the back of the rack.  A company called Roscoe’s had installed it, the system was under warranty, however their tech was out of town, and wasn’t available. Danny, the bar owner, offered me as much beer as I could drink, and I think $50, since I saved the night. I declined the drink as I didn’t yet drink at age 20 but took the $50. I stuck around, as the music that was being played was top 40, and it was LOUD, which appealed to me. The owner and I started chatting, and since I was a big lover of music, I asked if he ever needed a part time DJ (having never DJed in a club before, but I made many mix tapes at home with a small Radio Shack mixer). Danny took my number, and I started DJing a night or two a week, for cash pay. Lorne then also introduced me to the owners of Juliana’s, a dance music club a couple of kilometers away from Airwaves, Danny’s small Top 40 club, and eventually started assisting their sound and lighting tech, who introduced me to a bit of the large sound systems used in night clubs. 15” woofers, 200 watt per channel amplifiers… I was hooked!

The tiny club in Richmond was called Airwaves and held maybe 200 people (they probably bent the rules and allowed 220 on a busy Friday night), with a small dance floor. What attracted me was the folded horn Cerwin Vega speakers that really pushed out the bass, as well as the large screen TV in the corner of the club that played MTV. Back in the 80s, MTV was available in the US only, but if you had a 12’ satellite dish on your roof, you could pull the channel in. There was no descrambling needed in 1984, so I would watch the VJs and all of the latest rock videos. There’s a great book about the rise and fall of MTV if you care to read it (VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave). 

The local rock FM station, CFOX, didn’t play a lot of the pop music found on MTV, so as a result, my music taste shifted towards pop from hard rock. Madonna, Duran Duran, and Michael Jackson ended up being influences as I watched these videos. Thanks to Lorne who lived in Richmond, I started hanging around Airwaves and ended up living in Richmond at least twice in a few years. The difference between me and the other bar patrons was that I didn’t drink. I’d get free orange juice or a Coke from the bartender, and I’d watch a couple of hours of MTV before heading home.

Lorne quickly introduced me to the owners of Juliana’s Cabaret which was a couple of miles from Airwaves. Juliana’s was a larger club, and a typical nightclub size that held around 230 people or so. Juliana’s was a dance club which played all the dance music you wouldn’t hear on the radio. Vancouver didn’t yet have a dance music radio station, and wouldn’t have for a couple of years (which was called Z953). As a result, to hear dance music, you’d have to go to a dance club. I was introduced to Lefty, their DJ. Lefty took me under his wing and showed me how to beatmix two records (timing them so you could sync up the drumbeats, and then fade from one song to another, so you couldn’t tell where one song started, and the other one ended). Lefty was excellent at beat-mixing, and I tried my hand at it immediately. There are a lot more skills to beat-mixing on turntables than there is currently, where many of the CD/MP3 players will do a bunch of the work for you. With turntables, you had to adjust the turntable speed so that you could overlap the beats by anywhere from 10-30 seconds, and even longer if you wanted to do special effects or your own remix of a dance song.  Miss a beat or a cue, or accidentally bump a turntable, causing a skip, all of the drunks in the clubs laughed at you. More than once, I lost track of which turntable was live through the sound system, and I’d lift the needle on the wrong record, causing dead silence in the club. Oops!

I got reasonably proficient at beat-mixing while I was DJing, but nowhere near as good as Lefty, who had done it full-time for a number of years.  I ended up taking care of the sound and lights of Juliana’s in no time, because the fellow who had taken care of them for a few years decided he wanted to get out of sound and lighting installations and do astrology. Funny enough, Bruce got his start at Roscoe’s Sound, a local night club installation company a few years before I started working there, and he designed and built some lighting chasers that Roscoe’s ended up selling to a number of their club installations. They were super basic, but reliable, and I don’t recall having to service a broken one, ever.

Juliana’s renovated two times between 1984 and 1990, and I ended up doing the sound and lights for them as they upgraded and did the renos. When I started at the club, the crowd was predominantly Caucasian; however, with the large Chinese population influx into Richmond, the club had more and more Asians as clients and they loved the dance music. The problem was, the club also drew in some gang members, and more than once, I heard a cocktail waitress say “It was scary tonight. One gang member had a gun on him and another at the table next to him, and a rival gang member had a knife.” Being completely ignorant of such matters, I never figured out how she knew. Eventually by 1990, it appeared that the owners of Juliana’s were getting tired of the business, so when they moved locations eventually, as their building was about to get torn down, I passed on quoting on their new location.

Phasing out of the TV shop

In May of 1985, my dad called me, and said that he’d run into a salesman from a company named Roscoe’s Sound, and they were looking for a part time technician – was I interested? I’d known about Roscoe’s since high school, as they came and DJed some of our school dances, and my exposure to the install that they did at Airwaves. I did know that I was losing interest in repairing TVs, and 5 years after Drew warned me about burning out of repairing TV sets, I knew that he was right.

I went to be interviewed by the owner of Roscoe’s Sound, whose name was Charles, and found out that the company did nightclub installs, set up the sound and lights for fashion shows, and did a ton of mobile DJing for school dances and weddings. There were about 5 full time people, and then a bunch of part time roadies that would set up and tear down the DJ equipment, plus a number of DJs that were hired as needed. In all, there were maybe 12-15 people total, depending on how busy the season was for mobile DJing

Charles was the pure definition of a yuppie. He drove a BMW, dressed the part, and ran the company. I started working there part-time on Mondays and got introduced to night club sound and lighting systems by their main installer named Marv. Rod was their salesman, Danalynn was the receptionist and there were a number of people that came and went. I slowly became integrated into the company, and Marv took me to do some installations.

Two early installations were a Burger King intercom drive-through system where we installed an underground loop to detect when the vehicles would enter the drive-through, and a night club, which happened to be a remodel of Fast Eddie’s in North Vancouver where I had done that one night sound gig for the reggae band a few years earlier. I chatted up a storm with Marv and mentioned to him that the night club installs were fun, but laying conduit for an underground loop wasn’t super glamorous. I wasn’t complaining – I was just pointing it out to him.  Marv responded by giving me the example of a broken TV in someone’s home vs a defective drive-through system at a fast-food restaurant. He explained that if a TV broke at someone’s home, they likely had a second TV to watch, so the rush to repair the main TV wasn’t nearly as important as a restaurant paying overtime on a weekend to get their drive-through intercom fixed, that accounted for 50% of the overall restaurant volume at any fast-food place.  I saw the light, and recognized how important the functioning of a commercial sound system is, compared to a home stereo that may not get repaired for weeks.

A few months later, Marv decided he wanted to slowly exit Roscoe’s to pursue a video production company that he had started, and the pressure was on to work at Roscoe’s full time. I didn’t really like doing installs and really wasn’t given a proper education of installing a commercial sound system rack. At the remodel of Fast Eddie’s, we reused a bunch of the equipment and added a couple of amplifiers. I reused all the audio cables in the rack as compared to making new ones (I didn’t know any better), and about ½ hour before the grand opening, we lost all of the mid-range, due to one of these cables that was covered in stale nicotine failing (in 1985, all of the pubs and bars allowed smoking). I quickly made up a new cable, and we had amazing sound within 15 minutes of the grand opening. I remember the rush I felt as the standing room only crowd filled the club, and I was hearing dance music that I hadn’t heard before. The kick in the chest by the eight 15” woofers felt great, and I wanted to pursue more of this line of work.

Over the course of about a year, I ended up working part time at the TV shop, and full time at Roscoe’s. Business at the TV store had died down, and the owner converted half the store to renting video cassettes. This was a great move on his part, and it also allowed me to come in after 5 PM, after working a full day at Roscoe’s to go and repair TVs for another 3 hours, until 9 PM when the TV/video store closed. Add part time DJing to the equation, and I had more than enough work to keep me out of trouble.

The first project of note early in my days of Roscoe’s was that a City of Vancouver worker stopped by the office and said that they needed a new custom light chaser built for the flickering flames on the Burrard Street bridge. Anyone reading this that has lived in Vancouver for a long time is probably thinking “What? What flickering flames on the Burrard Bridge?” That was my question as well, and I’ve lived here all my life. The staff member told me that there were 4 concrete towers, one at each corner of the bridge, and at the top they had 4 large concrete fixtures that housed a series of light bulbs, that flickered the way a candle does. I had to drive by that night to see that for myself. Sure enough, there they were.

What the city wanted was a 4-channel light sequencer, where the bottom set of lights would light up, then the bottom and the second set, and so on, until all 4 sets of lights were lit. Then they’d all go off, and repeat. Rod the sales guy asked if I could build such a thing, as back in 1985 before the days of microprocessors and programmable PC boards, light chasers in the night club industry came in 3 or 4 channel versions, and they would simply sequence lights, one channel at a time, and not sequence to simulate a flickering flame. Of course I said that I could do it and quoted a princely sum of $125 each.

After the worker from the city left, I realized I’d have to crack open the textbooks from BCIT, as I had no idea off the top of my head how to design such a unit.

A week later, however, I’d gotten the sequencer to work, designing it at home after work, and I built a prototype, and brought it into the shop. There was a place locally that would custom build circuit boards for cheap, so I decided to build 5 of them, one being a spare, and ran the first unit for a week at Roscoe’s, then running 24/7 for another week. I built up each unit in an electrical box and called the worker to come and pick them up. I had a speed control for the speed of the flickering flame and labelled all of the connections for an easy install.

Post-sale, every week I’d drive over the Burrard Bridge at night, looking for working flames. Finally, 2 months later, I saw that the new light chasers were installed, but I was disappointed. Two flames flickered upside down, one ran far too slowly, and the last one far too fast. At that time, I left things alone, as I’d gotten paid, and had other things to deal with. I swore that one day, though, I’d call the city to get them set up and installed properly.

Roscoe’s also maintained the sound and lighting for several stripper bars, which were a hot item in Vancouver at the time. Marv introduced me to a number of these places, and I’d do service calls, cleaning the nicotine buildup that ended up in the cooling fans in these amps, and once they overheated, they’d shut the amp off, and the club would lose part or all of their sound. Seeing attractive girls in various stages of undress was just a job bonus.

One problem was that Marv didn’t really teach me a lot of the theory about commercial sound systems, and I shudder when I think back about those first installs that I did between 1985 and 1988 or so. I didn’t know a thing about hanging speakers off ceilings, and I’m sure I did many unsafe installs, and I knew nothing about commercial speaker wiring, which allowed you to connect many ‘shopping mall’ speakers to a single amplifier without overloading it.  I didn’t know any of the rules about connecting these 70-volt transformer/speaker systems and ended up hopelessly overloading many an amplifier. Why they didn’t all shut down or blow up is beyond me, but I learned as I went, and corrected my mistakes.

Most of the night clubs and strip bars also had a large screen projection TV. The brands of choice for most of them was either a Kloss Novabeam, at a price of around $6,000 installed, or a Sony, which was even more money, at $8,000.

Circling back now to the Zenith video projectors, I mentioned to Charles at Roscoe’s that Zenith had this inexpensive video projector that retailed for $3,500, and it might be a good fit for the sports bars. At the time, Roscoe’s was a dealer for ESP video projectors, that made the Aquastar projector, that retailed for $13,000, and the Aquaray for $11,000. Needless to say, they were overpriced for the sports bars. Charles asked me to bring one down to the shop for assessment, and Zenith allowed me to do so, as sales for the high-end homes weren’t great. The picture that the Zenith gave wasn’t quite as clear as the more expensive ESP projectors, but for many applications, they would give a perfectly acceptable picture. Roscoe’s ended up buying one at cost through the TV store to put into their rental inventory.

One of the jobs I had at Roscoe’s was maintaining the sound and lighting systems at the Blue Boy Hotel in South Vancouver. The Blue Boy happened to house one of the larger strip bars in Vancouver, so my job was to make sure these systems were running 100%. I got to know most of the DJs there, as well as some of the other bars around Vancouver, and with Roscoe’s offering 24-hour service via my pager, I had regular calls after hours, usually in a panic when an aging amplifier blew. Watching naked girls dance while I was repairing a sound system was a side benefit, of course.

All of the girls would bring their 3 songs for their dance set to the DJ on cassette. Naturally, when the cassette deck broke, it was a panic situation, so I always made sure that I had a working cassette deck as a loaner/backup. What I didn’t take into consideration at first was that the single cassette decks that these strip bars had were being used about 10-fold of that to what the same deck would be used in a home stereo application. With me wanting to repair everything in sight, more than once I repaired a cassette deck that was beyond the end of life, only to have it fail again a few weeks later with another problem. I quickly realized that repairing the most crucial item at the strip bar was not a good idea, so I kept a couple of new cassette decks in stock that I would then sell to the bars when their deck died. Right around that time, the double cassette deck was introduced, so now, even if one cassette mechanism failed, a second one was available in the same deck, and tragedy was avoided. I made a point of telling every DJ to call me when one cassette transport failed, so I could have a replacement deck at the ready. Of course, no DJ ever called when one cassette went down, so eventually it was back to the panic phone calls when the second cassette mechanism went down on a Friday night.

The Blue Boy had a large 8’ screen video projector on one wall. I wasn’t taking care of the projector, as that was handled by a local satellite contractor. I considered him to be the competition, and thus the enemy, taking a page out of Charles’ book of small business knowledge. One day I started chatting to the satellite guy, and it turned out that he didn’t really want the video projector part of the business, he only wanted the satellite service contract, so instantly he became my buddy, and I took over servicing of the Blue Boy’s Kloss Novabeam projector.

While these Kloss projectors gave an acceptable picture, they were not designed for 14 hour a day use that the strip bars had them on for, and as a result, the picture tube life was around 18 months. A new set of CRT tubes with installation was around $4,000. Seeing an opportunity, and being on good terms with the Blue Boy manager, I told him about the new Zenith projector that I could install for $3,500, labour included. Ted (the manager’s) first question was “How long do the tubes last?” I told him that since the projector was newly released, I didn’t know, but that it came with a 1-year warranty. I’d come back in at the 11-month mark, and that if the tubes were shot, I’d replace them for free.

That was good enough for Ted, and he instantly placed an order for the first Zenith projector that I’d install, putting it on the same wall as the Novabeam, about 30 feet away. Once I did the install and tweaked the image as good as I could get it (I did have the full-service course completed from Zenith), it did look pretty good, and as far as brightness and contrast went, it looked better than the freshly retubed Novabeam. I was happy, Ted was happy, I got paid.

Back in the mid-1980s, there of course was no such thing as the internet, and if you wanted to see a Pay per View boxing or wrestling match, the only way you’d see it is by going to a sports or strip bar. By coincidence, if you wanted to see a naked girl, you also had to go to the strip bar.  I’d arrived at the strip bar scene at the right time: I was one of maybe three people in town that had the knowledge to install a CRT projector, and for about 6 months, I was the only person that recognized that the Zenith projector had far more sales potential to the strip bars than the millionaire home theatre market that Zenith had released the projector for.

Two weeks after I installed the first projector at the Blue Boy, Ted called me and said “Pull out the Novabeam, and put in another Zenith.” I questioned Ted, since they’d just spent $4,000 on retubing the Novabeam, to which he replied “We had a Pay per View event last night. The place was packed. Everyone was crowded around the Zenith projector and no one was watching the Novabeam. It’s not making us any money, so pull it out.” So, I ordered another projector from Zenith, and pocketed another $700 for 3-4 hours’ worth of work. This made me very happy.

Once the word got out that there was this 22-year old kid who was installing killer video projectors for cheap, my pager started going off with orders from bars around BC. Ted turned me onto a friend of his who owned the Quatsino Chalet in Port Alice, a remote town on the Northwestern tip of Vancouver Island, and he needed both a sound and a video system for his pub.

I quoted him directly, rather than through Roscoe’s, but was pretty booked at Roscoe’s as well doing the rock video parties. So, over a 48-hour period, I loaded my Toyota van up with all of the equipment needed for the Port Alice job, but worked a full day at Roscoe’s first. At 5 PM, I drove to the TV shop to work the evening shift. I left at 7 PM, to catch the 8 PM ferry to Vancouver Island. I drove up to Port Alice, and got in at 1:30 AM, just as the pub was shutting down. I spent all night doing the install and left at around 8 AM in the morning to catch the ferry back to Vancouver. I drove to Roscoe’s to work a full day, and then DJed a dance that night. It was about 40 hours straight, and while driving from Port Alice back to the ferry I almost fell asleep more than once but managed to avoid hitting any other cars or crashing into the ditch. That was the one and only time I worked for that long.

When I started at Roscoe’s, they had a contract with a local band booking agent called Sam Feldman to do the Pepsi Rock Video Parties. These were a 90-minute lunch a 4-hour after school dance, and with rock videos being the ‘it’ thing in the mid-1980s, Roscoe’s was very busy with bookings, especially during the December and May/June periods, where most of the school dances took place. The videos came by way of an authorized video distributor, and every couple of weeks we’d get a new Beta video tape with 20 of the latest rock videos on it. We had an audio and a video mixer, and three video machines, so we’d run those the same way that DJs used turntables: we’d mix the videos together into a seamless flow of music.

Roscoe’s had a 1-ton truck, and it was filled to the brim (probably unsafely so) with tons of lighting and audio gear, plus a 9’ X 12’ video screen, and the video equipment.  Since Pepsi sponsored each dance, they’d give us a blue velvet Pepsi rock video jacket to give out at each dance, along with 5 T-shirts and 20 flats of 24 cans of Pepsi each. Hundreds of kids at each dance, loud sound, a massive video screen, bright lights, a smoke machine, and 480 cans of Pepsi to give each kid a massive sugar rush. Of course it was a big hit!

Originally the rock video crew consisted of 5 people: two sound guys, two lighting guys and the VJ that hosted the dances. Charles, forever trying to save money by cutting staff, managed to get it down to 3 people: one sound guy, one lighting guy, and the VJ. Since I was in tune with the top 40 music, I was nominated to be both the VJ and to assist in setting up the audio and video, and of course, the video projector. When the crew got down to 3 people, the lighting guy was Terry, the audio guy was Dave, and myself. We all got along like a house on fire, and had many adventures, and misadventures, two of which I’ll outline here.

Probably sometime in 1986, we were hired by a Sikh client that rented out one of the buildings at the PNE (Pacific Northwest Exhibition), to host a dance for a few hundred Sikh kids. I don’t know what the function was, perhaps a high school graduation party, or a religious celebration…I can’t remember.

Charles pulled the three of us aside as we were loading up to go to the dance and warned us not to get into any trouble as the client could end up giving us a bunch of repeat business. I was still nerdy and on the straight and narrow and didn’t drink or smoke. Dave and Terry were a bit younger than I was and a bit less innocent. We all nodded our heads, and loaded the truck, and headed out to the PNE to set up. Everything was uneventful until we got towards the end of the setup, when one of the elders with a turban and a large beard came towards us and asked who was in charge. Without hesitation, Dave and Terry pointed at me, so I nodded in the affirmative, and asked what I could do for him. He smiled at me, and from behind his back, gave me a 26er of vodka and rum, and said “Boys, have a good dance.”

Dave and Terry’s eyes widened, I turned to them with the two bottles, and since I didn’t drink, handed them the two bottles, and told them not to be idiots and to be back at 6:50 PM sharp, since the dance started at 7. At that time, it was about 3:30 in the afternoon.

I went to get an early dinner, and Dave and Terry went back to the shop. That evening: 6:45 came and went, as did 6:50. No Dave or Terry. It wasn’t the end of the world, as I could turn on the sound and lighting as well, but my hands were full doing the video, so to properly run the lighting, we needed at least Terry to run the lights. At 7:05, as the kids were filing in, Dave came running in the door, apologizing for being late. There was no Terry. A bit annoyed, I asked Dave where Terry was, and Dave said “In the van, but I wouldn’t bother him for at least an hour.”  Curious, I let a longer video start, and I ran out to the Roscoe’s truck to look for Terry. There he was, passed out, his blonde long hair hanging out of the open passenger window, with a bright orange stream of vomit running down the side of the truck. I was starting to put two and two together and went back inside to ask Dave what had transpired over the previous 3 hours. Dave admitted that they had consumed most of the two bottles of alcohol, and that Terry was swinging orangutan style from the lighting trusses on the ceiling of the Roscoe’s shop shortly before they both drove back out to the PNE building about 20 minutes away from the shop.

To my recollection, Terry never did make it out of the truck that night, and he endured weeks of ribbing regarding his bright orange vomit down the side of the truck. Why bright orange? They’d consumed two large bags of nacho chips along with the alcohol.

There are many other stories from my time at Roscoe’s such as one day while I was on Vancouver Island doing an installation, and by chance we had a rock video dance in another city on the Island as well. We’d arranged for me to finish the installation the day before the dance, giving me plenty of time to drive to the city the dance was in (Campbell River?), and that’s exactly what I did. Since the dance was at 7 PM, and it usually took us 4 hours to set up, I expected Dave and Terry to be there around 2-3 PM. The problem was, they weren’t there. At 3:30, panicking a bit, I called into the office to find out where they were. I was told that the boys arrived at the shop nice and early, and as they lifted up the loading bay door, with the 1-ton truck already loaded the night before, Dave noticed smoke trickling out from under the door of the truck. Dave lifted the rolling door, which allowed fresh oxygen to hit the smouldering fire, and the fire lit quickly. To his credit, Dave grabbed a fire extinguisher and put the fire out. It looked like an inside job. Several of the EV speaker cabinets were missing their drivers, and sundry other small items were stolen out of the truck. Charles was notified, pictures were taken, and new speakers were loaded into the truck, and off they were to meet me, but hours late.

They finally showed up at the school around 4 PM, with the principal being very understanding and sympathetic, and we got that dance set up in 3 hours flat. I don’t think we even had to delay the dance. The only downside to that dance was that fine soot and fire extinguisher powder got all over everything, including the Beta Hifi tapes. More than several times that night, the audio dropped out for a couple of seconds, as the video machines navigated the soot, but the kids were happy, and we got paid.

About three years later after Roscoe’s had gone under, I was at a car stereo competition show, and ran across Ian, another part-time roadie for Roscoe’s from 1985 to 1987 or so. He had some American Land Yacht entered into the show, and in place of his back seat were four 15” EV drivers, two EV mids, and two EV horns. Those EV drivers looked all too familiar, and the mystery of who lit the Roscoe’s truck on fire was solved. He never did get charged for it. Who knows the motivation for setting the fire in the first place? While I had the odd disagreement with my boss at the TV shop and with Charles at Roscoe’s, I never had the inclination or the balls to vandalize property. I was too much of a geek, regardless.

There were installation mishaps as well. On occasion Charles would do in-house financing for some restaurant that couldn’t come up with the money to pay for a sound system install. One of those restaurants fell way behind on their payments, so one night Charles asked me to go repo the sound system. I got the details of the address, and what equipment I was to pull out, so I got there 15 minutes before closing, and told the staff that I was taking the sound system in for service. The rack of amplifiers came out easily enough, but I also had to pull down 12 speakers that were about 8’ up on the wall. To take the screws out of the speaker cabinets that were bolted to the wall I had to remove the woofer to access the cabinet screws. It was a slow process, until I got to the third speaker, and realized it was loose on the wall. On a hunch, I gave a solid tug on the speaker cabinet and almost fell off the ladder as the speaker pulled off the wall easily. It turned out that Dean, our ‘install manager’ had merely used two drywall screws going through the speaker into the drywall behind it. Not only was this a poor install practice, it was a small miracle that the speakers didn’t fall off the wall, hitting a patron in the head. Each speaker weighed about 7Kg/18lbs, so the risk was significant. Dean shrugged it off and suffered no consequences as a result. Dean also didn’t last too long at Roscoe’s: his management skills were significantly lacking, never mind the ability to do a proper installation.

By and large, though, the installations went well, but I learned from Charles that he considered that every competitor was the enemy, and only on occasion would sub-rent equipment from other rental companies to complete a large event that Roscoe’s had been hired to do.

We did one large fashion show at the Hotel Vancouver, with two follow spots (I manned one of them for the evening), and two sets of lighting trusses that held coloured floodlights to light up the stage. At the time, I knew nothing about fashion shows, and marvelled at how much equipment was rented to do such a production. We had the two sets of lighting trusses held up by Genie lifts, which were collapsible towers that were capable of holding hundreds of lbs of lighting and sound gear in the air. The Genie lifts were powered by a tank of compressed air, and telescoping sections of each lift would extend by pumping this compressed air into the lift via a hand trigger, to control how far each lift would go up. They worked exactly as they should, and we carefully pumped air into each lift to raise the lighting truss. The only minor problem was, as the Genie lifts age, the air seals would leak a bit, and every once in a while, you had to give another shot of compressed air into the lifts to keep them at the height they needed to be.  I guess we didn’t get to the one Genie fast enough, as I heard a collective gasp from the audience in the middle of the show, as one side of one lighting truss dropped by about three feet, as one Genie lift dropped due to lack of air. The front half of the audience was blissfully unaware that anything had happened, as they were in front of the light tower. I was told by Charles on the headset intercom to GET.. SOME.. AIR.. INTO.. THE… GENIE …..LIFT.. NOW!, and so I did, carefully pumping the lift back up… but not too much air, so the lift wouldn’t rise too far and crash into the ceiling tiles of the hotel ballroom. Good times!

Staff turnaround, especially for the roadies, was high. We had some regulars, such as Bryan and Ian that usually worked together, and Dave and Terry. Charles generally paid minimum wage, and he said once “Roscoe’s is a good place to start at”, and I wondered why he didn’t keep some of the better roadies by giving them a raise. Maybe they’d stick around? Many didn’t.

While I am keeping personal relationships out of this diatribe, one is worth mentioning. In 1986, Charles hired a new bookkeeper/office manager named Teri. Teri was really good looking, with curves in the right places, and was a transplant from Calgary. The only other woman in the office was Danalynn, the receptionist, who was married, so all eyes were on Teri who was single. Teri drove a red Dodge Charger, and liked to socialize, especially since she was new in town. Every single guy fawned over Teri, and she had no problems going out after work for a pint or two. I too was smitten with Teri but knew not to mix business with pleasure. Plus, I had a girlfriend.

As with many women in the 80s (I noticed this while DJing as well), the mix of Joico hair spray for the big hair, cigarette smoke (Teri smoked) and perfume, she had a familiar aura about her every time she walked by. Teri and I became the best of platonic friends, and we’d have a great time.  As luck would have it, Teri started dating Terry on the down-low, as he also had a long-term girlfriend. I was unaware of this; however, one year we did 10 days of rock video parties at the PNE, at the Agrodome. Sadly, it wasn’t well advertised, so despite a packed PNE, and an awesome sound, light, and video show, we were lucky if 10 people came in to see it over the course of the 5 hours we did it. Still, Roscoe’s got paid well by the PNE, so despite being bored to tears, we continued.

On the third or fourth night, Terry, who ran the light show, was late, which was unusual for our crew of three. We weren’t too concerned as Dave and I could run the show, but it was nicer with all of us there, especially since no one else was in the building and we had to entertain ourselves. Finally, 45 minutes later, Terry runs in the door, dressed in a shirt, also unusual for our T-shirt and jeans gang, ran up the three steps to our little staging area, and then walked behind me to get to his lighting console. As he passed, an all too familiar scent followed him. He was on the far side of Dave who was beside me running the sound system. I reached around Dave, grabbed Terry’s shirt, pulled him towards me, and said in a stern voice “SPILL THE BEANS.”

Thus started an on-and-off again relationship between Teri and Terry which resulted in a marriage for 5 years after Roscoe’s shut down. While the marriage didn’t last, I remain friends with Teri to this day. Terry ended up working for larger lighting companies doing large musical productions such as Phantom of the Opera and Aida in the 90s, and ultimately moved to the US and formed his own company. We email back and forth once in a while, but it’s been 30+ years since I’ve seen him.

Condo Purchase

In the summer of 1986, I purchased a condo out in Richmond, at the far South end, in Steveston. The condo complex was massive, more like a multi-story apartment building, with at least two main buildings, with close to 200 units.   I really wanted a house, but my budget didn’t allow it at the time. It was $43,000 and some, and I managed to come up with a $10,000 deposit. Big money for me at the time. It was 2 bedrooms, 1200 square feet, and I was hardly ever there, I was working so much. I did have a housewarming party, and a bunch of friends and coworkers from Roscoe’s showed up.  As I was moving in on a Friday night at 8 PM, the place was dead silent, and I wondered where everyone was. I finally realized that the average age in the building was probably 60, and most of them were probably asleep.

By the summer of 1987 Roscoe’s had outgrown the building we had at 1734 W 4^th Avenue, and Charles decided to find a new building closer towards Granville Island and he hired a crew to renovate the 6,000 square foot space, to give a more corporate look to the company. I was too busy doing service calls and installs to pay a lot of attention but went over a couple of times to check out the new digs. They were pretty impressive.

To my surprise, Charles asked if I wanted to run the entire service department under my own company name, as Charles usually wanted everything for himself. I took him up on his offer, and had invoices printed up so that I could invoice him. I don’t believe that I had an official company yet at this point, but I did have a company name registered, CSE Electronics, and had the invoices under that name as well. With my parents both being accountants, they urged me to keep a clean set of accounting books, but I was too busy doing what I loved to care.

Roscoe’s had also hired a new installer named Laurie who passed my job interview by acing the interview quiz that one of Charles’ early employees had devised (and I had to write the answer sheet for Charles, and then ultimately reviewed them). Laurie also showed me several projects that he had built including a headphone amplifier and storage unit that he’d built out of an old wooden jewellery box. I realized that Laurie had construction and installation skills far beyond what I ever had, and I hired him on the spot.

Laurie did an amazing job at a new nightclub that Rod, the sales guy at Roscoe’s had landed, and for the better part of six weeks I didn’t see Laurie, as he went straight to the job site, even spending a couple of nights there so he could install the sound and lighting system when the other trades had left the job site. I went down to the site shortly before Laurie had finished, and he truly had put together a work of art. The building was all concrete, which had its own unique challenges to do the installation. By day, the club was a restaurant/bar, and you really didn’t see that there was nightclub lighting installed until it was turned on. I was thoroughly impressed, and Laurie was grateful for my comments.

Charles came down to the site, and started complaining about this and that, that it wasn’t installed the way he had envisioned. I rolled my eyes at Laurie, who I swore was going to take a swing at Charles; however, I pulled Charles aside and told him that Laurie had put blood, sweat and tears into his first large installation, and Charles conceded that overall the install was well done. Laurie wasn’t impressed with Charles; however, Laurie and I, and Charles and I got along, so it mostly worked out.

Outside of Roscoe’s, my love of music and LOUD music continued. Around 1985 or so, car stereo competitions were being held yearly, and people from all over Vancouver entered their cars to compete for installation and sound quality. The first few years of these show were a lot of fun; however, eventually they just became a pissing contest of who had the most money to hire the top installers to put a $15,000 stereo into a $5,000 car. In the fall of 1987, one of the part time guys named Bill and I decided to enter his 1962 Chevy Nova into the competition for the fun of it. While I was a terrible car stereo installer, the enthusiasm was there. We put a system into his car within 24 hours, consisting of a first-generation Technics CD Walkman. It was hidden in the glove compartment, leaving the stock AM radio in the dash.

In the trunk we had three Alphasonik amplifiers mounted to a large chassis that I had, and since a 3-way electronics crossover didn’t exist yet (or if it did, they were hellishly expensive, using my BCIT knowledge, I built a 3-way crossover, and we ran a 3-way tri-amped system. I borrowed (with permission), two EV 15” woofers from Roscoe’s that were screwed to a piece of plywood, firing into the back seat. The Nova had two 6 x 9 speaker cutouts in the back deck, plus a centre cutout for a rear window defogger fan. We put three 6 x 9 grilles over these openings and mounted four Philips 8” woofers firing up into them. We cut two holes in the back deck for two Philips dome tweeters, and wire-tied two more under the front air vents in the corner of the front windshield. The system was a complete sleeper system, as no speakers or amps could be seen with the trunk closed, and the only audio source looked to be the AM radio in the dash.  We worked feverishly on the Friday and Saturday to be ready for the Sunday competition. To us, the system sounded amazing, with tons of bass, and home stereo mids and highs thanks to the Philips drivers. Of course, with the amp chassis floating loose in the trunk, and a fair bit of whining ignition noise when the engine was running, we weren’t going to win any prizes, but we didn’t care.

On the Sunday, we drove to the PNE and entered the ‘over 200 watt’ category. To my recollection, there were three categories: 100 watts and under, 100-200 watts, and then our category. I told Bill not to turn the stereo on at all, so we could take everyone by surprise. True to form, everyone around us was blasting their insanely expensive professionally installed systems, while people looked at our Nova, looked at the stock dash, and asked why we were even there.

There were three categories to be judged: Sound Quality, Sound Pressure Level, and Installation Quality. We knew we’d fail the last category but based on some of the loud systems we heard, we figured we’d do OK in the first two.

The judge of the sound quality was an African American guy that had a couple of CDs, and he’d play a track or two in each vehicle. He came to our car, which was still silent at this point, and he asked how he could play his CDs. Bill grinned and opened the glove compartment. He put in his CD, and pressed play. The dual 15” subs kicked in, he jumped a bit in the passenger seat, and instantly our car was surrounded by people who wondered where all the sound was coming from. To our surprise, he rated us in the top 5 of all the cars he’d heard so far.

Next up came Bob, the engineer, who worked at the local rock station CFOX. He had hearing protectors around his neck, sat in the passenger seat, looked at the AM radio in his dash, laughed, and pulled out his DB meter to measure the sound level. Our CD track of choice was Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’ that starts with a flute, and within a few seconds, the horns and bass drum kick in. The track sounded fantastic in our car.

Bill told Bob to put on his hearing protectors, and Bob asked why, as there was nothing of note in the car. Bill insisted, Bob put them on, and Bill hit play. We hit 122db, very respectable for 1987. Bob was a bit astounded at the sound coming from the car, at which point we popped the trunk and showed him the installation. He shook his head and was walking towards the next car when Bill noticed that one of the woofer wires had vibrated off. Bill begged Bob to come back and take the measurement again, which he did. We hit 125db again, being in the top 5 of the day.

Naturally we failed the installation quality category, but it was 48 hours of a ton of fun. We left the stereo installed for a week, and cruised around, but then pulled it back out.

Rod was the sales guy at Roscoe’s from before I started there until we moved into the new  building. Rod was a nice guy, complete with several polyester suits, and while Rod did get sales, with the exception of the Coast Hotel chain that he landed, he also ended up finding a lot of flaky customers that had trouble paying, or simply didn’t have any money to start with. I did more than one shady repo job that technically was illegal, but I didn’t know that at the time.

For whatever reason, Rod got into a disagreement with Charles right before we moved into the new building in September of 1987, and quit. I was busy enough doing the service work in my own separate area (and my own phone number within the Roscoe’s ad in the Yellow Pages), but I realized that Roscoe’s really didn’t have a whole lot of installs going on with Rod having left. I kept in touch with Rod, but when we broke for the Christmas holidays in December of 1987, there was no Christmas party for the staff, and we all left on the last work-day before Christmas, wondering what was going on. Being a relatively small company, there was a lot of socializing between the various staff members although Charles was never part of these social interactions as he was above fraternizing with us low-life staff.

We came back to work at Roscoe’s on the first day in January. For whatever reason, I arrived a few minutes late on that first day only to find everyone else sitting in the front office area, looking glum. Charles informed us that Roscoe’s was in receivership and was going to have a fire sale. The bank had put Roscoe’s in receivership; however, Charles convinced the bank that the assets of Roscoe’s were almost enough to clear the debt that was owed. In the bank’s eyes, a bunch of audio, video and lighting equipment wasn’t worth anything, but in the 50+ days that followed, every sound and lighting competitor came in and bought a ton of the inventory that we had, and indeed, Charles did come close to wiping out the bank debt. From my understanding he had a couple of other investors that he had to pay off over and above the bank and did so over time post-Roscoe’s.

In the meantime, I had to figure out what I was going to do with my life. A bunch of the staff held a couple of meetings at night to see if somehow we could save Roscoe’s or buy Charles out, as many of us really liked working together. We were all in our 20s, however, and simply didn’t have anywhere close to what was needed to buy Roscoe’s, never mind the overhead of that new building. Charles and I got together a couple of times and he told me in that in the 14 years or so that he owned Roscoe’s, which started as a mobile DJ company initially, it had grown to something that he didn’t really want, or have interest in. The move to the larger building was the final straw, and he didn’t have the interest or energy to find another salesperson, and thus the company foundered.

While all the staff worked together during the 60-day fire-sale of the company, I did realize that certain items disappeared with the staff. Back at the old shop, Charles had purchased the 20 or so Sony XBR Trinitron TV monitors that came out of the Bryan Adams’ ‘Heaven’ video. We ended up selling a bunch, installed some into restaurants, but Roscoe’s kept about 3 for the Pepsi Rock Video Party dances. At least two of those monitors walked out the door with staff. I guess my conservative upbringing prevented me from engaging in such activities. As I moved my own stuff out of the building, I realized with horror one day that I ended up with the Roscoe packing tape gun, worth about $10. While I didn’t take it back, I did feel guilty enough to use and keep that tape gun for around 15 years until it finally fell apart, and I had no choice but to replace it. Sorry, Charles!

Despite Charles’ weaknesses and rotating staff when it came to DJs and roadies, I respected him and learned a lot. After all, Roscoe’s opened the door to the commercial sound world that I now loved.

Since I had been doing some installs of those Zenith video projectors into sports and strip clubs on my own, and Roscoe’s also added to the sales and install list of the projectors,  I figured that either I could fire up a new resume, and approach all of Roscoe’s competitors to get a job as a tech, or I could take some of my personal savings, and start off on my own, taking over the customer base, and start my own company.

I asked Laurie and Andrea, the newish receptionist at Roscoe’s, if they wanted to join me on my new adventure, and both agreed. Laurie and I got along great, and Andrea was happy to continue a job.

We called the landlord of Roscoe’s to see if we could continue to rent the service area that I had built up during the move, but I was told no, everyone had to be out of the building by February 28, 1988. I thus hunted around the classifieds for a small place to rent and by fluke I found a small office area right on Second Avenue, one of the main roads near downtown Vancouver, that was owned by a mining company that used the warehouse space to store mining core samples. That left the front office space area of 800 square feet open for rent, at $375 a month, which fit my nonexistent budget perfectly. We moved in with a bit of guidance from Charles, who insisted that I buy (for almost nothing) a couple of office chairs and desks (why would I need those, all I needed was a workbench… oh wait, our office manager/receptionist needed a place to work from!), and set up shop in this new building. We were at 261 W 2^nd Ave, just outside of the downtown core of Vancouver.

By a stroke of luck, we found out from the local phone company that since Roscoe’s paid and was listed as the creditor with them, and my separate service phone number wasn’t linked to the expensive Yellow Pages ad, all I had to do was pay $60 a month and I could keep the phone number used in that Roscoe’s ad. When clients called the main Roscoe’s number and found it disconnected, they would then call the service number, and get the new CSE Electronics, and thus we inherited a lot of the Roscoe’s service and sales business. Since I had no creative mind whatsoever, the CSE letters stood for absolutely… nothing. I have no idea why I chose them, and it was not a memorable name.

 

Not knowing anything about bookkeeping, I took $5,000 from my personal bank account and put it in a separate bank account that was used for the company, and got some checks made up. We dropped the Roscoe’s service charge rate from $50 an hour to $35 and told all customers that everyone was on a cash basis to get the reduced rate. We all resolutely pushed forward, and I told Andrea and Laurie that if we still had money in the bank at the 30-day mark, April 1, then we’d continue. If we were out of money, we were all out of work.

Everyone played along, most importantly the customers, as they liked our work, and being on call via pager 24/7, I got a fair number of evening service calls. More than once, I saved a Friday night from disaster when an amplifier at a night club blew unexpectedly.

Our building was far from being great, and as we found out, was pretty heavily mouse infested with the mice nesting amongst the mineral samples in the back warehouse. We didn’t even have a sign on the front of the building, but not being a retail operation, no one came to visit us anyway.

Andrea lasted about 2 months, having significant pressure from her parents to find a ‘real job’, so not knowing anything about hiring, I put a wanted ad in the local newspaper, and got about 60 resumes in. I quickly weeded out the terrible applicants (don’t make typos on your resume!) and I whittled it down to about 5 people. One day an attractive looking woman walked in to drop off her resume. She was energetic and had a great smile, so Laurie and I looked at each other and thought “Yeah, she gets an interview.” I have no recollection of what I asked or said in the interview which was held at the greasy spoon restaurant next door, but I do remember that she finished the sentences that I started part way through the interview. HIRED!

Julie was a perfect fit and had the talent of remembering people’s faces (the few that did eventually come to the shop), as well as people’s voices that called in. She was organized and did a great job of keeping me organized. While I also had tons of energy, my organizational skills were greatly lacking.

Business started picking up and my goal was to provide excellent customer service and never run into the problem like Roscoe’s did when back in 1984 I repaired the sound system that they installed months earlier out at Airwaves Nightclub.

One of the clients that I inherited from a tech that was exiting the A/V business was Fitness World. Their main location was on Kingsway, and they had other locations in Richmond and Surrey. The owner’s name was Henry, and he was a solid customer, paying his bills on time, which helped us a lot. Mid 1988, a few months after we started, he called me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to install the sound system into their new location in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. He flew us to Victoria via helicopter, which impressed us, and the three of us walked through the new location under construction. They needed a background music system along with a high energy aerobics sound system.

With our limited resources of products available to us, we couldn’t find woofers small enough to fit under the 24” stage, as the ceiling in the room was fairly low. Laurie looked at me and proclaimed “We’ll build woofers” with the JBL speakers we’d just gotten in on trade from the local drag queen pub. So we went and bought a table saw and spent a few days building speaker cabinets low enough to slide under the stage. We didn’t do any calculations on the cabinet housings but Laurie was a pretty good woodworker (I sucked at it), but lo and behold, we got bass out of them when we installed the JBL speakers.

The mid-high speakers also had to be custom built, as the main Kingsway location had custom speakers built in an inverted triangular shape, mounted into the 2 X 4 ceiling tiles. We looked at the back of them, and the last installer had put in dome tweeters along with Radio Shack 8” woofers into each of the 18 speakers at the Kingsway location. Once again Laurie came to the rescue, whipped up some plans to build clones, and we wrapped them in red Lycra for the speaker grille cloth. We raided several Radio Shacks to get the proper amount of woofers to mount in the ceiling tiles. We spent far too much time and underquoted the job but in the end Henry was super happy, paid the bill on time again, and we were onto the next install. Between service calls and installations, we kept busy and managed to pay the bills.

I did notice, however, that we needed a salesperson. I’d drive by a location while on the way to a service call, and see a sign ‘Restaurant Opening Soon’, and made a mental note to track down the owner to quote a sound system.  A month later I’d drive by again, and see the building almost completed. The next time I drove by, the restaurant was open, and it was another installation opportunity that I’d missed. This wouldn’t do. We needed a sales rep.

Again, we put an ad in the paper, and the successful applicant was Shaun who came to us from Granada TV rentals. He told me that he was consistently in the top 5 in sales in Canada and had run a small DJ company in the early 80s before he started working at Granada. Shaun fit right in and caught on to doing commercial sales quickly. We also had him help on some installations so that he’d get a feel for exactly how long it took to ceiling mount a speaker, wire a DJ booth, etc. Slowly CSE Electronics had access to additional lines although we were told by Harry the TOA sales rep that “You’re too small fry – I’ll never set you up as a dealer”, so we struggled with that for a while. TOA was a quality commercial sound supplier of amplifiers, and I really wanted access to that product line.

Shaun was hired shortly before Christmas, in late November or early December, and he invited us to his Christmas party in his 2-bedroom apartment. Julie, Laurie and I showed up, and Shaun introduced me to his friends from Granada TV who all wondered who the hell I was, this young nerdy kid who Shaun abandoned this large international company for.

Partway through the party I noticed that people were going into and out of the second bedroom that belonged to his roommate. Being insanely naïve, I walked into the room. There were about a dozen people sitting on the bed, and the mirror of coke and a razor blade was getting passed from person to person. This didn’t faze me, although Shaun, Laurie and Julie were also sitting on the bed and froze as I entered the room. I sat on the bed and chatted to someone next to me. Soon enough, the mirror got passed around to me, and since I didn’t partake, I passed it into the next person. After the mirror passed me a second time, it was apparent that I didn’t need to be in the bedroom, so I got up to walk out. I was stopped at the door by a guy that I didn’t know, and the following conversation took place:

Random Guy: “I couldn’t help but notice that you didn’t do a line when the mirror got passed to you.”

Me: “No, I don’t do coke.”

Random Guy: “Wait, so you don’t do coke but can sit in a room full of people doing it without preaching about how bad it is?”

Me: “Hey, what you do on your time is your business as long as you don’t pressure me into doing it.”

Random Guy: “Hey, you’re pretty cool. I’ve never met anyone with that attitude. Cool, dude!”

Hey, apparently, I passed the coke dealer’s inspection.

I got into work first as usual the following Monday. Shaun walked in, muttered ‘hello’, and sat at his desk. Laurie walked in next and did the same thing. Julie was last in, also said hello, and the office was strangely silent for about 20 minutes. Of course, I knew exactly what was going on, and broke the silence: “Hey guys, yes, I saw all of you do coke on Friday night. What you do on your own time at your own place isn’t any of my business, as long as you don’t have a runny nose on Monday morning.”   The depressurization of the office by my three co-workers was audible, and the work week commenced.

Yes, I called them co-workers, as my attitude was that even though I signed the paychecks, I never wanted to be the way Charles was, being all high and mighty while his staff did the real work. I wanted things to be casual, and if anyone had a complaint, or an idea, that they could come to me and talk about it. By and large, this method worked.

At the end of 1988, with additional sales brought in by Shaun, we hired a second installer. His name was Rich, and he was recommended to me by Kelly Deyong Sound, a live band sound company that was the go-to sound company for bands to go to when they came to town to play a concert. In the 1960s, bands didn’t tour with their own sound and lights, rather they rented a system from the local sound company. The resume of Deyong read as a who’s-who in the rock industry. Everyone from Led Zeppelin to the Mothers of Invention used Deyong over the years. A fellow named Dave owned Deyong, and he and I became friendly because we weren’t in the same sound industries, as we didn’t do rentals, and Deyong didn’t do installations. I did some repair work for Deyong, and as a result, Dave invited us to his home in North Vancouver where every year he’d throw a great Christmas party. Dave was a collector of anything mechanical and audio, and as a result, his house was a killer museum of many things vintage. He had 2 player pianos, 7 jukeboxes, and an insanely loud living room sound system, with a JBL Paragon speaker system that would blow the circuit breaker when turned too loud. There were probably 70-80 people at each of these parties, everyone had a good time, and the parties never got out of control.

Dave made overtones to me to buy Deyong Sound, and I spent a number of months putting a business plan together in late 1988. What a potential private investor pointed out, though, is that each year the revenue was declining, and all of the aging equipment needed to be updated. This required a bunch more capital, over and above the $400,000 that Dave was asking to sell the company, and despite trying, I couldn’t raise the money to do so.  Still, it was a really good exercise in writing a business plan.

Ultimately, Deyong lasted another couple of years before shutting down. Dave passed away some time in the 90s. He was a great guy, and any longtime Vancouverite associated with the band/music industry knew who he was. Dave also apparently ran a Revox tape recorder under the stage of each concert he did sound for, and, apparently, he amassed a massive collection of bootleg reel-to-reel tapes as a result. No one knows what happened to that collection: I’m sure the tapes are likely still out there.

By late 1988, Julie was getting a bit tired of sharing her desk with the mice that were rampant in the building, despite setting out traps. So, I started looking for a building more suited towards what we did.  It was around this time that I also sold my condo for $53,000, and I dumped a bunch of money into CSE as a buffer. I don’t even know what the condo would have been worth now had I kept it; however, without the sale, CSE likely would have shut down.

After some hunting, we found our new location, at 188 W 6^th Ave, a mere 4 blocks from where we were presently located.  It was about 1800 square feet, and the rent was around $1200 a month. It was an industrial warehouse type area, with everything from print shops to studios (including recording studios) in the area. It had an office area upstairs with a main reception area, two offices, and back office area that was sub-rented by a fellow that was close to retiring, that did drafting/engineering work. The downstairs area was a large (to us) shop space of about 1100 square feet. It was an old building that reeked of 1950s or 1960s construction, but it suited us fine, and we moved in.  We were on a month-to-month lease in our original space, and the geology company had no problem with us moving out.

The only downside of the new building is that there was an engine rebuilding place next door called Jan’s. Jan’s pretty much broke every environmental rule in the book, as there was constant oil, gas, and sundry other chemicals washed into the gutter, whose drain was on our side of the building. As a result, every time we walked in the back door, we couldn’t help but track said oil and gas into our shop, and up the stairs into the office area. We called the City of Vancouver to complain a few times, but nothing came of it.

Our jobs in the early years of CSE Electronics were primarily pubs, still some strip clubs (although the business there had slowed down some), and we did a number of other Fitness World locations. Henry kept coming up with new ideas of adding flash and glitz to each location he built, and the 12^th and Cambie location became their flagship location.  He wanted all sorts of cool things done, and Laurie and I did our best to accommodate him. He wanted flash, pomp and circumstance, and threw ideas out that Laurie would design. While I could install, I couldn’t design a damn thing from scratch, so that duty fell to Laurie. He’d get stoned, and design and breadboard for hours. When we did two Fitness Worlds in a row, I didn’t see him for a month or two, but he’d always come up with an end result that fit the bill. Partly given that items we needed weren’t available off the shelf, or we didn’t have access to product lines that did, we built almost everything from scratch. A couple of examples:

Any mixer or control unit that we’d put into a fitness facility had a bunch of buttons and controls on it that the aerobics instructors would invariably push, killing the sound in the fitness area. The staff at these locations were hopeless in troubleshooting things over the phone (of course this was before cellphones as well, and they’d have to run to the stereo to try something, then run back to the phone “Nope, that didn’t work; can you just come out here please?”) We decided something had to be done about these nuisance calls, so we came up with our own mixer, with only three controls on it; one for the microphone, one for the cassette deck, and one for the background music. We also set the controls so that at maximum volume, they couldn’t overdrive the amps and blow the speakers. These worked great, and while we only built three of them, they never failed.

The next thing that Henry wanted was a lighting sequencer that would sequence the neon heartbeats that were his signature, and the neon heartbeats were installed at every location. At the Howe and Dunsmuir location, there were 14 windows facing the downtown intersection, so he had his neon company install the heartbeats in each window opening. “Curt, make them sequence.” The problem was, commercially available lighting sequencers only came in 3 and 4 channels, so wanting 14 channels was an oddball request. So I threw the task at Laurie, and he came up with a 14-channel light sequencer, built over the course of 2 months, complete with wire-wrap wiring, and custom burned EPROMS, burned on a home built EPROM burner that he also whipped up. The sequencer had 12 programs of varying directions, a speed control, and a key switch so that changing the programs could be locked out if needed. It worked like a hot damn. As if that weren’t enough, we also custom built the power packs, to change the low voltage light chaser output to the 120 volts that the neon packs wanted to see. We installed them above the T-bar ceiling, hidden from view. We fired the system up. Henry was pleased, it worked great, and I congratulated Laurie on a job well done.

About 6 weeks later, Henry called us and said that we had to turn off the sequencer, and make the neon stay on solid. The reason, he told us, is that they were so distracting to the downtown drivers that within a month there were two accidents at that intersection. We went down, pulled out the light sequencer, bypassed the power packs and fulfilled his (and the City of Vancouver’s) request. I still have that lighting sequencer. It still works.

Our crown jewel, however, was the 12^th and Cambie location. Henry wanted more flash, so we custom built some strobe lights that sequenced. Laurie built the housings, which were clear plastic tubes, within there were five or six strobe light circuit boards. We mounted a series of foot-switches on the stage, so the aerobics instructors could press with their feet or hands, and the strobes would sequence for 20 seconds, then reset until the switch was pressed again.  Ditto for room mood lighting that we assembled out of small car headlights (Par 36, 12-volt bulbs), with colour gels in front of them. We’d made a connection with a nightclub lighting company that was more than happy to sell us the parts to make our own lights. These also sequenced and flashed for 30 seconds when a different foot-switch was pressed.

These lasted for several years; however, any newly hired aerobics instructor wasn’t told what the light switches did, so they didn’t use them. I’m pretty sure outside of the first few months, they didn’t get used; however, each time we did a service call at the location, we tested them to make sure they worked. One day I’ll need to go down there to see if they are still hanging from the ceiling.

Again, all of the power packs for the lighting were custom built by us, and these ones were dimmable. Laurie cloned a lighting dimmer pack that a company in Burnaby made for the touring nightclub bands. He sold a ton of them and cloning them was relatively easy. Did we make money? Not a chance, but we thought we were making a mark with our installs.

We ran a bit behind schedule with the Cambie and 12^th location, so we were still wiring up the sound rack under the stage when the first tours of the facility were given to potential clients of Fitness World. We were amused, as the first girl that came through the aerobics area told the clients:

“And these are our sound guys; they are putting in a state of the art 200 watt sound system.”

Ten minutes later, the next tour came through, and the clients were told:

“The sound guys are just finishing off a 500 watt sound system.”

We came really close to bursting out laughing when an hour later, we were putting in a 2000 watt sound system. By that time, we were pretty much done, and had to leave before the staff called the electrician to put in more circuits to provide power to the 20,000 watt sound system.

Other clients included a bunch of pubs and nightclubs which Shaun landed on a regular basis. One of the bigger jobs was the Holiday Inn at Metrotown, where Shaun had quoted a full DJ system, more custom-built power packs for the dance floor lighting, and the biggest sound system we had installed at that time. We were excited, and we all went out for dinner when Shaun announced that we’d landed the job.

We dealt with a female designer, who was great, until she announced that the DJ booth was going to be located on the dance floor itself. We explained to her that the records would skip as soon as there were more than two people on the dance floor, and this would be a disaster of epic proportions. The problem was, there was no budget left to relocate the DJ booth according to her.  We begged and pleaded, and she finally relented. We moved the DJ booth to the new location, overseeing the dance floor, and didn’t charge for the bit of extra wiring needed to relocate the amplifier racks. On opening night, the club was packed wall to wall (and would be a Burnaby hot spot for a few years to come). To her credit, she came up to Laurie, Rich and I halfway through the night, and thanked us for insisting that the booth got moved.

Some time in late 1989, it was time to renew the company registration. I was reminded by Julie and my lawyer, although I always had something better to do. Paperwork, who needs it? Unbeknownst to me, Julie, my buddy Lorne and my lawyer Arden schemed up a plan for me to renew the registration. They mailed me a fake letter from another CSE Electronics in Hong Kong, saying that they were going to register the company name, and that I had to give it up. The time elapsed between me opening the fake letter, and me calling my lawyer? Eight minutes. Needless to say, I did re-register the company. Happy Birthday to me! Thanks guys!

Naturally, we had competitors in the sound installation business. One competitor that I ran into all the time was Lorne from Sound Ideas. (This is a different Lorne from my friend from high school days.) Lorne pretty much did exactly what we did, and was a dealer for 3M, (yes, THAT 3M), who had a line of amplifier speakers, and drive-through intercom systems for fast food restaurants. Since we also dabbled in fast food sound and intercom systems, we’d compete against each other, almost weekly, it seemed. Lorne was also a Bose dealer, which was a name brand product line that we didn’t have.

Lorne’s background was working for the Woodward’s department store chain before he started his sound company. He therefore had some large corporation business acumen that I didn’t. While I was chasing individual stores for business, he’d go right to the head office, to corral a bunch of locations operating under that head office. One of the early jobs we quoted was a restaurant sound system in Surrey. The owner received a quote from me, using no name brand speakers, and Lorne submitted a quote using Bose. The thing was, we had quoted 16 of the no name brand speakers, and Lorne’s Bose quote only had 7. The client called me and asked why my system was better, as Lorne had the Bose name going for him. I explained to the customer that only 7 speakers wouldn’t cover the entire restaurant properly as compared to our 16. The customer agreed, and gave us the job. Lorne, finding this out, ended up calling me and told me in no uncertain terms that he would bury me, as my no name brand sound system installations would fail in no time. Given that Lorne towered over me by at least a head size, and wore suits compared to my blue jeans and T shirt, he did intimidate me. Lorne also told me that he had 6 installers, and were about to expand into Alberta, and all sorts of other promises guaranteed to squish a little bug like me.

Some months later, at a Wendy’s restaurant, I spotted Lorne doing a service call to their intercom system, on a Sunday. It struck me that if Lorne had 6 installers (I only knew one of them personally), then why was Lorne himself doing a service call on a Sunday? I finally realized that Lorne was full of it, there was only one installer, and not 6. I realized Lorne wasn’t a threat anymore. From that day on, the rare time that Lorne called  my office, Julie would put him on hold, cup her mouth and yell loudly for all to hear: “Curt, it’s LOOOOOOOORRRRRRNNNNNNE on the phone for you”. That never failed to crack us up.

Lorne also bragged to me that he was going public on the stock market, and that he’d have a ton of cash backing as a result and would walk all over me. Again, I was a bit intimidated, but realized that with Sound Ideas going public, I could get their prospectus. Sure enough, I got it once he went public and then knew exactly what business he was chasing. Soon enough, Lorne ended up shutting down Sound Ideas, and he called me to see if I wanted to buy anything from his fire sale. Revenge is sweet. Lorne ended up working for a competitive sound company, one of the larger ones in Western Canada. More on that later.

Sometime in 1990 we landed the contract to install and maintain the National Trivia Network (NTN), which was very popular in pubs at the time. It was an electronic version of the board game Trivial Pursuit, and consisted of handheld controllers that were handed out to pub patrons free of charge, who could compete with each other as well as other pubs. The system had a satellite dish which received the trivia games as well as a phone line which would dial out to the head office to send in the scores from each location. We were paid a flat rate per location to maintain the systems, as well as a predetermined rate for each new install we did. The franchise owners pointed out that the monthly pay they’d give us would pay for a tech to maintain the systems, and although the work was not full time, I neglected to factor in the vehicle and gas costs to go to these locations, so it was a break-even venture. We brought on two more installers, Joel and Lee, who were best of friends, and who had moved west from Ontario. They claimed to be satellite experts, having installed a bunch of dishes in the Ontario area. Since I knew nothing about satellites, I hired them both.

The first job at hand was putting a satellite dish on the roof of our own building, so that we would have a test setup available in our shop. In cold November weather, Joel and Lee went on the roof, got the dish all set up, but couldn’t locate the satellite signal. They spent the better part of two hours on the roof trying to find the satellite. I finally went on the roof, moved the tilt of the satellite dish downwards a bit, rotated the dish slowly, and within about a minute had the satellite locked in. Since Barrie, Ontario was at a different latitude than Vancouver was, the tilt of the dish was different than what they were used to. Joel wanted to throw me off the roof, he was so frustrated.

We may not have been the first company to install televisions into dental offices, but we were one of the first. Shaun landed the first dental office that we installed, at City Square shopping mall, at 12^th and Cambie, not far from our offices. This of course was long before the days of Wifi, Bluetooth, and even flat screen TVs, so we had to be a bit more ingenious.

We came up with some Sony 14” color CRT TVs that used internal speakers that stuck out from the TV cabinet by a bit, and we had some custom aluminum 2 x 2 ceiling panels made up that dropped into the 2 X 2 T Bar ceiling tiles. I put an external speaker jack on the back of the TVs, bypassing the internal speakers, and ran wiring down to headphone jacks next to the dental chairs, so that patients could plug in dentist-supplied earphones to listen to the TV programs. The first install went fairly smoothly, although we found that one remote control would operate three or four TVs side by side. What to do? Shaun figured out that if we surrounded the infrared remote control sensors on the TVs with some black foam, we’d shield each TV from picking up the remote control signals from adjacent dental chairs.

The patients were constantly breaking the headphones, but it was up to the dentist to find a cheap source of headphones. Eventually I think they had the patients bring in their own headphones to destroy. It’s amazing how much better people treat their own equipment than borrowed ones.

Once the first dental office was completed, word got out that we were the go-to company to do dental office installs, and we landed several more. One such location was in a newly renovated dental office in a mall at 41^st and Cambie. Rich and I went in after hours, and the dentist wanting to save money, asked us to also run the power for each TV location. Naturally we told him we could do it, and I pre-built some AC receptacle ‘pigtails’ to wire into the fluorescent fixtures that were on 24/7 throughout the office. Not wanting to hunt all over the dental office for the breaker panel, I decided to wire in the AC outlets live  while Rich installed the TVs. I’d been shocked so much that unless my fingers were wet or sweating, I usually couldn’t feel 120 volts anyway.

So I’m up on an 8’ ladder, taking the fluorescent fixtures apart and taking off the Marrette connectors that held the power wires together within the fixture. By accident, the back of my hand touched the bare wires, and I got a tickle that was significantly more than expected from the 120 volt line. I chalked it up to my hands being sweaty, and finished the wiring and went on to the next fixture.

Soon enough, Rich was ready to put the TV up and I assisted, and we plugged it in and turned it on. ‘Click’ went the TV, and then nothing. Puzzled, I told Rich to unbox a second TV, as the first one was obviously bad out of the box. We installed the second one, and turned it on ‘Click’ and nothing. Now, most techs would probably stop at this point and try to figure out what was wrong, but not this clown (me). I insisted that we put up a third TV and plug it in. Click, and nothing.
OK, now I was upset, and finally clued in that something may be amiss with our AC power installation. At the time I was using a cheap digital voltmeter which would take a few seconds to stabilize on reading the AC voltage coming out of the AC socket. Knowing this, I jammed the two probes into the AC outlet.  The meter slowly read the voltage, increasing… 12, 52, 120… OK, 120 volts. I looked away, and then back at the meter…180, 251… 277 volts. What the heck!!

Realizing now why I felt the shock more than normal when I got zapped, we pulled the TVs down, and into the shop for repair… and I was going to repair them as there was a good chance no Sony warranty depot would repair three TVs in succession for free, all with the same problem. Rich was laughing at me, saying “WHY DIDN’T YOU STOP AT THE SECOND TV??”

I called my buddy Drew the next day, asking why was this building wired for 277 volts? He laughed as well, saying that this was the new norm for modern office buildings, as a 277 volt fixture was more energy efficient than a 120 volt one.

We went in the next evening and re-routed the AC power to all TVs back to the 120 volt breaker panel. I’d repaired the TVs quickly as a resistor had gone up in smoke on each of the 3 sets, and repairs took under 30 minutes for all 3 of them. I didn’t live that incident down for years afterwards…

While we were relatively busy, and the phone rang regularly, I neglected to watch the bottom line, and slowly we sank further into debt. I was still installing the Zenith video projectors; however, every major city in North America had now clued in that the projectors were a perfect fit into sports bars and the strip bar market. Zenith was also in financial trouble and couldn’t compete with the cheaper RCA TVs. As a result, the Zenith video projectors were on constant back order, sometimes months at a time, and that impeded our sales.  The local Zenith rep’s name was Vic, and I’d dealt with him since working at the TV shop in North Van. One day he told me “Every single other Zenith dealer in Canada hates you.” When I asked why, he said: “For every 10 projectors sold in the US, only 1 comes into Canada due to the difference in population. For every 10 projectors coming into Canada, 8 go to CSE Electronics, because you’re the only guy that knows what he’s doing with projectors, and we’d rather sell to you than fielding 10 stupid questions by a dealer in another province that decides he wants to install one.” For a 27-year-old like me, that was pretty eye opening.

Still, we needed a ton more projectors, and I needed another source. By fluke, I found out that General Electric sold a gray projector, compared to the brown coloured one that Zenith sold, but it was very clear that the entry level GE projector was just a Zenith with a different paint job. I tracked down GE in the US, and found that even with air shipping, the landed cost of the GE projectors was $200 less than a Zenith. Bingo!

For whatever reason, GE gave us a line of credit, and I ordered one every few weeks. When we got paid for the projector install the payment went to payroll, rent, or the phone, and not to GE. They came calling a few months later and wondered when we’d pay the $17,000 that I’d racked up on our line of credit. Ohhh… shit.

Things got pretty desperate pretty quickly, and one morning I walked into the office realizing that I had payroll that day, and only had enough money in the bank to cover about half of it. I sat down, literally in tears, never mind the overall stress that my mismanagement of the business had gotten us into.

In walked Shaun that morning, clearly seeing the distress I was in. When he asked what was wrong, I told him that I was tired of running a business that was digging itself into a hole, with no foreseeable solution. I was paranoid to raise our prices or to let anyone go, as we were getting things done and we all got along well. Shaun looked at me and said “I don’t need a paycheck today; don’t worry about it.” (Shaun’s check was a decent size due to his commission.) I looked at him, stunned, but he insisted, and we continued for another day. Then another week. Shaun ended up ‘investing’ significantly more than one paycheck, but we did pay him back once we got back on our feet.

In order to relieve my stress, Shaun suggested that CSE hire a manager and recommended his friend Lorin. Shaun and I met with Lorin, and Shaun more-or-less carried the conversation, saying how we were expanding like crazy and that I was better suited in the field, so we needed a manager at the shop. Shaun was truthful about one thing: I was definitely more suitable on the road, installing and doing service calls. Shaun managed to lure Lorin away from a decent government job, and within a few weeks, Lorin found out the financial mess we were in. With my newfound stress-free job at CSE, I actually could get stuff done and leave Lorin with the headaches. Lorin did arrange to pay off GE over the course of a few months, and eventually we did.

Our company vehicles of choice were the Toyota cargo vans from the 1980s.  We had two of them, and while they were great on gas and very reliable overall, their weak point was the fact that you could break the steering wheel lock with a screwdriver jammed hard enough into the ignition switch, and then twisted hard. Every friggin’ year one of those vans was stolen. They were always recovered, but with a broken window and needing a new ignition switch, so there went another $300 deductible. The RCMP and ICBC (Insurance Company of BC) told us that the vans were being stolen to act as a getaway vehicle for other robberies committed that night, or over a couple of days. The thieves would use the vans to move the loot from wherever they’d break into, to a stash house or to a fence. Then the van would be abandoned, and it would be found.

Not to be outdone, we bought a couple of steering wheel ‘Clubs’, that were popular at the time. “Aha”, I thought, “We’ve outsmarted the thieves now!” Six months later, I came to work and found yet another van stolen. It too was recovered, but I wondered why, since we got the Club. When we got the van back, I had to laugh.  There, sitting on the driver’s seat, was the Club, intact, but someone had used a hack saw to cut through the steering wheel, and the chunk of cut steering wheel was still clamped firmly by the Club. Written in black Sharpie felt pen on the Club was a note “The Club is great, but what about the steering wheel?” Cocky fucking thieves! On the positive side, they left us the hacksaw as well, which was of decent quality.

McDonald’s Contract

CSE’s salvation came from an unexpected source. One day in early 1991 I received a call from a guy named Patrick who worked for a large sound distribution company in Toronto.  Apparently, Rich had done the installation of one of the new HME brand wireless headset intercom systems that McDonald’s was using for this distributor. I didn’t remember doing the installation, but Patrick told us that the Canada-wide company that was also the HME authorized distributor and service centre was in big financial trouble. As a result, none of the McDonald’s stores in Western Canada were sending in their headset systems for repair to Toronto, and all of the stores, all 400 of them were in bad shape. Since over 50% of the typical business of a McDonald’s comes from their drive-through lanes, having a working intercom system was paramount to an efficiently running store. Patrick asked if he was able to bring the Western Canadian service contract of the HME headsets to us in Vancouver, could he be guaranteed a job? Since Patrick was HME trained and certified, I had no problems telling him that a job was waiting for him if he brought said contract with him.

The only problem was, CSE was still cash poor, and we needed about $12,000 to stock up on the various parts needed to repair these systems, never mind the $5,000 analyzer required to repair the headsets. Also, the negotiations between McDonald’s, HME and CSE were very slow, so we desperately were trying to find a way to finance this new venture. It was probably Lorin that suggested we lease the  analyzer as well as the parts needed (you can’t lease parts that you’re going to sell to another user), but that’s what we did, and thanks to one of Shaun’s friends in the leasing business, all of a sudden we had a big parts order coming in from HME, and Patrick moved west. We officially became the HME authorized repair facility on June 1, 1991. McDonald’s had committed on paper to 100 belt pack repairs and 50 battery purchases. We gave that letter to the leasing company in order to further our chances of getting approved. In reality, since almost every one of the 400 intercom systems in Western Canada was non-operational at the time, we blew the projected numbers away, and within 90 days we turned CSE around into becoming a profitable company. All of the local McDonald’s were now spoiled because not only the repair depot was local rather than in Toronto, but we also did service calls and offered 24/7 service. We quickly found out that the local store managers took advantage of that and would more often than not call into our office on a Friday (it was more likely to happen on the Friday afternoon of a long weekend) from the furthest restaurant location from our downtown location, proclaiming “OUR SYSTEM DOESN’T WORK; WE NEED YOU HERE NOW!”

Since it was either Patrick or me who would field these calls, we’d try and troubleshoot the systems over the phone to narrow down the problem, and to avoid the rush hour traffic out of town to get to said restaurant. The response from the duty manager was always the same “It worked fine until an hour ago; now nothing works.”

Now, each of these headset systems would come with 6 headset and belt pack units. In a typical restaurant, four of these headsets were used during the normal operation of the store, with the order taker, cashier, and other staff wearing the headsets, so that each one could hear the order. The 5^th one was occasionally worn by the manager, to oversee the drive through operation, leaving one headset and belt pack as a spare.

Each time that I’d arrive at the store, frustrated by the rush hour drive, I’d be handed one solitary and very sorry looking headset and belt pack. I’d ask where the other 5 headsets were and was given a blank stare by the manager “No, that’s all there is; that’s all we have.”  I’d then ask to go into their office, where we’d proceed to uncover the other 5 headsets in filing cabinets, stuffed into cubbyholes, etc. Of course, then the manager would come up with all sorts of excuses ‘oh, we were supposed to send those in for repair, but we never did’ type of thing.

Funny how the excuses were always the same, from every store, from every manager. Some stores would abuse their $1400 headsets badly, to the point where they had three times the repair bills than others. This caught the attention of the local head office which we were on very good terms with. Between us and the head office, we ended up telling the stores to make up a sign-out sheet so that the store staff would sign out each headset, and the manager would inspect them upon the return of their shift. Not surprisingly, the repair incidents for those stores fell dramatically as soon as the staff was held accountable for them.

Our agreement with HME allowed us to sell their headset systems to any other fast food restaurant chain. We were told, however, that McDonald’s purchased the systems directly from San Diego, as they got a special discount that no other chain did, and no matter how we tried, we wouldn’t be able to sell to McDonald’s at a profit. HME was, of course, right; however, McDonald’s loved the fact that we were local to them and didn’t have to rely on someone 2500 Km away to organize the installation in some remote part of Western Canada. As a result, we sold a bunch of systems to McDonald’s at a price increase, but at a level of customer service that HME couldn’t provide. We ended up becoming the largest HME dealer in Canada, outselling the other three dealers in Canada combined. Between Lorin, Shaun, Julie and Rich, each installation went smoothly, and if a store got delayed for some reason, we’d pivot quickly to accommodate, something that McDonald’s loved.

The CSE staff went out to a lot of company dinners with our newfound wealth, usually at the local Fogg and Sudds up the street from our shop.

We also got a lot of free Big Macs, as Patrick told Rich and I to wear a headset to ‘make sure the system was working’ once we’d completed the service call. Every time, the manager of the store would ask if we wanted a free meal while we listened to the system. As our sales expanded to KFC, Dairy Queen, and Burger King, our free food expanded as well. It’s a good thing we were all young, with metabolisms that could withstand such fast-food abuse.

While CSE did well for a while, it wasn’t without problems. There wasn’t a lot of markup on the HME intercom systems, and Shaun was reluctant to raise our pricing, fearing that we’d lose sales. There was a sales rep named Harvey who worked for a company that did what we did based out of Toronto, and HME was making waves that they wanted one national sales rep. We pitched the idea that we should be the sales company for HME, but ultimately Harvey won out, as he was based in Toronto, where all the fast-food head offices were. Harvey knew little technically about the systems, but HME didn’t really care.

Ultimately CSE was slowly heading towards the cash poor company that we had been three years earlier. We had a large company meeting and decided we had to let go of a few staff, including Shaun. It was an amicable departure, with the running joke being that Shaun had fulfilled his 3-year stint at CSE, as he usually stayed at a job for three years before finding a different line of work. CSE’s business was almost exclusively fast food drive-through related, and I’d urged Lorin to get back into other sound contracting. That failed to materialize.

Vancouver Audio Clinic- the Empire Expands

There was a shop not far from us called Vancouver Audio Clinic. It was formed in 1969 and was Vancouver’s largest pro audio repair shop, repairing everything from guitar amps to keyboards, home stereo systems, and they also had a large speaker repair department. Back in high school, before I lacked the ability to fix the more complex electronics that the school had, I’d have to take a trip down to Vancouver Audio Clinic to drop the item off for repair. Each time I’d go down, I’d look past Pat the front counter guy, and see the shelves of high-end audio equipment, complete with the long haired musician clients coming and going, and to me at the time, that was my dream place to work.

I was approached by Dave, a former owner in Van Audio, who was also the speaker reconing guy, about potentially buying the company. After 25 years, Pat and Dave had grown tired of each other. Dave proposed that he’d stay on as the specialized speaker repair guy, while Pat wanted to move to Calgary. Van Audio also owed the government back tax money, and they were threatening to send in the bailiff to seize their assets. I wasn’t about to let this happen, as Van Audio was an institution. I would need the princely sum of $10,000 to buy the company, which would extinguish the tax debt, and Pat would walk away. Dave would stay, and the rest of the staff, Maurice and Fred, the two technicians, and Andrew the front counter guy would stay.

I presented this opportunity to the CSE staff, and I was turned down flat. They all said that I had enough on my plate with CSE, and that this wasn’t a good idea. I wasn’t having any of their opinions. Lorin could go and manage Van Audio during the day, we’d call him if we needed him, and life would be good. I was still turned down. Several times. Finally, like a chicken pecking at your ankles, the CSE staff told me that if I wanted the company so badly, that I should go over and manage it, and then leave CSE to its own devices. Besides, they reasoned, CSE was now a full-time fast-food headset installation company and there were very little sound installs that were done that point.

So that’s what happened. In December of 1991, I got a loan through a banking friend of my lawyer/high school buddy, Arden, and bought Vancouver Audio. Van Audio was another company that was barely breaking even, thus the previous tax troubles. In the beginning of the 1990s, home electronics started to become disposable, much like I saw happen in the mid-1980s to color televisions. The hot selling items were surround sound receivers, and as a result, the large stereo receivers that companies like Pioneer, Kenwood and Sansui offered were abandoned at Van Audio, and the owners would go and buy the latest 5.1 surround sound receiver at Best Buy or Future Shop (later Future Shop would be bought out by Best Buy). In addition, the night clubs that had live bands started installing their own permanent sound systems, and thus the sound systems that the bands toured with were no longer needed. This resulted in a bit of a glut of used pro band sound equipment because the sound systems that the nightclubs and theaters had permanently installed didn’t break down as frequently.  Lots of bands would dump their now-obsolete sound systems on the used market as a result.

Still, working at Van Audio was a welcome change for me, and I was back to doing what I loved the best, repairing broken electronics. I’d often stay late, until 9 PM or so, repairing the difficult ‘tough dog’ repairs that the techs abandoned during the day.

The staff all remained at Van Audio:

Andrew – front counter person. A nice guy, and generally good with the clients.

Fred – the amplifier tech. A brilliant tech, did great work, was very smart overall, with an insanely sarcastic sense of humor.

Maurice – tape deck tech. Also very good at what he did, and he taught me all about tape deck alignment, bias and equalization, and the use of calibration tapes. This was the key to what I was missing. I knew how to repair the electronics, but the finesse of calibration of any tape deck was lost to me. Maurice showed me how to do it, and it’s knowledge I retain to this day.

David – he was a former owner at Van Audio, and he reconed and rebuilt speakers. David really should have been in engineering for a large speaker manufacturing company. He could give you a 20-minute dissertation of a 1969 car stereo speaker, who made it, what its specifications were, etc. He could disassemble any speaker and replace just the voice coil that someone had blown up, even if that manufacturer was long out of business. He had the simplest of tools and the various glues to rebuild speakers, but his reputation was well known throughout Western Canada.

Gord – not the salesman that worked at CSE… this Gord was hired a few months into my purchasing Van Audio, as David was constantly behind in his work, simply due to too many repairs coming in. Gord was a large guy, and very soft-spoken, a gentle giant, as it were. He was also the local pot dealer of sorts and supplied many people with good ganja.

I’ll digress here a bit, and will say that due to my introvert nature, I never got into drinking or drugs, and when I bought Van Audio at age 28, I had never smoked a joint before. It was Gord’s mission to change this, although I was never pressured. One fateful night in early 1992 we had closed the shop on a Friday night, so it was about 9:05 PM. Gord asked if he could spark up a joint in the shop, as it was after business hours. He and Dave were going to spark one up. I was working on a cassette deck, and I had no problems with him doing so. So he lit a good-sized joint, and Dave and he each had a toke. Gord looked at me and asked if I wanted to partake. Gord had me take a couple of hits three or four times before, and it did absolutely nothing for me. I did as instructed, took a hit into my lungs, held it for a few seconds, exhaled. Nothing. I was stone cold sober. This Friday night was no different. I took a hit, held it in, then took another one. I went back to working on the problematic cassette deck. A few minutes later, Gord asked if I’d felt anything. I said “No, you’re just wasting it on me.” Gord told me to hang on, as he was going to roll another one of a different strain.  So he did, and I took another toke and went back to working on the cassette deck.

Then the following  occurred..p.Absolutely everything I’d heard or seen in a movie about being stoned hit me all at the same time. I was sitting there, checking things in the cassette deck, when I found myself looking at the meters on it. As I moved a switch up and down, the meter needles moved up and down. I was mesmerized by these VU meters moving in unison of me moving the switch.  All of a sudden my brain split into two parts: the sober, logical half, and the completely messed up, stoned half. The two halves then started fighting with one another.

“Curt, smarten up! Fix the damn deck” (my sober side).
“I can’t, I’m REALLLYY stoned!” (obviously, my stoned side).

After watching the meters, I realized that Dave and Gord had talked about going to get something to eat, and I realized that I was famished. I also thought that I’d stared at the tape deck for a good ½ hour, and that I was holding up Gord and Dave from getting food. I looked up at the clock on the wall and realized that exactly 90 seconds had passed. Gord looked over, and asked “Are you coming with us?” Damn right I am: I am starving! We drove up the street to an Italian buffet. We sat down, and paranoia kicked in. I asked Dave and Gord if it looked like I was stoned, and they laughed and said no. I wasn’t convinced. I ended up eating 4 plates at the Italian buffet. Now I was bloated.

We got back to Van Audio just before 10, and I realized in horror that I had a late-night service call booked at a McDonald’s on the East side of Vancouver. I realized that I had to get over to CSE Electronics, however I was completely stoned, and driving even 2 kilometres just wasn’t a good idea. Still, I had no choice. I hopped into my Toyota van, and remembered that someone had told me that when you drive stoned, it will appear that you’re speeding, but in reality, you’re only driving 30 kmh. Resolute, I hopped into the van, and was determined to do exactly the speed limit of 50 kmh. I drove up to the light at Van Audio and successfully made the left-hand turn. I was now on one of the main roads between Van Audio and CSE. I looked at the speedometer, and kept it at exactly 50 kmh. I realized that my eyes were very dry, and probably also very bloodshot. Fortunately, the road was relatively empty at that time of night.

The light ahead turned yellow and red, so I slowed down and stopped at the intersection. The traffic light seemed far away. I blinked and realized that I’d stopped a block early.  I panicked a bit and drove the extra block and stopped properly at the light. A couple of minutes later, I ran up the stairs to CSE and saw to some relief that the lights were still on. There was Lorin, drunk out of his mind, doing his best comedy routine, having polished off a 26er of Galiano. He was entertaining a very sober Walter, who we knew casually and had used a couple of times to do installations for us. Walter took one look at me coming into the office, and started laughing, and said “Man, you’re some fucked up.” Oh no, it was that obvious? I begged Lorin to drive me to the McDonald’s, with ‘high’ expectations that I’d sober up by then, but he declined, as he was in no shape to drive. He called Julie at home and explained the situation. Could she drive us? Nope, she was having none of that on a Friday night. In desperation, we called Patrick, who didn’t live far away. “Sure” he said, but he’d just smoked a bit of hash.

True to his word, Patrick came down in his Jeep, and we drove to the McDonald’s. We had to stop at the Coquitlam arena to meet up with a fellow from Seattle named Jerry, who also installed and serviced the McDonald’s headset systems in the Washington area. Jerry was a big guy, who liked to BS a lot about the ‘thousands’ of installs he’d done – himself… within an hour <wink, wink>. Still, we got along with Jerry, who was up playing hockey at the arena, and had brought some headset pieces we needed for our service call in his hockey duffel bag. Lorin, Patrick and I walked around the arena three times looking for Jerry and scanned the ice. We couldn’t find him. I was slowly coming down off my high luckily, when I saw a sign that said ‘Arena A’. Well, it turns out there were two arenas in the building and not just one. I pointed this out to Lorin and Patrick, and we saw the walkway that connected the two arenas. Coming in from the other end of the walkway from the other arena was Jerry. He took one look at the three of us, and proclaimed in his loud American voice “BOYS, YOU’RE SURE SOME FUCKED UP THIS FRIDAY NIGHT!” (Ssshhhh, shut up Jerry, we need our headset pieces, we gotta get outta here!) I was sober enough by the time we got to the McDonald’s at 11 PM as they closed to complete our service call mission, and Patrick drove us back to the shop. I swore off that nasty marijuana for life… (well for at least 6 months).

There was no shortage of items that people brought to Vancouver Audio Clinic to be worked on, and I never hesitated taking on something that was out of the norm. One case in point was a client who asked if I could repair a fish shocker. A fish shocker? What was that? It turns out that the client worked for Environment Canada, and one of the things they did was to go into the wilderness of BC and count and tag fish, primarily salmon and trout.  The staff would wear these backpacks, made by a company called Smith-Root, that consisted of a golf-cart battery that powered an electronic fish shocker unit. It had a 4’ wand with a net on the end of it. The centre of the wand was a metal core, as was the ring around the netting. A separate ground wire came off the backpack and was put into the water at the backpack. Once the environmentalist came upon some fish in the stream, they would bring the net close to them and push a button on the pole for the net. The net sent an electric charge into the water, stunning any fish in close proximity to the net, allowing the person to scoop the fish up with the net. The backpack had dials on it to adjust the electrical charge going to the wand/net, depending on the water (salt or fresh water), along with other parameters. We repaired these for about two years until the government purchased newer, lighter models that were more reliable. Along with the taxicab meters that I’d serviced back at the TV shop, they were another weird item that I didn’t know existed in the world, but I made money repairing them.

In late 1992, I moved Van Audio into a larger building exactly 4 blocks away from CSE Electronics. Now we had a front counter area with a small space to sell that used abandoned equipment. While still at the old building, I hired a rather tall, stunning looking blonde named Wanda, who happened to be the sister of an ex-girlfriend. Wanda still had the big hair from the nightclub days of the 1980s, and soon word got out to the musicians that Van Audio had a pretty blonde working there. Wanda was great for business!

Wanda didn’t last too long though, and we hired another part time front counter guy named Marty. Marty was insanely smart and had a great way with customers. For a couple of years, both CSE Electronics and Van Audio did well, and despite the odd Revenue Canada tax audit (we always owed money, go figure), life was pretty good all around.

One of the local stores that we had occasional dealings with was Paul’s Music/TMT. Paul’s

Music was a legendary music store in Richmond, BC, and they had around 6,000 square feet of

space, in two industrial warehouse locations. One side was a music store; the other was a

mecca for band and PA systems. The guy that headed up the PA side was Mike, a savvy long-haired guy that did exceptionally well selling PA systems to bands and night clubs. Paul’s Music sold a ton of EV and JBL speakers, and between them and Western Sound, they were apparently the two largest EV dealers either in Canada, or in all of North America, I’m not quite sure.

The most impressive thing to me on the PA side of things was the ‘wall of PA speakers’ that

stretched from floor to ceiling, all stacked on top of each other. For those in bands who

remember the Martin single and double bins, Paul’s Music had tons of those, and one of their

showpieces back in the day was the EV MTL-4 speaker system, which for the time was a high

output, compact sound system. It could take tons of power (6400 watts), and as with all EV

components at the time, sounded amazing. Mike took full advantage of his large showroom,

and usually had one of these rigs running, and all the long-haired musicians (and my nerd self)

would come out and ogle at what they could do.

 

Mike cloned a smaller copy of the MTL4, that he called the MT-2, with only two woofers instead of 4. Since he had a local carpenter build them up, they were a fraction of the price of the original EV system, and he sold a lot of them to bands and clubs. Overall, I wasn’t too impressed with their sound quality as compared to the genuine EV system.

Since Mike had a ton of trade in gear (he was always wheeling and dealing with musicians and

sound guys to get them into bigger and better equipment, while taking their old stuff on

trade), I was able to buy some more entry level speakers from him at a bargain rate. He also

had a tech in the back of his shop that would repair the amps and mixers, and depending on

which tech it was, I had a good relationship with most of them. (At least one of them was

somewhat of a hack; he didn’t last long.)

 

Eventually Paul’s Music got changed to TMT, Total Music Technology, and Mike cut the store

size in half, phasing out the music store side, while concentrating on the sound and PA side of

things. Richmond also had developed into a large Asian community, which wasn’t really into

rock n roll, so TMT moved to a much smaller location downtown.

 

Once the bands stopped touring with sound systems, and most of the clubs had a permanently

installed PA (TMT supplied many of those systems), their business slowed right down, and

eventually TMT went out of business. Mike stayed in the industry, however, and I see him every

year. Coincidentally, in October 2025, Mike, Greg from West Coast and myself met for lunch. Despite the ups and downs we had, and how we’d be choked on occasion when one

of us took an install or a client away from another company, we could all laugh about it, and

heck, after 40+ years in the industry, we’re all survivors.

The Western Story

In September of 1993, I bought Western Canada’s largest sound company, Western Sound. Due to legal reasons, I cannot go into the details here, even 30+ years after the deal was done. That part of this story may magically appear here once I have passed.

The bottom line was, though, 8 months after I bought Western, I was in debt for $150,000, all signed with personal guarantees because I was a moron.

The post-Western story continues below.

Rebuilding from the Ground Up

Because legally Vancouver Audio Clinic had bought Western Sound, word made it to me that the previous owner of Western Sound was going to sue Vancouver Audio Clinic and shut it down, simply to spite me. In order to protect Vancouver Audio Clinic, I sold it to Lorin for $1.00 and he formed another company to isolate Van Audio from anything to do with Western Sound.

Because Lorin was now owner of Vancouver Audio Clinic, he moved down to that shop to run it full time, while Gordon, Andrew and I moved into CSE to bring sales in, and to chip away at the massive debt that I presented the staff with.

I worked deals with a bunch of the suppliers and added to CSE’s product lines significantly. Most of those, of course, I had signed personal guarantees to, so they’d not only see their debt paid, they also made money on new equipment that we ordered. The new product lines included Audio Technica, Bose, and surprisingly, although Dukane set up a new BC dealer (there was only one per province), they allowed us to purchase with cash in advance from that dealer. As with the other suppliers, they figured any new sales from CSE would offset the bad debt from Western Sound. (That new Dukane dealer also went bust a few years later.)

The one brand that I wanted, ElectroVoice, wanted nothing to do with us. It had nothing to do with the head office, but their local rep Tom wanted nothing to do with me. Even when I tried to speak to him at some trade shows, he avoided me, which I thought was extremely unprofessional on his part. He didn’t last long as the ElectroVoice dealer and bounced around a few companies as a sales rep. Ironically, EV was one of those companies that saw their original Western debt get reduced during my tenure, from around $55,000, down to under $35,000.

Gordon and Andrew built CSE back up to do sound and video sales, to add to the drive-through business that we were strong in. Despite the debt load, we did a bunch of sales; however, Andrew’s sales suffered due to the long time it would take for us to get his product that he sold. As at Western, a large installation took precedence over a small sale. Andrew decided he’d had enough after about a year, and we amicably parted ways. Andrew ended up being a salesperson for more than one distribution company and always called me when his job changed. As a result, I bought quite a number of items through Andrew, as I appreciated his customer service.

The McDonald’s Brush with Greatness

HME, the manufacturer of the drive-through intercom systems, had released a new intercom that in one large way was superior to the original system. The original system that was in almost all of the Canadian restaurants, and a good number of them in the US, was called the System 3000. It was well designed, well-engineered, and with the abuse that the staff gave them, they’d hold up really well. When I did service calls, I’d find these $1,400 headsets left in the freezer overnight, and at least one got dropped into a deep fryer. Since we could buy any part we wanted from HME, we could repair every one of them.

The HME System 3000 was called a simplex communication system. As with a typical old style home intercom from the 1970s, communication could only be done one way at a time. When a car pulled up, the order taker in the restaurant would hear a chime, indicating that a car had pulled up to the menu board, and then they’d hear the customer and the car engine in their headset. When the order-taker pressed the ‘talk’ button on their headset, the communication would switch, and the order-taker would speak to the customer. The problem was that would turn off the line of communication from the customer back to the order-taker. Normally, at the end of an order from the customer, the order-taker would read back the order. If the customer said something, such as “Oh, change that from a chocolate milkshake to a vanilla”, while the order taker was repeating the order, the order taker would miss the change.  As a result, three possible scenarios would happen:

1) The customer would pull up to the cash window, and ask if the milkshake was now vanilla. When the cashier said no, then the order would need to be changed, and if the staff was fast, that chocolate shake would now get thrown out, and the drive-through line would be slowed down with this order change.

2) The customer wouldn’t ask if the milkshake was changed, would drive away, and then curse out the order-taker for getting the order wrong.

3) The customer would drive back to the McDonald’s and raise hell at the counter to get the right flavour shake.

Regardless of the scenario, each one slowed down efficiency and wasted food. The solution was the new HME System 2000, which was half-duplex communication. The headsets operated the same as the System 3000, but with one important change: When the order-taker read back the order to the customer, the staff would still be able to hear the client, and if the client changed the order in the middle of the order-taker repeating said order, they would now be able to hear the customer’s change, and correct the order on the fly. Less wasted food, and a speedier drive-through line. Win/win.

A System 2000 with enough headsets for a typical McDonald’s was around $6,000, plus usually another $600-1200 to install it, depending on where the store was located. The System 2000 also wasn’t nearly as robust as the original System 3000. One spilled soda over the System 2000, and the sugar seeped into the transceiver unit, causing damage to the circuit board. The audio quality also wasn’t as good as the 3000. HME cut some corners to be more competitive with the 3M and Panasonic systems that were sold in the US. 3M had a minor impact in Canada, and Panasonic was not approved by the Canadian government’s radio communication laws to be sold.

Rich was well versed with installing the HME systems as he’d bounced around all over BC installing dozens of these systems. One late Friday afternoon, we were complaining about the cheapness of the System 2000, and Rich said “Curt, why don’t you see if you can modify the System 3000 to incorporate the half duplex feature of the System 2000?” Wow, I’d never even thought of that. Since I had nothing to do that Friday night and had access to the full circuit diagrams of both systems, I decided to spend the evening on the workbench studying both designs. Four hours and a small handful of parts later I had the System 3000 working in half duplex mode. Rich came in on Monday, and we tested the functionality with the shop System 3000 we had set up, and we both agreed that it worked the same as the System 2000.

Since I had a good connection with the McDonald’s head office locally, I called our contact there and told him that I had modified the older System 3000 to half duplex, and could we get a couple of test locations to try the modification out at. At first, he didn’t believe us, as this was a question that McDonald’s had asked HME, who said it couldn’t be done. He was quick to give us four test locations scattered around Vancouver, and we went in after hours to install it. This was in the fall of 1994. We met with our contact at McDonald’s who checked out each system after it had been installed for a month and verified the proper functionality of each location. He then told me to call the Toronto head office and gave me the contact of his equivalent position in Toronto.

I called the fellow in Toronto who also told me that he didn’t believe that we had done it based on what HME had told McDonald’s. I told him to call our Vancouver contact as we’d had four test locations working for the last month. He then paused and told me that this was a much larger item than we had thought, as McDonald’s had just come up with a mandate to change every single McDonald’s location to half duplex functionality by the end of 1995. He then gave me the contact name and phone number at the worldwide head office in Oak Brook, Illinois.

It took a couple of weeks for Oak Brook to return my call and I had to go through the same explanation once again, to say that we weren’t replacing the existing System 3000s with the new System 2000s, and this was a more simple (and cost effective) solution, and to contact the regional head office here in Vancouver. There was silence at the other end of the phone. Then I got the “I’ll call Vancouver, and I’ll call you back.”

Things moved more slowly than I was used to, although with 7 staff, we could pivot at a moment’s notice at CSE – the wheels turned a little slower at a large corporation. In further calls with the local office, we were told that there were 22,000 locations in the US, and about 1,000 in Canada. At $6,000 dollars per location for the System 2000, that was $138 million dollars that McDonald’s was going to spend on upgrading the new systems.

After doing some number crunching with Lorin, we came up with $500 for our system upgrade, as it would take around an hour of labor per location, and the parts required to modify the System 3000s were under $20. With 23,000 stores in North America, that would be a $11.5 million dollar outlay for McDonald’s, a significant savings for them. Needless to say, a potentially lucrative business with McDonald’s was just the thing I needed to get my mind off the Western debacle.

We started exchanging daily faxes with McDonald’s head office and were introduced via phone to the international purchasing manager. One of the first questions he had was if I could modify the Panasonic drive-through system that was only sold in the US. I told him to send me one and I’d see what I could do. McDonald’s also supplied the service manual with the system, and within a couple of days I had it modified as well. McDonald’s got us two set sites in the Seattle area, so we drove down one day and modified the Panasonic systems. It turns out they were easier to modify than the HME ones, and those stores were a success as well.

By October of 1994, everyone at McDonald’s was convinced that CSE was able to do what HME said was impossible, to modify the System 3000. Oak Brook then told us that in December four engineers from their head office were going to come to Vancouver for 48 hours to check out the stores that we had modified.  We panicked a bit, not because we doubted our little invention, but because here we had four top engineers from the largest restaurant chain coming to visit our greasy, aging office. The oil and grease from Jan’s engine shop continued to be a problem. We scraped together more money, and painted the floor of the warehouse area, and had our bookkeeper Brenda bring in her dad, who was a carpet layer by trade, to install the thinnest, cheapest carpet we could find.

Sure enough, the four engineers came to Vancouver and we took them out to Joe Forte’s, a decent spot for dinner that night. The next morning, we all piled into Lorin’s van (freshly cleaned, and big enough for all of us) and toured the four test locations. By the looks on their faces, they were pretty impressed when they finally saw (and heard) the system firsthand. They told us as much, and I asked if we were therefore approved to sell the systems. They all laughed, and said “No, don’t sell anything yet; there’s a few more steps to take, but we like what we see.”

We got a call the day after the engineers left from our local contact at head office who told me “I’ve been with McDonald’s for 25 years, and I’ve seen a lot of ideas come and go. In my 25 years, I’ve never seen head office act so fast on something presented to them.” I’ll admit, we all got a bit giddy at CSE with that tidbit of news.

In January of 1995, the purchasing manager in Oak Brook told me: “Well, we’d better tell HME about this as they are expecting a large purchase order that they may not be getting this year.” So far, McDonald’s had kept their cards very close to their chest. You don’t get to be the biggest restaurant chain in the world by showing everyone your cards, after all.

As you can imagine, the proverbial shit hit the fan. I got a call from the purchasing manager who just came right out and said that HME completely denied that it was even possible for us to modify the System 3000 for half duplex operation. This denial went on for literally two months, with McDonald’s telling them that “We’ve seen their modification. It works and we want to buy it.”

At one point during negotiations, the purchasing manager told us that “HME hates you.” Well, I guess they would, considering a $138 million dollar purchase order was in the balance.

In the end, in desperation I guess, HME claimed that our modification of the System 3000 was in violation of the patents which they held with the intercom. We knew it was bullshit, McDonald’s knew it was bullshit, but as McDonald’s pointed out, HME has over 200 staff, and we had 7. They have deeper pockets, and simply by going to court, they would bankrupt CSE.

Panasonic certainly wasn’t happy that we modded their headset systems, but they never threatened to shut us down like HME did. Because HME had far more intercom systems out there than Panasonic did, they pretty much drove the show(down).

Shortly afterwards, McDonald’s dropped us like a hot potato, and along with it went our dreams of being served Mai-tais on a beach in Hawaii. Suitably annoyed, I did end up selling about 20 trade-in System 3000s to Burger Kings locally, with the half duplex modification installed at a surcharge. So, to a small degree, I did give HME a kick in the butt, as they never found out that we did modify and sell a small amount of System 3000s. I also took solace that the large purchase order to HME never materialized from McDonald’s, and stores were given an option to upgrade to half duplex, but it wasn’t mandatory.

As additional fallout, HME terminated our authorized service agreement with them for obvious reasons, and Patrick left us to go to the new repair facility called Commercial Electronics. By the end of the 1990s, the old System 3000 had run its course, and all of them had been pulled out of service.

To combat our loss of the HME business, we realized that we could become an independent HME service depot, just as several companies had done in the US. One in particular, introduced to us by McDonald’s head office, was making parts such as the belt pack cases themselves, having spent the money for the injection molds. We found the manufacturer for the HME headsets, a telephone headset company called Foster, and cut our prices by 20% over what we were charging when we were the authorized repair facility. Business dropped a bit, as Commercial Electronics did lots of it; however, they didn’t offer 24-hour service, so we got a lot of the panic emergency calls and continued repairing them well into early 2000.

Outside of the McDonald’s near hit, I was spending time over at Van Audio as I just loved sitting on a workbench repairing broken electronics. It’s always been my favorite thing to do and is to this day. When Lorin took over Van Audio he decided to take out a significant (probably more like ‘reasonable’) salary, something that I only did when the company could afford it. I mentioned to Lorin that Van Audio couldn’t afford for him to take as much money out as he was, and his reply was “That’s what I need to live on, and where-ever I work needs to be able to afford me.”

A few months in, I saw that things were pretty tight, and once again, the taxman was the last to get paid. The whole disposable mentality of the end user was higher than ever, and so people weren’t bringing in as much equipment to be repaired, and significant amounts were being abandoned when the cost to do the repair was too high.

By April of 1995 I was begging Lorin for me to take over the company again, but he knew he’d be out of a job if I took over again, so he declined. By June of 1995, the bailiff representing the taxman came in and took the meager assets off to auction. After 24 years, Van Audio was gone. David, our speaker tech, found a tiny hole in the wall office and opened up Vancouver Audio Speaker Clinic, as reconing speakers is all he knew what to do. Everyone loved Dave: he didn’t have an enemy in the world.

David died of a massive heart attack in the early 2000s. Apparently the attending paramedics said that he had died before he even hit the floor, it was that big of an attack. There was a celebration of life for David a short time later in a small banquet room that was designed to hold about 40 people. Over 150 people showed up: there were literally people from the audio industry from all over BC with standing-room only, with a line going out the door, with people straining to hear what was being said. It was a remarkable occasion. The BC audio community lost a key player when David passed on.

Reorganization

With the HME service contract gone, so went a significant amount of our business. Gordon brought in some sales, as did I. I still had a good chunk of the burden of the Western debt hanging over me. Van Audio was gone as well, so I had to concentrate my efforts on staying alive at CSE. Word on the street, of course, was that Curt was a dead man in the audio industry. Western was gone, Van Audio was gone, and CSE was next. I was determined for that not to happen.

One day in early 1996, I was again faced with CSE not making money, struggling to make payroll, etc. Gordon approached me and suggested that we move out of our building and start working from home. I was completely against the idea, as we’d then be known as ‘trunk slammers’, rookies who usually did poor work, who couldn’t afford a proper office building.

However, in the end, I knew Gordon was right. Pagers had been all the rage for a few years. I had one since the late 1980s, but now cell phones were coming down in price, as were the plans, and he suggested that we switch the office phone to cell phones, and not having a showroom wasn’t a big deal, since we had no retail sales anyway.

I had taught myself how to type after the demise of Western, so I was self-sufficient to write quotes. Gordon was a ‘hunt and peck’ typist but got good enough to write up a decent proposal. I called Telus, the main BC telephone provider, and found that they had a small business plan where the main phone number would ring to a programmable menu ‘press 1 for Gordon in sales, Press 2 for Curt in service,’ etc.

Begrudgingly, we ended up doing a midnight move out of the building and took the stock and moved it into my 2-bedroom condo that I was living at in Burnaby. I set up a workbench in the basement. I let Julie go, who I always thought was the backbone of CSE, but with Gordon and me doing quotes, and Rich and Bill, a relatively new recruit, doing installs, we were meaner and leaner. I realized that once we were settled into our respective homes, we’d cut $11,000 a month off the overhead, between salaries and rent.

While we were on month to month with the landlord, for some reason he didn’t call me for months after we’d done the move, wondering where we’d disappeared to. Nor did he chase us for back rent. From my recollection, we left the building in decent shape, plus we had put in the new carpeting a few years earlier.

All of a sudden, with the reduced overhead, it was a lot easier to breathe, and we started paying the suppliers on time, much to their surprise. While some of the competitors outright laughed at me, some right to my face, I had the last laugh, as a bunch of them had renewed 5-year leases on their buildings. More than one shut their doors due to lack of business shortly after I moved CSE into the condo.

A name change was in order as well. CSE meant absolutely nothing and was completely forgetful. Gordon came up with ‘Sound Solutions’, with a red sine wave running through the logo. I loved it, and we printed up new business cards and stickers.

In 1998, I came down with a strange flu. For three weeks’ total, I could lie down but got extreme vertigo every time I stood up. It simply wouldn’t go away. I was completely incapable of doing anything but watch daytime TV. Right in the middle of it, Rich informed me that he was leaving Sound Solutions as he was lured away by John, the owner of Strategic Sound, who had come out of nowhere and promised Rich that Strategic would be doing arenas and stadiums within a couple of years, and to ‘stop working for Curt the clown, who is forever stuck doing pubs and restaurants’.

John came from an autobody shop background: why he got into sound is something I don’t know, but John wore suits and talked a mean game, so Rich gave his notice. I had Bill come over and told him that he was now the main installer. Bill looked a bit sheepishly at me and said “Well, John hired me as well.” FUCK!

A new installation crew came to me via a strange set of circumstances. After I’d moved into the condo in Burnaby in 1994, I decided one day that while I could repair a sound system with bubble gum and duct tape, I knew nothing about car engines, and I decided I should buy a car to repair and learn how to do engine work. My buddy Paul, who I’d gone to BCIT with, and who had worked at CSE doing HME repairs for 18 months or so, had a Porsche 924 that he sold me for $1,500. It was a good car to learn on as everything was wrong with it, from the engine blowing blue smoke, to a grinding 5-speed transmission, to a groaning drive shaft. The electrical system had problems as well.

Over the course of one summer, 1997 I think, I pulled out the engine in my driveway, and had it rebuilt. I did get the car to run, but not super well, and I’d work on it when I had time. I then figured I’d keep an eye out for a second one, as it might be a good idea to make one car out of two. Sure enough, a few months later, right around the time that Rich and Bill gave their notice,  I saw an ad in the local paper for a bright yellow Porsche 924 for sale. The paint was new, which appealed to me, as the paint on mine was faded, and the clearcoat was missing, so it was a dull rust color. Dropping my newly rebuilt engine into this yellow Porsche might be the way to go. The owner’s name was Dave, and he claimed the car to be in good running shape. He was asking $1800 for it. I went over, and Dave tried to start the Porsche but it wouldn’t start. He made a couple of excuses, but the paint job seemed nice, and I was interested. I told him that if it wasn’t sold by the following Sunday night, I’d give him $1,000 for it. He agreed, then told me that he was short on rent, as he’d just been laid off his job, working at a radiator shop, after 5 years.  I mentioned that I needed an installer or two, asked if he had some basic installation skills, which he said he had. We shook hands, and I left. Dave called me on Sunday night, told me that he had indeed sold the car to someone else, but asked if I still had a job for him. I figured I’d give him a try and told him to come over the following morning.

Dave showed up, and after working with me for a couple of weeks, so I could see what he could do, Sound Solutions had a new installer. Along with Dave came an assortment of other people: Mat, Kerstin, Jeff, Rob and Ryan. Mat ended up being Dave’s right hand man, and they either worked together as a team, or each one could be lead tech on a job, with one or more people under them.

Dave had assorted friends that he could call on when we needed more installers. This was super handy, as jobs were picking up again, and more than once we needed extra staff. One morning we had to do a video projector installation at yet another bar.  Michael, the owner of the Cecil hotel on Granville St, and a longtime customer of mine, had just bought another hotel down the street. In it was a high-end NEC video projector, but the previous installer had done a terrible installation, and the picture was awful. Michael called me in for an assessment, and I told him that it would be cheaper for me to sell him another Zenith than it would be to put new CRT tubes into the NEC. I also gave him some trade in on the NEC. On the morning of the install, Dave told me that he had Kat, a woman that he knew in her early 20s, to help him. I quizzed him on it, as video projectors normally weighed in at 50Kg+ and it was a 2-person job once the ceiling bracket was up, to carefully walk the projector up two ladders, side by side, to hang the projector from the bracket. I also told Dave to be VERY careful with the old NEC video projector, as it was my goal to rebuild it to use as my own high-end projector, that was higher end than the one I was currently using. Dave told me not to worry about it, that he would be using a block and tackle above the projector, and it wouldn’t take a lot of Kat’s strength to raise or lower the projector. I trusted Dave. I arranged to be downtown a few hours later to do the fine tuning.

Dave called me before I was on my way down to the hotel, and said “I have good news, and bad news. The bad news is, we dropped the NEC projector 8 feet. The good news is, it was 10 feet to the floor.” I didn’t hear the last part of the sentence and I had visions of the NEC video projector being in many pieces all over the dance floor, and my dream of a personal high-end projector coming to a ‘crashing’ end. Dave said “You didn’t hear me: it was 10 feet to the floor.”  I finally paid attention, but I had no idea what he meant. He explained: “We used a block and tackle above the NEC projector, fastened to the ceiling, and wrapped the rope around the NEC like tying up a package, so that the NEC could slowly be lowered to the floor via the rope. We lowered the projector and Kat and I balanced it on top of one of the ladders, so that I could reposition myself slightly to walk the projector down the ladder with Kat lowering it. The thing was, Kat let go of the rope as the projector was balanced on top of the ladder. I bumped the projector slightly as I moved on it. That was enough to unbalance the projector, and it tipped off the top platform of my ladder. I had my back turned, and all I heard was the ‘WHIZZZZZZZ’ as the projector slid down the back side of the ladder, with the loose rope whirring through the pulleys. I realized what happened, turned around, and grabbed the loose end of the rope. The rope stretched, but held, and the projector was bouncing at the other end of the rope, barely 2 feet off the ground.” Once I comprehended what Dave was saying, all I could do was laugh, as I pictured the situation. I called him every name in the book, jokingly of course, and ended up with an unscathed projector after all. I did rebuild it, buying new tubes from NEC in Toronto, and learned how to dial that projector in exceptionally well. It was on my ceiling for about a year, and then I sold it as my first high-end projector with new tubes installed.

Although Rich was now working for the competition, he and I kept in touch, and he liked the condo that I was living in so much that he moved into the complex adjacent to mine. As a result, I’d run into him from time to time while walking the dog. One morning in mid-1999, I ran into him at 7 AM, loading up his truck, as he normally did. He asked if I had bid on the Westin Bayshore hotel project. I looked at him “No, I didn’t know anything about it.” He said “Well, the bidding is closed as of last week: you’re too late.”

The Westin Bayshore was one of the older, premium hotels, and I was damned if I was going to be left out of quoting the job. I went back to the house, called Gordon at 8 AM, and told him to find out who the electrical contractor was, while I’d chase down the consultant who was overseeing the project. After a couple of calls, I found out that it was Nemetz, a well-known electrical consulting firm that was responsible for overseeing the sound system.  I ended up chatting to the consultant and introduced myself. There was a long pause, and she said “You’re coming to the table awfully late.” (Excellent: that meant I wasn’t too late, as she didn’t give a solid ‘no’). I asked when I could pick up a set of plans for the lounge, restaurant, and multiple ballroom/meeting rooms. She said I could have a set any time I could get down to their offices. I asked for 10 minutes of her time and rattled off a bunch of the (significantly smaller) hotel jobs that we did. She asked when she could have a proposal on her desk, and I told her “48 hours. I’ll fax it down.” I got to work. As promised, 48 hours later, I had the 11-page proposal on her desk. Before delivering it, I asked Rich how much their proposal was at, and he said $153,000. The only other company bidding that I knew about was LOOOORRRRNNEE at West Coast Sound, and I figured that they’d be higher than the one from Strategic. I came in at $148,000.

The consultant called me a couple of days later and said “This isn’t at all what we want. You’ll need to redo the proposal.” I panicked, but once I found out what changes they needed, it turned out to be some minor tweaking and rewording of the quotation; overall, my original quote met all of their needs.  A couple of weeks later, Rich mentioned that he’d gotten into supreme shit from his boss John, for letting me know about the Bayshore. I said to Rich “Look man, you know me. You dangle a carrot in front of me, and I will make a run for it.” Rich was none too happy but kept his job at Strategic.

We waited… and waited. No decision. Every couple of weeks I’d call Rosanne the consultant, until she finally said “Look, I know you really want the job. Stop calling me. I promise you I’ll call you once a decision has been made.”  I stopped calling. About a month later, the three bidding companies were called by Rosanne, requesting a live demo of our proposed systems at the Bayshore hotel. More panic, as the main control system was a unit I’d run across and used at Western, but I didn’t stock it. I called the distributor, who agreed to send me a sample unit for a couple of weeks for the demo. It was an early computer-controlled sound system, where a computer would control volume levels and ballroom zoning by combining via a fairly archaic looking (but easy to operate) software system and computer screen. I didn’t even own a laptop computer, so I got the demo unit in, set up a couple of amplifiers and speakers in my living room, verified that everything worked, and on the morning of the demo, I dragged my desktop computer to site, and strung the speakers from their chandeliers.

Six people from the Bayshore came to the demo, from Rosanne the consultant to the banquet manager, and Keith, the head of maintenance of the Bayshore. I asked who would be using the system the most and sat them in front of the computer screen. “But I don’t know how to use this”, he said. “No problem, I’ll show you how easy it is to use”, I said. Sure enough, putting a client with a hands-on demo is the easiest way to sell something, and they quickly caught on to using the system, and each person from the Bayshore ended up taking a turn playing with it, while others talked into the supplied microphone.

Since Strategic and West Coast were in different rooms, I didn’t see them or how their demos went at all. I did find out from Rich that Strategic didn’t actually have a functioning system on hand, which I thought was a strike against them. I thought our demo went well, and since construction at the Bayshore was well underway, I expected a contract award any day. Nothing.

Finally 6 weeks later, we each got an email. We had to re-work the contract to $120,000 maximum, including the 5% GST Tax. I was disappointed but got to work. Within a couple of days I’d shaved some money off our quotation by reducing the equipment count, but not our profit (that was something I learned off Loooorrrrnne a long time ago, in one of the few civil conversations we had about running a business).

My understanding was that Strategic couldn’t bring their quote down enough, and West Coast told the Bayshore to take a flying leap, throwing in a significant wrench into the mix in the 11^th hour of awarding the job. Being the new kid on the block, I still had energy to shave numbers and equipment from the original quote and my company had the lowest overhead of all the bidders.

Sure enough, I resubmitted, and a week later, we were awarded the biggest job in my career. We used something like 120 Bose speakers. Dave and Mat headed up the install and we didn’t run across many problems or cost overruns. I’d under-estimated the wire runs, but in my quote hadn’t accounted for the discounts offered by Bose or TOA, the amplifier manufacturer, for the large amount of amps we purchased, so the two cancelled each other out.

Towards the end of the installation in the spring of 2000, I was in the amplifier room doing some testing, and wire installations. Keith, the head of maintenance for the Bayshore walked by, and said “I just want to thank you.” Puzzled, I asked “What for?” He admitted that he was dead set against Sound Solutions getting the job, as we were the smallest company and had no similar sized hotels as references. He also said that we were the only trade on site which was last to the jobsite, no-one bitched about us, and no one ‘heard’ from us (bad pun intended) until we turned on the sound system. I smiled and shook his hand. Keith used Sound Solutions during his duration at the Bayshore before moving to Toronto for a better job. Years later, I got an unexpected call from Keith as he’d returned to Vancouver and needed help with the sound system at the arena he was working at.

Because of the Westin installation as well as Thunderbird Equestrian, we ended up being the biggest Bose dealers in BC. The sales rep was a guy named Darrell, who apparently started in a rock n roll band, but then moved into sales. I didn’t really like him. I got a vibe that he’d play for whatever corporate team he was working for at the time and used his dealers as pawns.

I was more-or-less right in this assumption. Even though we were the biggest Bose dealers, he insisted that we sell the related ‘Business Music’ products, the speakers and amplifiers designed for retail stores and restaurants. I refused to sell them. They were overpriced and overhyped systems for the most part. As with all product lines that we sold, I picked and chose what we’d sell, and we’d push that product, but other parts of the roster we’d ignore if we didn’t like it.
At one point Darrell moved into a regional sales rep job, and a fellow named Gary took over. He was just as bad as Darrell: he didn’t really care about the dealer network. At one point he was setting up additional Bose dealers, claiming that we didn’t sell enough, yet the new dealers fell flat on their face with what they promised to sell for Bose, and were thus cut off. It just muddied the playing field for us.

Bose had a sales seminar for the local dealers. Dave, Mat and I attended, and John and Rich from Strategic were also there, as were about 15 other staff from various other dealers.  The big push at the meeting was the small surround sound systems that Bose made at one point for the residential market, which Sound Solutions didn’t partake in. Rich did the odd consumer installation and pointed out at the meeting that the system was always in surround mode: there was no way to turn it off. His (completely valid) point was that on occasion, someone just wanted to listen to a CD, and not have the surround function kick in. The sales manager from Bose responded “Well, it’s MAGIC!” What the hell kind of answer was that? I looked at Dave and Mat, rolled my eyes at this insane response aimed towards a bunch of technicians that expected more from a manufacturer’s rep.  Dave and I looked at each other. We stood up, Mat followed, and we walked out of the room.

The phone line was on fire the next morning from Gary, our Bose rep, complaining that we made him look bad. I stood my ground and told Gary in no uncertain terms that if some sales clown was coming to my city to waste my time during a sales seminar, and throws the word ‘magic’ around to a bunch of techs in the room, he didn’t deserve my company’s attention. Gary didn’t have much to say, but I’m sure we weren’t his favorite dealer.

Between 1997 and 1999, Gordon was fairly prolific and landed a number of notable jobs, including a Buddhist Temple (yes, they need sound!) and the Milestones and Bread Garden restaurant chains that were quickly opening new locations, and the Real Canadian Superstore grocery chain. Gordon didn’t specifically land Superstore; rather, we both had called on them a couple of times, sending introductory letters and business cards. One day, the head office of Superstore called, asking if we’d be interested in finishing off a couple of sound system installations that were partially complete, and they had a few more stores that were in the planning stages. Would we? Heck yes! It turns out that the owner of the company that Superstore was using for a number of years passed away, and his sons tried taking over the company. The problem was his sons were apparently young and couldn’t get a line of credit at the bank or at suppliers to cover all the jobs they needed to complete. Since apparently our business card was the latest one on the Superstore’s construction manager’s desk, he called us.

This was a great opportunity for us, and sure enough, that company had also been doing Safeway stores as well as Save On Foods. Once we found this out, we called on them and quickly landed those contracts as well. As fast as CSE had switched into doing McDonald’s headsets, Sound Solutions’ prime customers quickly were grocery stores. At the time, most of the new construction for all three companies were in Eastern BC and Alberta, so we picked up another Toyota cargo van, and eventually had three on the road.  We put those Toyota vans through a lot of abuse, and with the exception of one head gasket blowing, we did really well with them.

Mat, Dave, Ryan and Rob hit the road, often for weeks at a time, as each installation typically took 10 days to complete. More than once, a few stores were close to opening at the same time, so we’d bounce from Cranbrook to Edmonton to Red Deer and Calgary. All three clients were impressed and stuck with us for a number of years.

Save On Foods, in particular, spent a fair bit of money on the sound systems, complete with subwoofers, as they reasoned that the younger clients wanted some good music while shopping. The problem was, it alienated all of the senior customers who wanted to shop in peace and quiet. Once Save On figured this out, they scaled back on the sound system, but still spent more than Safeway and Superstore, who just put in some basic speakers for paging. We tried upselling them, but they weren’t having any of it.

Our contact at Milestones was a bit of an audiophile, so with each location we installed, he upped the sound system game a bit. The first location we did was in Langley, but by the time we did Milestones in Coquitlam, we were also putting in larger subwoofers there. With each opening, Milestones invited all of the trades to their soft opening. It was always a packed house, and all the Milestone corporate people would oversee their staff to ensure the kitchen and servers could handle the pressure, while tweaking weak spots throughout the night. We had a lot of good food at the various Milestones openings.

Doing lots of installations all over Western Canada wasn’t without its share of problems. We did pay our bills on time, but more than once we got called to a jobsite too early, resulting in a wasted trip. We ended up tweaking the way we did business and came up with change order forms and a checklist for a jobsite to make sure it was ready.

On one jobsite in Calgary the Superstore project manager called us out far too early, and we arrived weeks before we should have. We had no choice but to come back to Vancouver. We called their head office to get a change order but they nixed the extra charge, saying it was our responsibility that the project manager was calling us at the right time. Our contact there did tell us, though, that they’d had problems with that project manager before on other sites. I came up with a checklist, sent it to Superstore’s head office, and they loved it. Two weeks later, the project manager called us back, and I told him that I’d fax him a checklist that he had to check off, sign, and fax back to us. A couple of days went by, and we didn’t receive a signed copy back. The project manager called me, asking why we hadn’t come to site and I told him I hadn’t received the signed checklist back. He point blank told me to FUCK OFF and hung up on me. Feeling repercussions coming, I called head office, explained the situation, and said we weren’t going to site until the form was signed. This time, head office sided with us and had us fax the form to them. Within 2 hours, we had the signed form faxed back to us by the project manager, and we were back on the road again.

Another problem that ended up being a near disaster was Dave having a few too many drinks at one of the Milestones openings. He got a little touchy-feely with a woman who turned out to be the fiancé of our main contact there. The shit hit the fan. Our contact told us that normally we’d lose the contract of the sound system installations; however, they were willing to keep us on board as long as Dave wrote an apology letter and never showed up at a jobsite again. He did write the apology and the crisis was averted; however, Dave also came really close to being fired that day.

Somehow… I think it was due to myself and not Gordon, Future Shop also came calling, asking if we wanted to do their store installs, for the CD section sound system, the car stereo section, wiring up the car stereos wall that they provided, and also their supplied display of computer speakers. We negotiated, and they gave us a one year contract to install 22 stores all across Canada. I put Mat in charge, and again, we didn’t see him for weeks at a time because he was all over Canada doing these installations that took about a week each.

Life was good, and for the first time in 10 years, I had a life savings of $5,000 in the bank. By this time, the Western Sound debt was fully paid off.

Discovering eBay

In mid-1999, working out of my townhouse in Burnaby, I had a casual acquaintance show up. He looked around and asked what I was doing with all of the electronics all over the townhouse. I explained that I got lots of trade-in equipment and that I had no good avenue to sell it. I was hesitant to put an ad in the paper, as I didn’t want all the sound equipment at my place to be public knowledge, but through friends I’d move some of the pieces. Bob asked me why I wasn’t selling on eBay.  “EBay? What’s that?” Bob laughed and said that of all people, I should know about eBay.

Granted, I was a latecomer to the internet in general, as I’d heard that most of it was porn websites, and I had no interest in that. I did start with a dial-up connection but soon realized that it took longer to load a page than it took me to read it. That was a waste of time for me.  I did get a high-speed connection but really wasn’t doing much with the internet.

At Bob’s urging, I went to check out eBay that night. Holy crap! The world’s largest garage sale, available at your fingertips, 24 hours a day! Like most people, I explored eBay with caution, since funds were limited, and I didn’t want to get a bunch of junk. So, I bought a few items and since I had my US PO box where I sent items from the US to, I had things I purchased sent there. Canada Customs as well as the US side of things was a bit slow to the online sales thing, so for a while I just declared bringing in a broken piece of electronics, and I was waved through. Within a year though, both governments caught on that there was a steady stream of taxable revenue that they were losing out on, and both sides then demanded eBay receipts, both for purchasing, and for the sale of items. I had no problems with that because I kept accurate paperwork when it came to customs, since I had business things to ship both ways, and I wasn’t going to have some little eBay purchase get me flagged in either country’s computer system.

As I got to know how eBay worked, I decided to try my luck at selling some of the sound equipment that I’d gathered over the years. I splurged and spent $1,200 on a 1.3-megapixel Canon camera (smartphones were still years away), and ended up being one of a small minority of people that put pictures of the items they were selling up on eBay. Most people didn’t have pictures due to the cost of said digital camera.

One of the items that I sold in the first few months of getting onto eBay was an old and beat up Phase Linear 700 amplifier from around 1975. It likely came from Deyong Sound, and it had seen a hard life on the road. I’d dragged it around for a few years and finally realized that I wouldn’t fix it any time soon. It was also a bit of a rare model, Phase’s foray into a bridged mono unit. It had a weird driver circuit board in it, with lots of trimpots. I listed it for $75 US, expecting to probably not get that for it. To my surprise, it sold for $165 US, to someone in Seattle. The buyer, Ed, messaged me asking if he could pick it up, as he was coming up to the Vancouver area that weekend. I said “Sure”, and he came up and met me. It turns out that he was the former Phase Linear service manager when they were located in Lynnwood, and he’d been there a bunch of years, including right to the end. We spent 90 minutes together, as he regaled me with stories of the ‘good old days’ at Phase.

Two stories that I can recount was that their office Christmas parties in the 70s were epic, and at one point they sent out the party invitations with gold leaf embedded into each card. Phase Linear was making the world’s most powerful amplifier, and both it and the smaller 400 were best sellers as a result. High end home stereo owners purchased them, as did many touring bands, night clubs, and large sound reinforcement companies, such as the local Kelly Deyong, that owned over 40 of them. The Phase 700s were, of course, first generation high power amplifiers, with no speaker protection, and no fan cooling. Thus, they became known as ‘Flame Linears’. If you tripped over a speaker wire and shorted it out while the amp was running there was a good chance you’d blow up the amp. Rich, having worked at Deyong before he worked at CSE told me that during a few summer festivals, with the amp racks sitting in the sun, they’d overheat so badly that they would shut down, only to start back up a few minutes later when they cooled down. Deyong then got blocks of dry ice to sit on the amplifiers, to keep them cool throughout the show.

The second story happened during the demise of Phase Linear. Other companies such as Crown amplifiers started to dominate the business, and Phase Linear couldn’t keep up. Pretty soon all the staff knew that in 1983 the company went into receivership, and the bailiffs were showing up to take the inventory to auction. Bob Carver, owner of Phase Linear decided to have one last ‘Phase Out’ party for the staff and suppliers. The day of the party, Ed and a couple of other service techs realized that while the bailiffs were interested in the new product stock, the computers and office furniture, all of the custom built parts like cases, knobs and transformers would be lost forever once the bailiffs showed up. As a result, while everyone was getting drunk and stoned in the front offices, Ed and the two other techs quietly ‘borrowed’ 3 pickup trucks full of the custom built components for the bulk of their product lines, and took them out the back doors.

In 1999 when Ed bought my amplifier, he still had about 30 new, wrapped up front panels and other case parts for the Phase Linear 700s. He looked at the serial number of the amp I sold him and gave me a 5-minute dissertation of when the amp was made. In turn, Ed had custom circuit boards built for him of the most reliable version of the 700 amplifier, and was getting top dollar for them on eBay and Craigslist. Indeed, I visited him in Seattle a month or so later, and sure enough, there was a row of new front panels sitting in his garage, waiting to be used. (Ed has long since moved out of Washington state, and the statute of limitations is long gone).

One of our conversations during our meeting was me telling him how I worked on and installed CRT video projectors. That piqued his interest, and he asked me if I’d ever been to the Boeing surplus store in South Seattle. That was where Boeing liquidated anything they didn’t need, from scrap metal to computers and anything related to the building of their aircraft. Apparently, many Boeing staff had a side hustle buying things at the surplus store, and reselling them elsewhere. In fact, Boeing sold their scrap metal at less than what recyclers paid for it, so a number of staff would load their trucks up with metal from Boeing, drive it to the nearest recycler, and made extra money that way.

The best story that Ed told me was that one of his friends was perusing the Boeing store and found a mystery vial of some mercury-type looking liquid metal. The vial was sealed, and never used, plus it had no price on it. His friend asked the Boeing staff what they wanted for it and was told $10.00. His enterprising friend tracked down the manufacturer from the sticker on the vial and asked if the company wanted to buy it back. The manufacturer offered him $800 for it, so you can imagine what they were going to resell it for to an end user. Not a bad wage for a few minutes’ worth of work.

Ed called me the next day and told me that there were five Barco projectors for sale at the surplus store for $600 US each. Barco CRT projectors generally retailed for $26,000+ and could do high resolution projections up and beyond high-definition TV signals, even though at the time they were 1080i, and 1080p at a consumer level wasn’t a thing yet. These projectors were far beyond my (and the sports/strip bars’) budget, although I had some limited experience setting them up a few times for Roscoe’s shows, when they sub-rented them for high profile rental gigs.

The way the Boeing surplus store worked was that nothing could be plugged in or tried out, and you couldn’t haggle over the posted price. If you didn’t like the price, you could come back the following week, and all goods were marked down 10%. That repeated each week until everything was sold.

I told Ed that I would be down with my Toyota van the next morning, and I went to the bank, turned my $5,000 life savings into $3,000 USD (the US dollar was very strong in 1999), and drove down to Boeing. Ed used his 20% discount on one projector, and even had to lend me $200, as I forgot about the 9.6% US state tax. He said “You are going to pay me back, aren’t ya”, and of course I did send him PayPal as soon as I got back home.

As I got to Bellingham on the drive back, I remember thinking “This is either the smartest or stupidest thing you’ve ever done, wiping out your life savings on a complete unknown.” Just North of Bellingham, a driver cut me off badly, and I had to stomp on the brakes hard. The brake pedal sank all the way to the floor, and I realized that while I’d avoided the driver, I was down to about 20% of brake power overall, with an extra 900 lbs. of projectors in the back of my van. Luckily the van was a stick shift, so between the emergency brake and shifting down, I made it home safely. I don’t remember having to pay taxes, so it’s possible that I was waved through customs.

The next morning Mat and Dave pulled the wheels off and found that one brake cylinder had exploded, leaking brake fluid everywhere. The three of us were proficient at basic auto mechanics, so we repaired it in no time.

I took some time to test every one of the Barco 800 series projectors.  While I could check the rough condition of the expensive CRT tubes while still at Boeing, I had no idea what condition the rest of the set was in. To my surprise, all five of them fired up, and gave a nice bright picture. I test-ran each one and watched TV for a few days on an 8’ screen in the living room. Since I had the digital camera, I grabbed a tripod and took some screen shots of the image projected on the wall. I also took pictures of the projector itself and decided to take my chances on eBay selling them. I listed each one for $2,000 US plus shipping. Back in the early days of eBay, you could list your email address as your seller ID and also list your phone number within the ad, without Bay blocking it. I wrote up a paragraph why a CRT was better than an LCD projector, and listed the advantages of CRT, which at the time were numerous:

• better black levels
• zero pixelation (the early LCD projectors were limited to 640 X 480, whereas the Barcos could lock to a 1600 x 1200 image.)
• brighter than a typical LCD projector
• perfect whites (the LCDs projected whites that were very yellowed).
• far less money (a typical Sharp LCD projector was around $12,000 US at the time).

I also mentioned that if anyone had any questions about CRT projectors or home theater, they could call me at the Sound Solutions number or email me.

Much to my surprise, within 60 days of coming from Boeing Surplus, I had four projectors sold, $10,000 in the bank, and one projector left over. That projector went to a client that had given a deposit through Western Sound, and while he got a partial delivery of his equipment, some of it didn’t get ordered before Western closed its doors. It was the one debt I felt bad about, since the client was a fellow AV contractor. I was able to make good on it, and we’ve been friendly ever since. In fact, he installed the projector into a high-end home in the rich area of Vancouver, and I went over and aligned the projector for him as well.

Once I did a search for CRT video projectors on eBay, I found literally thousands of units that were listed there for pennies on the original dollar. I also discovered that the US had a massive government surplus division, whereas Canada had none. With 10 times the amount of people in the US, and therefore 10X the amount of boardrooms and offices that each had a CRT projector in it, as these were being pulled out, they were being dumped on eBay for next to nothing. CRT was a specialized device that few people had interest in.

Naturally I took a part of that return on my Barco investment to buy… more projectors. I also found on eBay that there were office and computer liquidation companies that would do large scale computer upgrades all over the US, and then would take their computers, keyboards, monitors and mice on trade-in, and list them on eBay once they went through them and installed a new version of Windows on them at a profit. With most surplus computer acquisitions there were one or two CRT projectors that they wanted nothing to do with. As I’d find these sellers on eBay, I’d send them an email, saying that I would buy their unwanted CRT projectors completely as-is, without any guarantees as to their functionality, but I’d pay less than if they sold them on eBay. Since these companies weren’t in the business of offering customer service for an as-is projector (How do you install it? What kind of signal do you need to feed it?), these companies jumped on the opportunity to sell them to me. One of those companies was called Firebuy, who would buy out the computer systems from defunct companies. I had emailed them through eBay, and after a few messages back and forth they would stockpile the CRT projectors for me, and then I’d send a trucking company down to pick up the palletized projectors. I bought a large number of projectors from them, and they were always great to deal with.

Sometime in late 1999 I discovered an early home theater forum online which still exists, called the AVSForum. It was owned by two owners of a high-end home theater company in New York, and they put the forum up so that their high-end customers could chat with one another, compare notes, and brag about the $100,000 that they spent on their custom home theater. To the owners’ surprise, the website went viral quickly, and by the time I joined, it had around 100,000 members.

Since digital projectors were still new technology, the CRT projector sales were still strong for AVS. Their installers, based in New York, knew how to install them, and how to get the best picture out of them. In fact, the multi-millionaires were easily spending $250K+ on a custom-built home theater system.

The AVSForum had a dedicated forum section for CRT projectors which was very active at the time. There were many people asking questions about setting up a CRT projector, even though I was far from knowing every high-end CRT projector brand and model. Many questions were very generic, and I would spend ½ hour each morning answering the questions, and then again ½ hour after working doing sound installs.  My hope, of course, was to get people to come and buy projectors from me, rather than from an unknown seller on eBay. I found that while members of the AVSForum appreciated my answering their questions at no charge, there were very few private messages and very few emails to me, even though my email appeared in my signature in every post I made. I looked at my post count, which was at 900+ over a few months on the forum, and decided that I’d answer another few dozen questions so that my post count was over 1000, and if I had no sales opportunities via the AVSForum, I’d scale my participation way back and just work on projectors and sell them on eBay.

It was as if the 1000^th post was the magic number to gain credibility on the forum. All of a sudden the floodgates opened and my inbox was at 20-30 emails a day, with people wanting to sell me projectors, people wanting projectors serviced, and people wanting to buy projectors.

A similar thing happened on eBay: once I sold a few projectors with positive feedback, I had some street cred there too.

Looking back, I hit the perfect storm on eBay with the CRT projectors:

• everyone was discovering the novelty of buying online and were therefore making impulse purchases on eBay.
• High Definition TV was becoming mainstream, and for $1,000, you could call the local TV company for an HD cable box with three HD channels on it. Everyone from Costco to Best Buy to Future Shop had extensive HD setups, and everyone wanted one.
• home theater was in high demand. While the demand for 5.1 receivers was partly to blame for the demise of Van Audio a few years earlier, I took advantage of consumer demand and started pushing home theater CRT projectors online.
• DVD players had just been released and had a far better picture quality than a VHS or Beta machine.
• the US hadn’t gone to war yet in the Middle East, and most people in the US therefore had a good amount of disposable income to spend on home theaters. I was certainly ready to take my share of that pie.

There was also a website called govliquidation.com. That was the site where all of the surplus US government assets went to, to be liquidated. It was a bidding site similar to eBay but would extend the auction bidding time by 15 minutes each time a new high bid was hit. Therefore, an auction that ended at 5 PM could easily drag to 8 PM if there ended up being a bidding war at the end of the listing.

Naturally, I wasn’t the only person interested in CRT projectors on a tech level. There were multiple competitors out there. One of the big ones was CRTCinema.com, out of Wisconsin. I was a bit jealous of them, as they had a website and took far nicer pictures than I did, cropping the images and using a better digital camera. Overall, their website and eBay listings always looked a bit better than mine. There was also Hammerhead Tech out of Chico, California who primarily dealt with computer refurbishment, but knew enough about CRT projectors, and started selling them as well.

Because I was giving out free tech information, my inbox was flooded with messages, despite not having a website. There were equal amounts of inquiries of people wanting to buy projectors, wanting tech info on a projector they had already bought “Sorry, I didn’t buy this from you, but I can’t get it to work, can you help?”, and people wanting to sell me projectors.

The one thing a bit unique about most CRT projectors is that they were modular and designed to be field-serviced. Considering that the target market for these projectors were boardrooms, government buildings, planetariums and flight simulators, downtime had to be at a minimum when they failed. The excuse ‘we’re waiting for parts’ wasn’t good enough when a multi-million dollar flight simulator using six projectors was grounded due to a projector being down.  Also,  a company like Boeing would have 100s of these CRT projectors at any one of their large facilities, spare parts in stock, and multiple techs that could service these projectors, having received factory training.

After I’d purchased a few projectors in late 1999, getting to know how they worked, and spending a lot of time on the AVSForum connecting with other techs, I was determined to purchase one of every single CRT projector ever made (there were 5 major brands, and about 60 different models overall), so that I’d get to know how to work each one. By mid-2000, I was buying enough projectors to have to do a run to the border with an empty Budget 1 ton truck, and came back with it filled with 20-30 projectors. I was also getting 150 emails a day (no exaggeration!) regarding CRT projectors.

Mat, Rob, Dave, and Ryan were doing a fine job completing the installations, and we had a part time bookkeeper keeping track of invoicing, freeing me up to do more and more CRT projector business. My living room was my work-station, my basement had the work bench, and I’d do regular runs to Blaine, as most of my customers were in the US.

I quickly found out that some projectors were too old to work with, and I narrowed my field of expertise to later makes and models that threw a good picture and were easy to repair. The storage area of my townhouse was filled with scrapped projector modules, from units that I’d parted out. I’d accumulated service manuals for every projector and realized that I could troubleshoot projector problems via email down to a board or two, and by having a working projector of the same make and model at my house, I could then test and repair these boards, without a customer having to send me the whole 200 lb projector. Instead, they’d send me 5 or 10 lbs of circuit boards in a small box. I’d receive the boards, test them in my projector, verify the fault, repair the board(s), test-run them for 24 hours, and then ship them back to the customer.

To put some numbers into perspective, let’s say you had a customer that purchased a Sony projector off a local university for $500.  He’d be all excited, with the plans to put a home theater in his basement to watch football on. He’d get it home and his  wife was already disapproving due to the large size of a CRT compared to the much smaller digital projector. He’d plug it in, and realize, “Wait, there’s no cable input on the back, now what?” As was typical, many buyers did no research as to what was needed from a technical point to do an installation; they only had the end-product of a large screen on the wall in mind. Invariably, I’d get the call or email (or they’d post on the AVSForum), and I’d give advice on what was needed.

In many cases, these surplus projectors were available as they’d failed and were then dumped on eBay for cheap. The buyer of the university projector would find out that the projector didn’t even power up. With the buyer’s wife now being downright angry, he’d call Sony, asking the price of a new power supply. Since the original purchase price of the Sony projector was around $30,000, Sony had an appropriate price of $2,000 for a replacement power supply, much like a spark plug for a Porsche was never $2.49. Now his wife is threatening divorce, and in desperation, the customer finds that there’s this guy in Vancouver BC, that will repair any CRT projector module for $250US plus return shipping. He’d get a hold of me, we’d do some diagnosing, and I’d verify that the power supply was bad. He’d send it up, and I’d repair it and return it. Gentlemen, you can thank me for saving countless marriages, and the $250 you spend with me was considerably less than a divorce. You can laugh, but this scenario happened more than once.

I started repairing modules in my Burnaby townhouse, while doing local service calls and commissioning sound system installations during the day. I was working 7 days a week (that really was nothing new), but I loved what I did, and started making good money, more than I’d ever seen before.

One day after finishing a job in the Queen Charlotte Islands in Northwest BC, I had a 6-hour layover at a tiny airport. I had nothing else to do, and there was no gift shop at the airport because it was too small. I therefore pulled out my laptop (I had finally purchased one!) and decided to write an article covering the most common questions about CRT video projectors that 100s of emails were asking. I still didn’t have a website and didn’t have a clue on how to write one up. As I did with quotations on a regular basis, I had a case of ‘typing diarrhea’ as I call it, where I did a brain dump through my fingers into my Word document. It covered the pros and cons of CRT vs digital, how to connect a video source to a projector (there were several right ways, and many wrong ways), how to throw distance etc. I also wrote up some of the major video projector brands and summarized their strong and weak points. As they called to board the plane, I was ¾ finished and had 23 pages of information in the document. I was right in the middle of describing the Electrohome video projector brand and ran out of time. I saved the document. When I got home, I re-read the article, corrected a few minor things, and figured it would save me some time by mailing it out to all of the people that would email me, asking the same basic questions.

Once I sent out the document to a few dozen people, it had exactly the opposite effect. Clearly, this guy in Vancouver knew what he was talking about, and the amount of emails increased. I got an email from Italy asking permission to translate it. Really? Sure, go right ahead! One day a couple of months later, I got an email from a fellow named Clarence that I’d chatted with many times on the AVSForum linking me to curtpalme.com, a website he’d registered, and he had split my document into several categories. Hey, I had a website! I thanked him profusely, although I now realized that I had a massive job ahead of me to flesh out this website with a lot more information which needed translating from my brain onto paper. I jumped onto the AVSForum website and put up a post asking for someone to assist with my website, putting up the articles and pictures that I’d provide, for the period of a year. In return, I would give them a high end, tweaked-out CRT projector at no charge. The winning bidder was Kal, out of Ontario. He was a few years younger than I was and was an electrical engineer by trade. He sent me a couple of examples of some good-looking websites he’d put up and even said that he didn’t need the projector for 6 months. That way, I’d be ensured that he did his part of the agreement. I was in.

I got busy writing articles about CRT projectors, and within a year had a decent little website built up. I had summaries of most major makes and models, with pictures of the insides of the projectors, identifying what each module and circuit board did, and where to check for the various fault indicators that would indicate what sections of the set were working properly and which ones weren’t. Barco specifically made easy-to-service sets and the engineers were some smart cookies. Inside of a Barco, a green LED lit up was a good thing and a red LED indicated some kind of problem. I would write more articles outlining what each of these LEDs did, and did similar writeups for other makes and models. Pretty soon, almost every make and model of CRT projector had some form of writeup on the website.  I also put up owner’s manuals for end users to download for free; however, I did not provide the service manuals online. My thinking was that the basic troubleshooting down to a module level is something that an end user could do, even if they weren’t technically inclined. Worst case, they could email or call me, and I’d assist for free. Once a problem was narrowed down to one or two boards, I’d then expect the clients to send me those boards for repair. I was right that this did indeed work really well, and soon I was getting in regular repairs via mail.

The emails continued to increase as well as the site got more popular. Every month or so, I’d have a few more projectors repaired that were ready for sale, and I now needed a way to market them. I realized that I had access to all of the emails that people sent questions in from, including emails through eBay and the AVSforum. With whatever version of Outlook or other email program I was using, I had access to all of the email addresses in the address book. I decided I would simply write up an email and then send it out to the couple of hundred emails addresses that I had on file at that time. That worked fine for a few months. I would usually send the emails out on a Sunday night and by the next morning, I’d have one or two projectors sold. As I built up new contacts and email addresses daily, the email list grew longer, quickly.

One day, I tried sending out emails to 400 people but got all sorts of error messages when trying to send them out. I was using a Shaw email address at the time, and I guess the internet providers were figuring out that people like me were sending out SPAM! So Shaw decided to block all emails being sent out that had more than 10 recipients attached to them.  I called Shaw, and they told me that I now needed to subscribe to their business account and get myself a Shawbiz email account that wasn’t restricted. I did, but a few months later they restricted that to 100 email recipients, so I’d have to send the email out multiple times. Pretty soon, just sending the email out was taking over an hour to do and every once-in-a-while one recipient received more than one of my emails. By and large, everyone was accommodating and understanding, and only a small handful of people that I added from eBay inquiries wrote back “TAKE ME OFF YOUR EMAIL LIST!” and I would.

Finally, Kal set up a proper emailing format so that he could attach pictures. I’d send him the email with the description of what I had for sale. He’d make it look nice, with a curtpalme.com logo, and some graphics, and business increased even more.

One day, I needed a part specific to a Barco projector. I had none of these parts in my stock, and no replacement was listed on eBay, as it was a bit of an obscure transformer. I decided to call the Barco North American head office in Georgia. I asked for the parts department, and knowing Barco might not sell a part to someone that wasn’t a Barco dealer, I politely asked if they had heard of me, and my website.

“Oh” the parts guy said, “You’re Curt? Yes, we know who you are: we send people to your website all the time.” HUH? “Why would you do that?” I asked. I was told that Barco was in the business of selling high-end projectors, and any time they’d get a call from a college student or home theater enthusiast that had picked up a Barco projector for cheap, they’d send them to my website for support, as Barco didn’t want that kind of business. That was an eye opener, and yes, Barco was happy to sell me five of those transformers for cheap.

The sound installations and the CRT projector business was overlapping. In early 2000, Gordon also landed the Thunderbird Equestrian Centre which was being built in Langley BC. It was a large horse show/jumping facility which was a first time build for the owners, who knew what they wanted, but really didn’t know how to get there. Sound Solutions had done some work for the various restaurants which they owned, so they asked us to help design a sound system that was world class.

The technology of commercial sound systems back in 2000 wasn’t yet to the point of easy-to-use touch screens, at least not ones that were affordable. I knew nothing about programming and wasn’t set up for the few companies that did offer the very expensive touch screen systems, so we had to provide other alternatives.

In addition, no one at Sound Solutions knew about the workings of equestrian centers, but we were soon to find out. Some of the functions were easy enough: they wanted several locations to have all-page as well as local paging zones, and then there were ‘in-gates’ that only needed to page into the various holding/training areas where horses were kept. We got familiar with terms like ‘jumper rings’, ‘berms’, and other horse show type of terminology. There was a large show area which was the main attraction, and they built a tower there with the announcer in it who had a view of the entire facility… all 70+ acres of it. We’d never done a sound system installation covering that type of ground.

The owners were accommodating, and we had a number of meetings to determine what exactly they wanted. Sometimes even they didn’t know. Finally, we came up with a plan that everyone agreed with.

We gave Thunderbird explicit instructions where we needed power and asked for two conduits that were 3’ apart, running from the main tower area where the sound system was housed, to the various locations that needed speakers and microphones. We needed separate conduits for the microphone lines vs the speaker lines, as the far more powerful speaker wires would cause interference with the low-level microphone lines. Separating them would ensure that each announcement was heard clearly, and there was no bleed-over between zones.

Six weeks later, after the electrical contractor had run the conduit, we came back to site. It was also about 6 weeks to opening so there wasn’t a lot of time to do the installation. We found only one conduit run to each location, instead of two. We were told “We didn’t have the budget or the time to run the second conduit.” This would be disastrous for the paging system; however, I came up with a plan. I decided to custom build microphone preamplifiers which would boost the microphone signal-to-speaker level and then reduce the signal back down once it hit the sound rack. Since the mic level signal was boosted close to the speaker signals coming back to the various zones, we’d avoid the interference. Naturally, the right thing to have done was to go back to Thunderbird and get a change order for several thousand dollars, but we were always in ‘we can do that’ mode, and it wasn’t going to be a lot of extra time and money to build the preamps. In fact, some of our labor was cut down, since we were running the wiring in one set of conduits instead of two.

I sat in my basement shop for a week, custom building microphone preamplifiers and a master switching system to route audio signals around the property, crossing my fingers that the damn thing would work at all. I put isolation transformers into the units to prevent hum and noise as well, and on my bench at least, everything was working as expected two weeks later.

We used Bose speakers, and Thunderbird installed 18’ telephone poles to mount the speakers on. We selected the Bose 402 model which the brochures and spec sheets said were weatherproof.

Overall, the installation went well, but all hands were on deck for the install as there was a lot of work to do. Scant days before the grand opening, which date could not be changed, we fired the system up. To my utter amazement, everything worked as planned. No buzzes, no hum, and the music and paging sounded great. We used weatherproof boxes for the mic inputs that were out in the open and played with the system before the grand opening. The Thunderbird staff assured us that the system would never be cranked up, as that would spook the horses, and the system was to stay at low volume levels.

Of course we were all on site for the grand opening, as I was still a bit paranoid that things wouldn’t work properly, or something would blow up. Not to worry apparently; everything worked just fine. That was, until the final number at the big show ring. No one told us that a woman with a really good voice would be singing ‘Oh Canada’. The system got turned up beyond what we were told, and on her final note of ‘Oh CanadAAAAAAAAA’, three of the four speakers blew their internal fuses. Of course, the owners were on us in a heartbeat, but we pushed back, saying that they never told us that they’d be using the system at that level. They got us a ladder, and we quickly changed out the blown fuses. Ultimately, they paid us to install a volume limiter so that the fuses would never blow again.

We all patted each other on the back for a job well done. The next day, Thunderbird called us and said “OK, so now we need to reconfigure the system to different zones for the next show”. HUH? That wasn’t possible. We explained this to the owners, saying that yes, in the near future, a more cost effective, programmable digital sound system would be available, for an extra $15,000 or so, but for the time being, they got exactly what they wanted the system to do. Luckily that was all in writing, and they discovered that they couldn’t just wave a magic wand and make drastic changes to the system.  Ultimately, we did do some minor tweaks to the system, and we had to attend every horse show in case of an emergency. One of the main announcer’s names was Ned. Ned was well renowned in the horse show circles and commanded a large sum of money to announce for the day. Unfortunately, Ned was also a royal PITA to work with. He acted like a diva (which he was), and expected changes to be done on the fly, to his whim and desire. I normally got along with everyone over the years: it was rare that I blacklisted a client, but after two subsequent horse shows, I begged Dave to be the tech to attend these Sunday shows. He complied, and for whatever reason, Dave and Ned got along just fine.

The final installation of note was Ritchie Brothers’ auction facility under the Patullo bridge in Surrey, BC. Ritchie Brothers is known worldwide for holding construction site auctions when a company went under, or was simply liquidating equipment, selling everything from telephone systems to large Caterpillar bulldozers. The management from Ritchie’s were great to deal with, and while the sound system wasn’t anything fancy, we used more Bose speakers and Bose amplifiers. Their big concern was that the sound system could be heard over the noise that the construction equipment made as it was being moved over a ramp, for display, as it was auctioned off.

The installation was a big success, sounded and worked great. The only thing that the Bose couldn’t compete with was the rattling of the largest Caterpillar D9 bulldozer as it came up the display ramp, but the gents at Ritchie’s understood, and thanked us for a job well done.
As with Thunderbird, they requested that a member from Sound Solutions be present for each auction, to make sure the sound system worked for each important event.

In the year 2000, we did record numbers and came within a few dollars of billing out a million dollars, between CRT projector sales, and sound installs. Given that I did some business in cash off the books, we likely exceeded $1,000,000. Not bad for a motley crew working from their various homes.

The video projector sales and service were sky high as well. Demand far exceeded the number of hours in a day that I had to possibly work on them, and as with anything vintage electronics, I didn’t want to ship anything that I wasn’t 100% confident in, as guaranteed it would fail by the time it got to the client’s place. I had enough problems finding reliable shippers that would treat the projectors with care and not get one smashed into bits and pieces by the time the client got it. I dealt with enough damage to projectors and had 2-3 every year that wouldn’t work properly. Luckily, there were very few that were completely unrepairable, and almost all clients that I sold to had some form of technical ability to be able to do some diagnosing and then replace parts by themselves that I sent to them. A few times though, I ended up replacing projectors, due to smashed tubes. It was all a cost of doing business.

By this time, I was picking up projectors in Blaine by the truckload, and we’d stockpile them at the Blaine depot, then rent a 1 ton from Budget, and we’d go pick them up. The small patch of grass in front of my townhome was bare due to two of us moving projectors from the truck into the front door on a regular basis. The poor living room in my townhouse was my lab, as dragging 150-200 lb. projectors into the basement wasn’t too feasible by myself. I’d end up scrapping about 20% of the sets that I purchased due to worn out tubes, or too many problems with them, but those made good parts units, so I’d get some value out of them regardless.

Every few months a new LCD projector model would come out, and people on the AVSForum would state that this new model was the CRT KILLER. Sales would die down as a result. Then, within a month or two, the CRT guys would critically view the new digital, post all the flaws they found, and sales would pick up again. It was clear, though, even back around 2001, that eventually the digital projectors would be cheap enough and beat the CRT projectors for value and price. I was hoping that day would be a few years off yet.

Early in 2001, I realized that out of the million dollars in sales that Sound Solutions had done, $350,000 was CRT projector sales and repairs. I did that solely, with the occasional help of Rob and Ryan to bring projectors from Blaine to my place. The other $650,000 was Sound Solutions sales and installs, but that took 5 staff and 3 vehicles to accomplish. The numbers were off to say the least. I was paranoid, however, of abandoning the sound installs, as the CRT projectors were a limited time thing, or so I thought.

What was happening as well, is that I was banking a ton of money based on the profit of these projectors. When I looked at the numbers, Sound Solutions was making money, and we were going out for a lot of company dinners, but subtract my earnings from projectors, and it was obvious that the sound end of Sound Solutions wasn’t super cash rich. Still, we had a good thing going, so I didn’t change anything. I realized, though, that I was quickly able to put a substantial downpayment on a house.

Sometime in 2001, I had just purchased another projector load-worth about $17,000 total, when the bottom dropped out of the CRT projector market. This was mostly due to the political climate in the US, and people hanging onto their money. A home theater was a luxury, and people got thrifty. Sound system sales and the repair of projector circuit boards was good, but for a few months, I didn’t sell projectors that were scattered all over my living room. I sat on these projectors for a few months, thinking seriously of dumping them on eBay at cost, just to get my money back, but something told me to hang on. Sure enough, about 6 months after the market died, it picked right back up again, and I was back in the swing of things. I was back on track, saving for the house.

In 2001, I learned a lesson on being a bit more careful about what to post on the internet. I was still posting hard and heavy on the AVSForum.com, which by now had turned into the largest audio/video forum on the internet. End users, manufacturers and sales reps alike all hung out in the various forums there, and of course many people simply read posts, and didn’t get involved in the discussions.

One such person was Sam, the owner of Runco.com. Runco was a high end home theater supplier which made some video processors, but by and large did some minor modifications to other brands of equipment. While by 2001 they were primarily in the digital video projector market, they claimed to be the first ‘manufacturer’ to put high end CRT video projectors into home theaters. Runco offered white glove treatment and was usually featured front and center in many of the high-end home theater installations in magazines like the Robb Report and a now-defunct magazine called Audio/Video Interiors.

Runco was very successful in high-end homes and had more than one dealer in the Vancouver area. Runco also did some modifications to the Zenith based video projector, and claimed 750 lumens instead of the Zenith 600 lumen spec. Naturally, when I had the opportunity to open one of these Runco projectors which had broken down, I looked at the circuit boards and chassis, and found zero difference between the Zenith and the Runco model. As you may have guessed by reading this far, I’m not a big fan of exaggerated specifications, and considering that the Runco model was a good $2,500 more expensive than the Zenith model, I had little respect for Runco in general.

I’d heard from one of the local Runco dealers that they took entry level NEC digital video projectors, put a fancy larger Runco case around them, and then increased the price tag significantly. Based on the extra box around the small NEC projector, the air flow was lacking, and as a result, the Runco versions of the NEC projectors failed fairly often. One of the local sales people told me that when he was at Runco, there was a wall in their warehouse full of these defective, returned NEC/Runco projectors, and he and I had a good laugh about it. A few weeks later, someone asked a question on the AVSForum about Runco projectors, and I posted about my findings of the Runco projectors of both the NEC and Zenith versions, adding that they were more about hype than extra performance.

A couple of weeks later, I get a phone call from a local lawyer’s office, saying that Runco had said that they should call me. I was a bit flattered, as I’d never dealt with Runco personally, and thought that Runco had sent one of their customers to me to repair their failed Runco CRT projector. Well, not quite. The lawyer was calling me to delete my offensive Runco post on the internet. I was a bit confused, as my post about Runco was long forgotten, and I had no idea what the lawyer was talking about. I told the lawyer that he must be mistaken, as I hadn’t badmouthed Runco, and if he could tell me where on the internet the alleged offense took place.

After some time, the lawyer was able to point me to the AVSForum and the post I had made about 2 weeks before. I asked the lawyer to send me a letter saying that that Runco wouldn’t take the matter further if I deleted the post, and to my glee, Runco had to pay said lawyer for his time to write said letter, which he then emailed me. I deleted the post, and nothing further was heard from Runco.

Years later, I ran into Sam Runco at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I went to the Runco hospitality suite, had a bit of food, and went up to Sam. I figured he’d still know who I was, and sure enough, he did. I apologized for being a shit-disturber, and as expected, Sam laughed it off. I listened to the speech he gave to his assembled dealers, and Sam was one of those people that closed more business deals on the golf course or at a pool table than on the merits of the person or company he was dealing with. He definitely wasn’t the type of person I would have dealt with had I been looking to be a dealer of anything in the home theater market.
A few years later, he sold Runco for good money, and I’m sure he’s shooting pool out there somewhere.

Shortly after 9/11 occurred, I sent Rob and Ryan down to Blaine in our normal fashion to pick up another load of video projectors. The US was still reeling from the attacks, but the border security wasn’t quite yet at the level that it is today, requiring a passport to cross into the US. A driver’s license was still fine at that point. Rob and Ryan drove down to the border crossing, the guard asked where they were going, and they said they were heading to Blaine to pick up some video projectors. Because I was busy that morning, I told them to call me once they were leaving Blaine, and I’d meet them at the Lynden/Aldergrove border crossing to deal with the paperwork to bring the stuff into Canada. Sure enough, at about 11 AM, they called saying they were leaving Blaine.

It’s normally a 20-minute trip from Blaine to the Lynden border crossing, and the road between the two is through farm country, so traffic is always light. I got to the border 20 minutes later, walked into the Canadian side of the border, and told the guards that I was waiting for my two guys coming north in a truck. I waited. And waited. An hour went by but no signs of Rob or Ryan. I called, I called again, but the phone went right to voicemail. Finally, 5 hours later, the Budget truck came rumbling to the border crossing. Annoyed, I went outside to ask what the hell was going on, and Rob said “Not now Curt: it’s been a bad day. Don’t even think of talking to Ryan.” Now curious, I did what I was told, filled out the paperwork, paid the taxes, and we all got on our way.

When we got to my place to unload the projectors, I found out what had happened. The US border guards were a bit suspicious of an empty 1-ton van coming into the US, so using the infrared cameras along the border, they tracked the truck as it ran along the road parallel to the US/Canadian border. Once Rob and Ryan turned up to come to the Canadian border crossing, the US border guards intercepted them and the truck, and hauled them into the US office. The guards separated them and asked all sorts of questions. They also wanted to Xray the truck, but the portable Xray truck was at another border crossing, so that took another hour for it to show up. At one point, Ryan had to pee, so he was escorted to the urinal, with the border guard looking over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t flushing drugs. Finally, about 5 hours later, they were free to go.

About three weeks later, more projectors showed up, and once again I was too busy to head to Blaine, so I called Rob and Ryan to do the same run to the US again. Both protested vehemently, but I assured them that they’d get paid, regardless of whether it took an hour to come back from Blaine, or 6 hours. They relented and went to the US. This time they were on time coming back to Canada; however, Ryan was a bit frazzled still, and Rob was laughing.

Apparently, what happened this time heading into the US was as follows:

Border Guard: “Where are you going?”

Ryan: “To Blaine, to pick up some projectors.”

Border guard: “Are you the guys we stopped about 3 weeks ago and searched your truck?”

Ryan: “Yes, that was us.”

Border Guard: “Ah OK, c’mon in then!”

One other memorable event that happened was as follows: Some time in 2001 or so I went down to Blaine with Rob to pick up yet another load of video projectors which had come in. A couple of weeks earlier, I had done some horse trading with a projector client who owned a home theater store somewhere in the US. At the time, a high-end surround sound receiver sold for $1,200 to $1,500 each, and a regular DVD player was $400. I swapped a video projector for two DVD players and two surround sound receivers. I had been expecting his equipment to show up, but it hadn’t arrived yet. Granted, my paperwork was super sloppy at the time due to buying so much equipment, so while I’d know some of the projectors that were arriving, and what I’d paid for them, there were four ratty looking boxes in the load of stuff that I picked up in Blaine, so I put them down as ‘used projector parts’ worth $200.

Well, that was the day that Canada Customs decided to do a full inspection of the truckload that I was bringing into Canada. I’m sure that it probably started as a cursory spot check; however, the customs officer that came out to the truck asked for one of the ratty boxes to be opened. In said ratty box was a brand new $1,400 Yamaha surround sound receiver that I’d just valued at $50. Big oops! The next 4 hours were spent unloading every piece of equipment from the 1-ton truck. It was spread out over the entire 4 spot parking at the small border crossing that I used. The border agent was convinced that I was a hardened criminal at this point and developed a major attitude with me. I was cooperative and realized that I’d screwed up and that she was just doing her job. Fortunately, I had paperwork and proof for most of the items on the van; however, the border guards don’t appreciate people crossing the border misappropriating the opportunity to collect taxes. I was dressed poorly to boot – a stained T-shirt and ripped jeans – since we were loading dusty and dirty projectors. At the end of the four hours, she came up with a $1,900 total for me, penalties included. She glared at me and sneered “And how are you going to pay for THAT???” I’m sure she figured I was penniless to boot.

Fortunately, I had just gotten a Visa Gold card, with a $7,500 limit on it that hadn’t cracked yet. I shrugged my shoulders and pulled out my Visa card. As she was typing numbers into the computer, she realized that she’d made a mistake and then told me that the actual total with fines was $3,200. Despite being tired after 4 hours at the border, and super annoyed with myself for being sloppy, I kept my sense of humor, and fired back “Can I meet you halfway?” She didn’t have a sense of humor, though, and snapped back “NO! How are you going to pay for THAT?” I handed her the Visa card. The payment cleared, we loaded our truck up and were on our way.

Years later, when I was clearing a tape deck through Canadian customs, I’d made a minor mistake on the country of origin on one brand. The customs officer caught it, and I had to pay an extra $8 in tax. I apologized, and to my surprise, the customs agent said “I see you were in some trouble back in 2001.” I said “Boy, you keep records that go wayyy back.” He smiled, and said “Correct, we forget nothing.” It was an expensive lesson learned, and I keep my nose clean when it comes to customs’ paperwork and have had no problems since.

There were other customs stories as well. A couple involving US customs I will regale you with below.

I realized while working on video projectors that I could save several thousand dollars a month if I could set up a small shop on the US side of the border, to store and repair them. I was paying 5% tax and for truck rentals and employees every time I brought another load of projectors to Burnaby to test and repair. I’d save that 5% if I had a shop in the US, even if it was a heated garage that I could rent. Not knowing the ins and outs of how a Canadian working in the US was handled, I decided to go into US customs and ask. I was told a polite, but firm ‘NO’, and that was that. Or so I thought.  The next time I went through customs, I was hauled into secondary inspection, which happened once or twice a year, and they went through my paperwork, and asked where the equipment was going etc. I had nothing to hide, so I answered every question that I was asked, and I was on my way. The thing was, the time after that, it happened again… and again. By the fourth time I crossed into the US, I just resigned myself to adding an extra 45 minutes to my time crossing the border, as obviously I’d been flagged in the system. It was an inconvenience, but what could I do?  This went on for about three months, until one day I was pulled into secondary inspection again, but this time I actually owed US customs a bit of money (around $35), as one of the items I was bringing across had some duty to be paid on it. The customs officer inspected my Rav4, came back inside, handed me my keys and said “You’re good to go.” It was tempting to take the keys and not pay the $35, but since I was already flagged in the US system, there was no point in testing whether I could get away with it. I told the customs officer that he’d forgotten to collect the $35 I owed. He looked at me, gave me sort of a smile, wagged his finger at me, and took my money. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good or bad thing, but my honesty got me unflagged from the US customs system.

About 5 years later, I decided to ask again about working in the US. I went to the Lynden border crossing, went into the office, and asked if I could ask them a question without getting flagged in the system. That of course piqued the customs officer’s interest, but I explained that I had inquired about working in the US about 5 years ago, and that got me flagged in their system. I told the officer that I was trying to find out information, and not do anything untoward. He agreed that I could ask my question. I told him that I was doing specialized work (CRT projector repairs and sales), and that there were very few people left in the world that did what I did. He was nice about it and asked me a simple question. He asked if I had a university degree. When I said ‘no’, he told me that no matter how specialized my work seemed to be, it was considered to be blue collar work and that there would be someone in the US that could do what I did. Since that was the case, then I’d be taking work away from a US citizen, and the US doesn’t take kindly to that, and that’s why I got flagged in the system. I thanked him, and since I got the information that I needed, I never asked again. It also explains why my sister, with a doctorate degree, was welcomed into the US with open arms.

The other thing that happened in 2001 was that Rich quit working for Strategic. The promises that John the owner made about doing large arena installations never materialized, and Rich saw that Sound Solutions was busy doing larger installs than Strategic ever did. Rich ended up becoming an independent contractor, forming his own company, and had a couple of guys that he could call on to assist with the installations, so he’d work for anyone that wanted to hire him. In addition, he made a connection with a Toronto company that farmed out the installation work for many retail stores, so when a new mall was built, Rich and crew typically would install four or five sound systems in the various chain stores that went in as tenants. Those sound systems needed regular service calls as well, so it was a decent part time job that paid well.

I still had my new crew but promised Rich that I’d use him for any overload that Dave, Mat, Rob and Ryan couldn’t handle.

My townhouse was 2,200 square feet and with my projector and sound business, I knew I needed a larger warehouse… err… house… to work from so I started looking around. I figured out quickly that houses in the greater Vancouver and Burnaby areas were going to be far more than what I could afford. I didn’t want to move over the main bridge connecting Vancouver to the eastern part of Vancouver/BC, as the bridge was a constant traffic jam, almost 24/7, and the new bridge was still a couple of years away from being completed.

Then, I realized with all of the business that we were doing in eastern BC and Alberta, and the trips I was taking down to the US for the projectors, I had no need to live near downtown Vancouver; in fact, we only had a few clients in that area. Surrey and Langley were significantly less expensive than anything closer to Vancouver, although from Langley it was a 45-minute drive to downtown on a good day, not factoring in rush hour traffic.

Over the course of 18 months, I narrowed it down to 3 houses. One was really nice, but access to the house was a pain, which didn’t work for lugging in video projectors. A second house looked promising but was sold before I could make an offer. That left the third one, out of 20 or 30 houses I viewed.  It was 4200 square feet, on a ½ acre, was on a dead-end street, with nothing but ALR space behind the house. Agricultural Land Reserve meant that technically it was an undeveloped area that could only be developed if the same amount of land which was developed was surrendered to become ALR once again. The neighboring houses were much further away than in more populated areas, which suited me if I was going to blast my stereo once in a while so it looked good.

In addition, the house itself had an oversize garage that would work great as a shop, a semi-finished basement with a rumpus/storage room that could house some great shelving units for my projector parts and sound equipment, and a room in the basement that had HOME THEATER written all over it. The house was a bit out of my price range, but I realized with the amount of projectors I was selling, I’d come up with the extra downpayment required in no time.

On June 1, 2002, I took possession of my first home, outside of the condo that I purchased back in 1987. The previous owner of the home was a top morning DJ working at the number one morning show on FM rock radio. He ended up leaving the station for whatever reason and thus couldn’t find work at another radio station. He ended up selling the house as a result.

The home of this DJ was another example of how radio station staff have no interest in electronics or music after their workday is over. From a technical point, the house had nothing. It had 4 phone jacks, 4 cable outlets, no internet wiring, no alarm system, nothing. In fact, I couldn’t get home insurance unless I had an alarm system installed.

I already knew that moving from one home to another would be a massive undertaking, so I decided to overlap my rent with my mortgage for two months, easing the difficulty of the move.

I recruited Rich to build me a workshop in the garage. He built five workbenches which wrapped around the garage walls, with some storage racks against the garage doors, and a 60-amp sub panel to power each bench individually. Dave, Mat, Rob and Ryan wired the house for CCTV cameras and an alarm system, we rewired the telephone jacks to accommodate the phone system that came out of the CSE offices, and we put 12 zones of speakers with a keypad to control each set throughout the house.

The story about how I acquired the 12-zone keypad sound system is a bit unusual. In downtown Vancouver there is a massage parlor, called the Swedish Touch. It’s been there for years. I remember seeing ads in the paper for their business in high school. What I didn’t know until I got the phone call and went there for myself is that it’s a ‘happy ending’ massage place, and the Vancouver Police had turned a blind eye, as had the politicians. Why? Because all of the pro sports teams that play at Rogers Arena and BC Place would go there after the game for a post-game ‘massage’. As long as there’s no trouble, it lives a semi-anonymous existence.

So the manager calls me and states that someone else put in a Carver multi zone system several years ago; however, over the years, the remotes got stolen or had broken. These were very simple 6 button remote controls, one button to select each music source (including one for the porn channel, piped into each room via satellite), and the volume up/down buttons. They were down to two remotes, whereas they’d need at least 8, one for each of the 6 theme rooms that they had, and one for the office, and one spare. The remotes were now discontinued, rendering the system useless. I went down to take a peek although I was told that I had to be there before 11 AM as they were open at noon for the business crowd seeking a lunch massage. I had no idea what to expect, but my eyes were opened when I walked in. The place was on the 4^th floor of a 6-story building, and a night club occupied the top floor. A restaurant was on the ground and second floors, and office space was on the 3^rd and 5^th floors. There was ‘The Touch’ mat at the front door as you entered, and security cameras were everywhere. The inside was spotless as well. There were the six theme rooms, ranging from an Egyptian Room to the Mirror room, a room with a hot tub, and the themes of the other three rooms escape me. There were pretty girls everywhere, all in their 20s, and I was told that at any time there were around 35-40 girls working there in shifts.

We proposed to build some custom panels in place of the wireless remote-control systems so that there would never be the need for another remote, ever. I also allowed a bit of money to take the existing Carver system in on trade, as I had visions of it being installed in the house that I knew I was going to buy, and surely finding replacement remote controls couldn’t be that difficult. Since most of the clientele would come to the Touch in the evenings, we had to do all-nighters, starting work at 2 AM, and finishing around 10 AM.

Rich built the custom wall control panels, and since all of the speakers and wiring were already in place, the overall retrofit didn’t take too long. I went down the morning that we finished the install, demonstrated it to the manager and staff, and they loved it. Everything was clearly labeled, requiring no technical knowledge.

Two fun stories about The Touch.

• 48 hours after we finished the installation, the manager called and said that the porno channel audio wasn’t working. It was the most important one, of course. I went screaming down there, walked in, and saw immediately that someone had turned off one of the amplifier channels. I walked over to the rack while the manager was doing something else, went into one of the theme rooms, to verify that the porno channel was now loud and clear, and sat back down in the office. The manager, who was sitting there with one of the very attractive young women looked at me and said “Are you done already?” I smiled and said “Yes, someone turned off one of the amplifiers.” The very attractive young woman looked at me straight in the eye and said “Well, they didn’t hire us for our brains.” I couldn’t stop laughing.
• They called one other time about a year later because they had problems with their satellite system. They couldn’t get a hold of their satellite guy so they called me. I went down to see what I could do. I rang the doorbell to get inside, and one of the young women came to the door, saw me with my toolbox, and said in a very seductive voice “Oooh, my, what a big toolbox you have. Is that all for me?” I smiled and said, “No, actually I’m here to fix your satellite system.” The young woman dropped her sultry demeanor, and yelled “WENDY (the manager), SOMEONE IS HERE TO FIX THE SATELLITE.” (So much for a young attractive woman wanting this 40 year old ugly guy: all they want me for is my brains).

As for the multiroom sound system, we did take the two working remote controls. I realized that I could simply use a learning universal remote control to learn the codes to the Carver unit, and we installed the system in my new house. It’s running to this day, although I rarely use it.

A final epilogue to The Touch… Around 2004, I got a call from Wendy the manager saying that they were in a big dispute with their landlord and were moving out. Did I want the sound system we installed, for free? Never to turn down free sound equipment, I drove down and took the rack out of the office. As I was walking out, I saw the large The Touch woven door mat still sitting at the door. I looked at Wendy and asked if I could take it. She hesitated but finally agreed. That Touch door mat is still sitting at my front door to this day. Only one person in the last 23 years has recognized the logo and asked why I had it.

Tax Audit

Shortly after moving into the house, I received a brown envelope in the mail, indicating it was from the government. Short of regular tax remittance notices, a brown envelope generally never was good news in my life. This particular envelope was particularly bad, as it informed me that I was due for a tax audit. Oops! I hadn’t filed taxes in….well, probably forever. Here in Canada, the government was generally more lax in collecting tax from the small company owner/operator than it was for large corporations. According to friends in the US, the taxman was pretty rigid in being all over you if you missed filing taxes by a year or two. Not so much in Canada. I had heard a rumor that the Canadian government wised up to this fact, and shortly before I got my tax notice, they’d hired 5000 new auditors to chase after the little guys like me. Accompanying the notice was also a note of the tax balance owing, which was around 1.2 million dollars. Well, wait a sec, that’s incorrect, that’s about the same as the total sales of Sound Solutions. For those not in the know, the taxman randomly assesses a high number to the unpaid taxes, to scare the bejeezus out of the delinquent tax remitter. Well, that part worked. I had boxes of receipts, and books done to some degree by the varying bookkeepers that I’d had over the years. Specifically, I was to be audited for the years 1999 to 2001. Of course, those happened to be my highest income years. Once I’d calmed down a bit, I did some math.  By and large, I had no bad habits. I didn’t drink or smoke or drive expensive vehicles. All I ever did was work. My gas was a tax write-off, so were my restaurant receipts so this couldn’t be as bad as I had feared.  Since I was good with math, I figured that I’d probably owe about $150,000 for the three years since the biggest personal expense was the downpayment of the house that I pulled out of the company in June of 2002. Heck, maybe that wouldn’t even be considered, since I didn’t pull the money out of the company until then and was simply saving the money in the bank between 1999 and 2001. Still, I was in a financial mess.

I looked up accounting companies that specialized in tax debt, and found a promising looking one in Surrey, about 20 minutes away from me. I called them up, and they told me to bring in all of my banker’s boxes for those three years. I signed the form that allowed them to talk to the government and breathed a bit of a sigh of relief. Needless to say, there was a ton of data entry work to be done, entering the invoices and payables. Since I knew nothing about accounting, some of the CRT sales went into my personal account, but as Sound Solutions needed money, I’d transfer funds to the business account. Over the three years, I’d put tens of thousands of dollars from eBay sales into my personal account… but also transferred lots over to Sound Solutions. By and large I reasoned, I still didn’t pull a lot of money out of the company overall, and while the business was profitable, the company tax amount was at a lower rate. So, over the course of a few months, the tax accountants filed the proper tax returns, and we waited for a proper adjusted amount. Months went by, and it was apparent that the government worked slowly. Finally, we got a statement from the government with the adjusted tax amount due. It was $1.3 million. This couldn’t possibly be correct. I went back to the accountants, asking what the heck the problem was, and they couldn’t tell me, other than it was wrong. For the next 18 months, they kept stalling and stalling, until finally someone from Revenue Canada called me (since I was the director) and said “Look, you’ve stalled long enough; we really need this tax debt paid.” I spent a couple of days by myself, manually looking at all of the personal and business deposits I’d done at the bank, then listed all of the personal withdrawals I’d done, and listed those, and then the inter-account transfers I’d done for the three years that the taxman was auditing.

I came up with a personal draw of around $30,000 per year that I needed to pay tax on. That was a far cry from the $1.3 million I owed according to the government. I called them back after triple checking the numbers and asked to speak to someone about my account. I was given the name of a senior tax collector rather than a first line collection agent. (I guess I had a special ranking with the taxman). She was from South Africa, with a great accent, and I went to her office with my printout numbers. For 45 minutes she showed me all of the various tax statements, explaining where and how I owed the money. She lost me at about the three minute mark. I had no idea what she was talking about. My head spinning, I asked her for a blank piece of paper. I asked for her to check her numbers against mine. I listed out the total amount of money that I’d put into my personal account.  It worked out to be something like $500,000. I said “Can we agree that I put that amount of money into my personal account?” She agreed. I then showed her the transfers over to Sound Solutions, saying that by transferring the money to the business account, it was now company money, and not money that I had taken out personally. That number was something like $420,000. She agreed that the $420K was now company money. Feeling a bit victorious, I then circled the remaining $80,000, and said “Now, that $80,000 of money I spent personally, that’s now my personal income, and THAT’S what I need to be taxed on, not the ridiculous amount that Revenue Canada has said I need to be taxed on for the last 3 years of my life.”  There was silence for a few seconds in the small collections room, where many a taxpayer before me had gone to die. She finally exhaled and said “So THAT’S why you’ve been fighting this for the last 2 years!” I said “Yes, do you see my point?” She did indeed. I asked for her to recalculate my taxes owing, and she said she’d get back to me.

The bottom line was, on top of the mistake that the taxman made on my account, remember the $400,000 that they had assessed me for, for the three years of my audit? Well, it turns out that the tax auditor figured out that they’d never reversed those random assessments when they sent me the statements. Since the taxman is great in levying fines and interest on unpaid taxes, the last large statement I got from them showed that I owed 1.499 million dollars. Well what the hell, why didn’t you just round it up to an even 1.5 million?

A couple of months later, I finally got the correct tax amount owing. As I had correctly guessed, my base amount of tax owing, personal and corporately, was around $150,000. With penalties and interest, however, it was closer to $350,000. In Canada, there’s no negotiation of owed taxes. Give up your house, give up your vehicle, and give up your first born: the taxman will get his due.

The worst part is I went back to my tax accountant, who by this time had taken tens of thousands of dollars from me, getting my books in order. The owner looked at me and said “Well, you know, had we caught that mistake of them not reversing your initial assessment numbers, and we went to Revenue Canada, you would have had all your taxes cancelled. They aren’t supposed to make mistakes like that.”  So wait… you’ve had my books for almost four years, have charged me tens of thousands of dollars, and you FUCKERS didn’t catch an obvious mistake? It took me, someone with zero accounting and bookkeeping training to go to the tax collector to point out errors, at which point they caught their mistake? Fuck you!

I took all of my bookkeeping and my up-to-date taxes, and found an excellent accountant, Bill, who I use to this day. To date, we’ve had no additional tax audits.

Now facing a 6-digit tax bill, I did end up going to get a free assessment from one bankruptcy lawyer, who looked at the numbers for about 20-30 minutes, and proclaimed that it was a wash. With the equity I had in my house, I could go through bankruptcy, and likely lose it, or I could work with the taxman to pay the debt off. Since business was good, I decided to take my chances and work with the tax collector.  I told him I’d think of my options and get back to him. A week later, he sent me a $600 invoice for the 20 minutes he spent with me. I sent the bill back with a nasty letter, saying that his ad read ‘free consultation’ and to take his bill and put it where the sun didn’t shine. I didn’t hear from him again.

The tax collection agent was a lovely lady named Jeannie, and she and I worked well together. Since I needed well over a year to pay off the debt, I offered to pay $5,000 a month and that eventually I’d have the debt paid off. That worked great for about 18 months, until the CRT business started to slow down, and I had to renegotiate. Finally, business slowed down, and with reluctance, I refinanced my house and pulled an extra $100,000 out of the equity I’d built up, and paid Revenue Canada off. My mortgage payments went up about $400 a month; however, at least the taxman was paid off.

But wait, it gets better!  Sometime around 2004 or so, in the middle of the corporate and personal tax audit, I received yet another brown government envelope, informing me that I was also due for a GST (federal sales tax) audit. This one I wasn’t too worried about, as I followed the GST rules to the letter.  One of these rules dictated that any sales from a Canadian company into the US or other foreign country did not need the federal sales tax charged to the client. So, virtually none of my CRT projector sales and service were taxed, as only the Canadian sales would be subject to the GST. Since 95% of my CRT sales and  repairs were to the US and overseas as compared to Canada, I should have to pay minimal additional GST assessments or fines.

So once again, I gathered up my boxes of accounting, and took them to the tax department. I met with Richard, who had been assigned my case, and a few months later, he issued his findings: $46,000 in GST was owed. Knowing already what I did about my corporate tax audit, I knew this was without penalties and taxes, so I figured now I owed another $130,000 or so. This simply wasn’t possible. I knew my bookkeeping was nonexistent; however, I did charge tax where I should, and none where I shouldn’t. I called Richard up, complaining, saying that I would spend a few days tallying up US and Canadian sales, and I’d bring him my own calculations. Sure enough, I did find a couple of Canadian transactions where I may have owed GST on, but by and large I found no flaws, so I was trying to figure out where the auditor came up with the ridiculous figure of $46,000.

I found out soon enough. Even though the law stated that GST didn’t need to be charged on US sales, Richard wanted proof, not just on the invoice, that an item actually went down to Blaine. Back then, I used a company called White Rock Courier, who were set up to take shipments across the border, to pick up packages from my condo, and then they would drop them off at my PO box in Blaine. The staff at the PO box would send them out for me. That wasn’t good enough for Richard. He wanted the White Rock Courier receipts, as well as the packing slips that I received when the driver picked the packages up from my place. Well, I didn’t have a lot of the packing slips, but I did have the invoices stating the number of packages that White Rock Courier had delivered down to Blaine for me. Painstakingly, I spent about three weeks combing through invoices and receipts, trying to match up the trail for each package from my door, down to Blaine, and then out to the purchaser.

For the most part, I did manage to match a majority of them up, although even I didn’t know exactly what customer any box that was shown on the White Rock Courier slips or invoices were for. Still, I pressed on. I presented my totals to Richard at the tax office. A few weeks later, he sent me an invoice back for $23,000. Hmm, that was suspiciously half of the original assessment, and nowhere close to the $2,300 in GST that I couldn’t exactly account for in the White Rock courier slips. Worse, I personally would also take shipments across the border when I had time, and since these transactions were considered an ‘informal entry’ for US customs, there was no paper trail. I called Richard back up, and asked where he’d gotten the new total from, and he said (and I quote): “Oh, I didn’t look at any of the numbers, I just halved my original assessment.”

Now wait a second. I take full responsibility for having shoddy or nonexistent bookkeeping. That’s no one’s fault but mine. Surely, however, a guessing game by the taxman couldn’t possibly be the correct resolution. I was now determined to deep six Richard. In a surprising next step, Richard informed me that he would be taking an extended leave of absence from Revenue Canada, but I’d hear from him when he got back. It took over a year for the incompetent (in my eyes) Richard to finally return to work.  He called me and said “This file has been on my desk far too long: what number would make you happy?” I said “The $2,300 that I came up with, which is an accurate number.” He told me, “That isn’t going to happen. He asked if I’d accept $6,000. By this time, the main audit was almost over, and I was tired of playing number games with the taxman completely. I said “Sure, let’s go with that.” Clever Richard, he then added the penalties and interest, including more interest to cover the year that he was gone, and I got a bill for over $18,000. I was more than annoyed.

Getting back to Jeannie, the nice tax collector lady, when she and I started talking, I told her that I was prepared to pay the tax bill, but I wanted to deal with one collector only, and with one payment only, and not one person for business taxes, one for personal, and one for GST. She completely agreed, which is part of the reason we had a good working relationship for a few years. Each time I made a payment, I received a new statement showing the payment, and the reduced amount left owing. Great! I refinanced the house some time in 2005 or 2006, and I was done with my taxes. Or so I thought.

About 2 years later, I got yet another brown envelope in the mail from the government, stating that I owed $23,000 to the tax man. This was some kind of mistake, I figured and showed Bill the letter, and he couldn’t match the statement up with anything, since my taxes were now up to date, and Bill made sure all subsequent tax remittances were current. It wasn’t even clear from the statement which department I owed money to, as the statement was made out to me personally.  I figured I’d wait until another statement came in as perhaps it was an old statement, or was sent by mistake.

About 6 months later, I got a call from yet another tax collector, now looking for $24,000, as penalties and interest were owing. They were calling for me personally, and not Sound Solutions or CSE. I explained the situation, told them that all my taxes were paid off, to talk to Jeannie at Revenue Canada, who would confirm my story, and to get back to me. “Yes sir, I’ll check into this, and I’ll get back to you.” I never got a call back, so I assumed that they found their mistake, and thus didn’t call back. Wrong. Six months later, I got another call from another tax collector, and hey, guess what, the bill is now at $26,000, due to penalties and interest. A bit annoyed now, I explained the whole situation all over again, and got the ‘yes, sir, I’ll check into this, and I’ll call you back’. I never got a return call. Six months later I got yet a third call from another collector, looking for $28,000. This time I was finally told that it was for an old GST debt from about 6 years earlier. While I didn’t swear at this new collection agent (your call may be terminated if abusive language is used), I did tell them in no uncertain terms that everyone from Richard to anyone associated with the sole single invoice was completely incompetent, and had no business being in the tax audit department. Once again, I got the standard line of ‘we’ll check into this’ and once again, I got no return call. At no time did I get any other invoice from said tax department, nor a statement showing what the debt was for.

A year later, I came back from a 10-day business trip//vacation, and had a note in my mailbox that there was a registered letter at the post office.  A registered letter generally meant things as bad as notices that came in brown envelopes. I went to the post office, only to be informed that the Queen herself, on behalf of the Crown, government and whoever else the government represented at the highest power had put a lien on my house, for taxes owing. I was livid at the government’s stupidity.

The next morning, I tracked down whoever it was at the GST tax office and started asking questions. The person couldn’t tell me what the debt was for, other than it was for GST for Sound Solutions. They couldn’t tell me why three different tax collectors had called me over an 18-month period but had never followed up. They didn’t keep records of who called me. They could, however, tell me that the GST department didn’t send out statements when I told them that I’d never received notice of said debt. “Oh, we don’t send out statements.” Furious now, I asked them to explain how I was to know that I owed tax money when no statements were sent out, and that I’d rolled any GST debt from the fudged audit into the same payment as the corporate and personal tax debt. “Oh sir, no, we don’t work with the corporate and personal tax department: we are a separate entity, so we never would have combined our debt with theirs.” Naturally, Jeannie, who would have been my savior in this, no longer worked at Revenue Canada.

The nice taxman at the other end of the GST phone said that I could take things up with the tax court, however. I went down to the tax court, and the staff there all looked at me strangely when I asked for the paperwork to file against the Canadian Government. “No sir, you can’t really do that; you need to hire a tax lawyer. They are quite expensive, and any documents submitted to court need to be bound in a special binder” [undoubtedly sprinkled with fairy dust, and had a spell put on them by no other than Harry Potter (oh wait, the books and movies were a few years out yet)].

In desperation and frustration, I penned a pointed letter to the GST tax department, naming names, and outlining in detail (luckily I kept all of the statements) how utterly mishandled my entire GST audit was. I couldn’t help but add that if I ran my company the way they ran their audits, I’d be bankrupt (but I meant it in the nicest of ways). I mailed it in and waited. We’re now talking somewhere in 2008 or so I think.

One Friday, around 3PM Pacific time, there’s a brown envelope in my mailbox. It’s addressed to me, and after the cordial sentence of introduction, the letter delved into more legal and tax gobbledygook that I didn’t understand. At the end of the letter were the words ‘this debt has been vacated’. Huh? What does an available hotel room have to do with tax debt? Luckily, at the bottom of the letter was a phone number starting with a 416 area code, which was Toronto.  The last name of the contact person was Singh. Throughout the duration of the entire tax audit, regardless of department, I had never talked to anyone in Toronto, not to mention anyone with the last name of Singh. Being Friday at 3PM in Langley meant that it was 6 PM in Toronto. What the heck, I’ll call, I thought, although I expected a voicemail. I rang the number, and on the third ring, someone answered. I said “Hi, my name is Curt Palme, and I am calling about this single page form letter I just received.” The woman at the other end of the phone said “Uh huh” and paused. I said “Don’t you want my business number, or my social insurance number?” She replied “No, we know who you are.’”

Wait a second, I am calling a number in Toronto that I’ve never called before, to a tax department that I’ve never talked to before, and yet this random Ms. Singh KNOWS. WHO. I. AM??? This can’t be good. Still, I pressed on. “So can you explain the letter please?” She said “Your debt has been vacated.” “Yes, I know that, but I don’t know what that means. Does that mean I don’t owe any debt to the tax department?” “Correct” she said. I asked: “Are we are talking about the $32,000 GST debt for Sound Solutions?” She said “Well no, it’s now $34,000, but yes, that balance has been vacated.”

Fuck, stop using the word ‘vacated’! (I didn’t say that to her) What I wanted to say is “Why???” but thought the better of it. Instead, I politely told her to have a good weekend, stared at my cellphone for a good minute, and called Bill, my accountant. He told me that in the 25 years he’d done books and accounting, he’d never heard of the GST department waiving (I mean, vacating) a large tax debt. Patting myself on the back for being a trendsetter once again, but this time shafting the correct people, I took myself out for a well-deserved dinner. The lien was also taken off my house.  I checked. Twice.

A change in Direction for Sound Solutions

As quickly as Sound Solutions had risen to a busy and profitable company, we had a downturn in business due to several factors in 2003. Our contact at Superstore called me and informed me that a company out of Saskatchewan that installed their telephone systems was also quoting on installing their sound systems, and their identical quote to ours was 25% less than we were.  Worse, they were bidding on a job that was in Kamloops, a 3-hour drive from us, whereas the company from Saskatchewan had a 2-day drive to get there. The Superstore contact told me that while he preferred doing business with us, he’d lose his job if he awarded the sound system to a company that was 25% higher than their low bid. I crunched the numbers on that bid, as well as a second job elsewhere in BC, and found that there was no way that we could compete with the telephone company’s pricing. So we lost Superstore.

Milestones restaurants got sold to the international food company Cara (who also owned a bunch of other restaurant chains and did airplane catering), so we got dropped as the local supplier after about 4 years of servicing them. Save On Foods also went with a company that undercut us, but without telling us, so they were gone as well. Finally, Safeway got a new project manager at a job on Vancouver Island, who didn’t like Rob for some reason (who generally got along with everyone). That got back to Safeway’s head office, who also found someone else to do their sound installations.

The pressure was on Gordon to come up with new sales, as he’d been resting on his laurels of the continuing sales from our four main customers. The problem was, while Gordon was great at massaging and maintaining existing customers, cold calling isn’t what he liked doing. Cold calling in general can be really boring, trying to convince customers to try your company, just ask every telephone solicitor that has ever called you.  However, when your business is decimated, it’s mandatory. For the 19 years that Gordon was at Commercial Electronics, new customers would constantly call in, as Commercial had been an institution in the Vancouver sound market since the 1950s. Therefore, he really didn’t have to do any cold calling. Over a couple of years, I had to restructure Gordon’s salary vs commission, but in the end, he simply didn’t bring any sales in, and I had to let him go. Gordon did not take the news well and he has not spoken to me since.

One day Rob comes over to my house to pick up some supplies. He asks if I have the speakers in yet for a restaurant patio installation that was on the books. I said “We don’t have any patio speakers on the books.” It turned out that Dave had booked this installation himself, and while I didn’t find out which restaurant it was, I guessed it was one of my clients. Technically, since Dave and everyone else was a subcontractor they could do installations outside of those for Sound Solutions; however, we had never discussed anyone doing outside work. Since things were slow, I figured it would be prudent for any sales leads that any installers ran across to be brought to the company. They’d get the installation, I’d even pay them a commission on the sale, and things would continue.

Dave, Mat and I ended up having a three hour meeting, and we discussed the slowdown at work. My recommendation was to lay off the two most recent installers, Rob and Ryan, which would keep Dave and Mat busier. Dave disagreed, and wanted to keep everyone on board, and spread the work around. That didn’t make sense to me, as everyone would be hurting financially. We also discussed him doing work outside of Sound Solutions etc. Finally, two hours later, we had a handshake agreement that everyone would only work for Sound Solutions and bring installs and sales in, for a commission.

Later that afternoon, Rob came back to my shop and asked for yet another set of speakers for another patio installation at a restaurant that I knew nothing about. I saw red. Around this time, Dave was asking for a managerial salary, but we came up with an agreement that for every person that worked under him, I’d pay him an extra dollar an hour salary. If that person received $12.00 an hour, I’d pay Dave $13.00 an hour. The more people Dave had working under him, the more he’d get paid. It seemed like a good scenario. Over a couple of years, Dave occasionally asked for raises for the crew. They were all subcontractors as well, as they supplied their own tools, and usually their own vehicles to get to the job sites.

Rob came over to the house to grab a couple of parts and we got to chatting. He asked if he could have a raise, since it had been a while, and things were getting tight for him and his young family. Upon further discussion, since Dave had just asked for a raise not long ago, it turned out that Dave had been pocketing at least two raises designated for the subcontractors.  I thought I had been paying Rob $19 an hour, since I was paying Dave $20 for him, so Rob and I were pretty upset. There was only one person making a lot of money out of Sound Solutions, and it was Dave. Rob and Ryan were still getting $12.00 an hour. Things had to change, and fast.

I called Gordon, who was still working for Sound Solutions at the time, and we devised a plan. Due to the large volume of installations we were doing, Dave had built a storage area under the patio area of his house, and we put all of the Sound Solutions equipment and inventory in there. We all had keys so that we could all access the wire, hardware, and other installation items that we’d need for the various jobs. The total amount of items there totaled about $40,000, and I wanted that back before I severed all ties with Dave. I had no idea where Mat’s head space was at, whether he was loyal to Sound Solutions, or to Dave. At the moment, it didn’t matter.

Gordon, Rob, Ryan, and I devised a plan. We’d rent a Budget van, and, through Rob and Ryan, would find a day where Dave was out on an installation of a service call for the day. The four of us would go over to Dave’s place with our keys and pull everything out and put it in a storage locker that I would rent for the time being.

That day turned out to be two days later. I went and rented the storage unit, I called Dave around 9 AM to confirm he was heading to a job site, and our crew went to Dave’s place. Since Dave was apparently doing his own installations, I didn’t want to be accused of theft, so I told everyone that if they didn’t know the item belonged to Sound Solutions, to leave it behind. I wasn’t going to get charged with theft over a quarter spool of wire. It took us about an hour or so to load everything into the van. It was a good thing that Gordon brought his car, as that van was completely packed with gear, and Dave’s storage unit was empty, save for a couple of boxes of hardware. No sooner had we arrived at the storage locker and started unloading, when Ryan’s phone rang. It was Dave. Ryan looked at me in a panic, and said “What do I do, what do I do?” I told him to act normal and see what Dave wanted. So he did, and Dave just wanted to know some detail about some installation as I figured.

We were literally on our last trip into the storage locker, with the last of the stuff from the van, when my phone rang. It was Dave. He said “So… did you not want to take the other two rolls of leftover wire?” Apparently, he had to come back to his house as he’d forgotten something and found the storage area completely wiped out.

I let Dave have it. I told him that I’d never use him again. I gave Mat the opportunity to become lead installer, but he decided to leave the company and go with Dave, in whatever he was going to pursue next. Dave did let me know that he had some additional stock in his house that I did go back for a couple of weeks later, but things were tense, and I really didn’t want to have any dealings with him.

Within a month, I got a phone call from one of the sales reps that dealt with Sound Solutions, saying that Dave had called him, and wanted to become a dealer. To his credit, the sales rep turned Dave down, saying he had enough dealers, and then called me and said Dave didn’t have a business plan.  It turns out Dave had started his own company with Mat, and they were chasing after all of my clients. They managed to take away about 40% of them, including Thunderbird and Ritchie Brothers. I didn’t care about Thunderbird because they were a high maintenance client, but I really wanted to keep Ritchie Brothers.

While we weren’t in debt, as I was still making good money with the CRT projectors, it was very apparent that the CRT projector market was shrinking, and the digitals had gotten a lot better and cheaper each year. The thing was, all of my competitors and friends in the business who had larger overhead got out of the business faster than I did, so when CRTCinema sold and moved from Wisconsin to Minnesota, it quickly became apparent that the new owners didn’t know what they were doing, and my business stayed steady. Working from home with no overhead had its benefits as well.

Sound installations were going nowhere fast, and while I still did some service calls, in the end I gave Rob and Ryan 90 days’ notice, and told them that for the time being, I was getting out of sound installations. I’d keep the phone number alive, and would take care of clients if they called, but I wasn’t going to chase any new business and concentrate on CRT projectors until that business ended. We all departed on good terms, and both said that I should call them if I fired things up again.

I could tell that I was burning out of the sound installs anyway. Once you do a couple of grocery stores, whether the fancy sound systems of Save-On, or just the basic Superstore system, with 120 speakers and one amplifier driving them all, you’ve pretty much done them all. I wanted a new challenge.

A Brush with Greatness

A few notable things happened towards the end of my CRT business days.  The first one happened around 2003. I received a phone call from a fellow named Tony, from the 714 area code, which was around Los Angeles. He asked if I had a certain power supply for a Marquee projector. I replied that I did, and he asked to have it aired to Los Angeles overnight. I told him that since the overnight air cost would be more than the power supply, would a 2-day delivery be OK? He said “Sure”, then asked “Do you know who this is for?” I said, ‘Well no, it could be for just about anyone.” He said “This is for Herbie Hancock’s projector in his home.”

I said “Hey, cool, this is the first time that I am knowingly selling a CRT projector part to a celebrity.” So Tony and I chatted for a bit. Then he asked if I wanted Mr Hancock to call me. Now, Herbie Hancock is a multiple Grammy award winning jazz musician and is world famous. I, however, went down a rock and metal road, and knew very little with the exception of some mainstream jazz songs that I’d heard back in high school. I also had played his crossover song ‘Rockit’ many times in my club DJing days, but that was my limit of knowledge about jazz. I’d hoped that if Herbie did call, that we’d talk about CRT projectors, and not jazz.

Tony also offered backstage passes, and two tickets to the Vancouver Jazz Festival in June, when Herbie was coming to Vancouver. I love concerts; I’ll go see anyone. We hung up, and then I realized… this was March, and I just got a random call from a guy named Tony, who promised me tickets for a show three months away. By the time word got from Tony to Herbie to his handlers to management and then to the Orpheum theater, there was a pretty slim chance that I’d see those tickets.

The next day around 11 AM, the phone rings. The caller asks “Is this Curt Palme?” I say “Yes” and he replies “This is Herbie Hancock.” I was stunned. For the next 20 minutes, we talked about CRT projectors, HDMI signals, and how to get the new HD signals into a 10-year old analog projector etc. As we were ending the conversation, he thanked me for my knowledge and said that I would get the backstage passes and tickets to the show.

I called my high school buddy Lorne, who had since moved to Toronto, and asked what he was doing at the beginning of June. He replied that he was coming to Vancouver to go see Herbie Hancock at the Jazz festival. Well no shit! I teased him with the backstage passes, and we were both excited. I did warn him, though, that I thought chances were slim that I’d actually get them.

Fast forward to June, and I drove downtown and got to the Orpheum theater well ahead of time. I went to the box office, where there were a bunch of bearded older men (typical jazz afficionados) hanging around, hoping there would be some last-minute tickets released to the sold out show. I asked if there were any backstage passes for me, and the cashier looked at her list. She said “Oh, yes, you’re on the list, but yours are coming from management, who haven’t brought them down yet. Come back in about a half hour.”

I caught that a few of the men looking for tickets had heard our exchange, and one asked “How did you get tickets and backstage passes?”  With a smirk I told him “Well, I sold Mr Hancock, or Herbie, as I like to call him, a power supply for his home theater.” The gentleman was in awe.

I get the passes and found out that I also received third row center tickets. Bonus! The show was very entertaining, and he did a cover of U2’s ‘Where the Streets have no Name’. It was sung by a 19-year old Vancouver woman, who hit it out of the park.

After the show, I gave Lorne the second backstage pass, and we walked down towards the entrance to backstage (Years earlier, I’d done some work at the Orpheum, so I was somewhat familiar with the backstage area). A friend of Lorne’s named Ronn who had given Mr. Hancock’s drummer, Vinnie Colaiuta (who previously drummed for Frank Zappa) a snare drum was also there with a backstage pass. So, the three of us walked down to the backstage entrance which was guarded by a small Asian security guard. I showed him our backstage passes which clearly said ‘ALL ACCESS’ on them, and nothing doing. In his somewhat broken English, he said “No, you no go backstage. Mr. Hancock, he come out here in a few minutes.”

There were four other people waiting for him, also with backstage passes. I didn’t know who they were, so they stood on one side of the door, and the three of us on the other. Sure enough, about ten minutes later the door opens, and Mr. Hancock steps out, followed immediately by his handler, who said “Mr. Hancock, we have three minutes, then we need to go.” As luck would have it, he turned to the four people that we didn’t know, took a couple of pictures, signed a couple of autographs, and was whisked away. He turned to us and waved, and said “Sorry boys”, and he was gone.

Now, my buddy Lorne in high school was a lot more outgoing than I was and could be a bit of a shit disturber back then. I was the introverted nerd. I looked at Lorne and Ronn, and said “We have the backstage passes: let’s go backstage.” Lorne looked at me, and said “Won’t we get in trouble?” I looked at Lorne, and said “Dude, what happened, you’ve gone soft on me? What are they going to do, kick us out? The concert is over!”

That was good enough for Lorne, so the three of us went backstage to try and find Vinnie. Lorne and I are huge Zappa fans, so to meet a drummer of his would be great. We walked all over backstage, found the opening band members, and all of the rest of Mr. Hancock’s band, but no Vinnie. We walked all over the place, and just as we were about to give up, Lorne spotted him having a smoke break out one of the back doors. We called to him, and he motioned us over.  For the next 20 minutes, Paul and Lorne talked snare drums. It was fascinating, but it was way over my head. It was like two techs talking about video projectors with someone that didn’t know anything about electronics.  Vinnie was a very down to earth, humble guy, posed for pictures, and signed a couple of autographs for us.  Just as we were getting ready to leave, the back door opens again, and who comes in, but Mr. Hancock and his handler. I assume he had gone out for some media interviews, and was now back. We all shook hands, and I wanted to make sure that Mr. Hancock knew that I appreciated his gesture of the tickets. I thought fast, as I had exactly 5 seconds to come up with a memorable line to get his attention without chatting up a storm. I knew exactly what to say: “Mr. Hancock, how is your Marquee projector doing?”

Herbie Hancock: “Excuse me?” (He had no idea what I was talking about.)

Me: “Mr. Hancock, I’m Curt Palme. I sold Tony, your tech, a power supply for your Marquee projector back in March.”

HH: (now understanding what I was saying): “Oh, YOU’RE Curt Palme? Oh, you’re amazing, you know so much about video projectors. Thanks again for getting me the part.”

Lorne looked at me as if I was from Mars and said “How the hell does a worldwide killer jazz artist know who you are?”

We got pictures and autographs.  Now to this day I get a big thrill meeting famous musicians, and for that matter, anyone else that has made a career in the entertainment business. I think there’s a couple of reasons for that:

– My entire life, I’ve had a very specialized career, whether repairing TVs, or installing sound systems. It requires skill and technical know-how; however, my business caters to a specific, small group of clients. A successful musician or other artist can write and/or perform a song, and millions of people around the world will recognize that. To me, that’s incredible.

– I’ve told many clients, who marvel at my troubleshooting skills the following:

“You can put ten technicians in front of the same broken piece of equipment. It can be a car, a camera, a tape deck or an amplifier. Each of those ten technicians may take a different route to diagnosing the fault; however, if the bad spark-plug wire, the stuck shutter, or the bad transistor or chip isn’t replaced and diagnosed in the piece of equipment, that equipment still isn’t going to work.  By comparison, you can give a blank piece of paper to ten different musicians, and tell them to write a song about a tragic breakup between a man and a woman. You’ll get an instrumental, a country song, a jazz song, a rock and roll song etc, and each song, despite being completely different, accomplishes the assignment.”

My brain can’t compute the artistic side.

Even in high school, when I could bang out an Elton John or a Supertramp song on the piano, I’d have to sit there and copy what I heard on the radio or on my cassette deck. Put some blank sheet music in front of me, and ask me to compose something, and I’d fail miserably. Two different trains of thought between artists and me the technician, and I greatly admire the artists.

In addition, despite my coming out of my shell in my 20s, I am still an introverted nerd deep inside. In high school, I looked up to the people in the music room that could play their instruments well. For the select few of the many musicians that have made it big over the years, for them to now call me, wanting my expertise is still mind blowing to me. It would happen a few more times over the years, but Herbie Hancock was the first one.

Outside of being technician to (a) celebrities, I started to get emails from the US government, especially once the US was at war with Iraq in 2003. The digital projectors had gotten much better in a short time-period, and at an industrial and government level, the digital projectors were better (and significantly more expensive) than what was offered at the consumer level.  I started providing CRT parts to facilities such as Camp Pendleton, a large military facility near San Diego, CA, who found that my used parts were a whole lot less than buying new ones from the manufacturers, such as Barco, and Electrohome, who were the largest suppliers of CRT projectors for flight simulators and planetariums. Digital projectors still couldn’t produce perfect blacks, so whether training pilots in a flight simulator or a planetarium projecting a night sky, these facilities couldn’t be displaying a dark gray screen rather than a pitch black one using just a digital projectors. A high-end planetarium projection system, or a flight simulator, would use six high end CRT projectors, typically around $60,000 US each (not including the screen, installation, or calibration). On top of that, you’d have a $2 million dollar computer rack which would split one continuous flight simulator or planetarium image up over those six projectors. The projected images would then be ‘blended’ together to form one large seamless, black, image. A ground-up installation of just the projector end of things for any one of these installs would take a good month to install, so a typical multi-projector system would be around the $3 million mark.

Come 2003, with the US at war, all of the budgets to upgrade flight simulators and planetariums was slashed. The main manufacturers were winding down production of their CRT projectors to concentrate on the digital models, so the customer service to maintain the 10-year old CRTs was also reduced. Barco and Electrohome had no interest in keeping their old sets going: they wanted these facilities to buy the new digital units. The problem was, the computer mainframe for the CRT projectors wasn’t compatible with the new digital projectors, so a system upgrade to digital ran around $3 million dollars, as much as when the CRT projectors were originally installed.

Since much of the available government budgets were going toward the war effort, a lot of other budgets were cut. Despite flight simulators being related to war, a $3 million dollar upgrade was considered a luxury and wasn’t going to be part of any military budget any time soon. Thus, I sold a lot of parts to large American corporations, including NASA, Boeing, and a lot of other US government facilities that were still using CRT projectors. Even Disney sent me a video projector to assess for an overhaul, as they had a dozen that they wanted refurbished. Nothing happened with that potential sale, however, and they told me to keep the projector. I suspect they went digital, which wasn’t surprising. Still, I kept their oversized, hermetically sealed case, with a big DISNEY logo emblazoned on all sides, for a bunch of years, until I finally sold it cheap on Craigslist.

I was still spending a bunch of time each day answering questions on the AVSForum when they decided to get a new moderator to make sure things weren’t ever out of control in the CRT section. The AVSForum had grown to 500,000 members, and as is the case with many forums, members will attack others, and cause fighting. By and large, the CRT forum itself was well behaved, to the point where one of the AVSForum members made a post stating as much.
This new moderator, Kal, however, was very heavy-handed, and started deleting members as he saw fit, usually for some minor reason. Kal also monitored the CRT forum, and we both noticed more than one long-time forum member get the boot from AVS. I asked Kal how hard it would be to put up a forum on our website, with the mission to not moderate much at all.

He told me that it was fairly easy, as there were templates available for this, and in 2006, Kal launched the curtpalme.com website forum. We private messaged a few key members over at the AVSForum, as we couldn’t post that we had a competing forum over at AVS for obvious reasons. Within days, a large portion of the AVSForum CRT projector members had jumped ship and had moved to our website forum.

One of the large concerns about the CRT projector technology was if it was compatible with the new DVI/HDMI digital signal format that was already making inroads into the home theater market. Flat screen TVs were also being introduced, furthering concerns that the old analog CRT projectors would be obsolete soon. The movie production houses were concerned that computer whiz-kids could find a way to record the new HD video format onto their computers, and sure enough, I knew one such nerd in Seattle that was indeed recording HD satellite signals onto his hard drive. I went to visit him around 2002, and indeed, the playback quality from his hard drive was identical to the HD signal coming in off his satellite. The movie production companies were therefore pushing the new digital format, which was un-recordable. The problem, therefore, was no one was yet converting the digital video signal to the analog one that these CRT projectors were looking for. Things looked bleak.

Fortunately, a company in Taiwan figured out exactly how to do this conversion within a small cigarette pack sized box, that would convert the digital signal to an analog RGBHV output, the same signal that the older computer monitors used, with the 15-pin connector, called a VGA connector and signal. This unit was called the HDFury. Kal approached me and asked if we could sell third party products such as the HDFury on the website, and if so, what cut would I want from it. In a snap decision, I told Kal that he could have the entire share of the pie, as I had more CRT projector business than I could handle. I had no time to field questions about the HDFury, and other related products that he could sell, such as other signal conversion type of boxes, and units called ‘scalers’, that would change the resolution of an incoming signal to another, which better matched the HD signal to whatever type of projector you were using, ultimately resulting in a better picture quality.

There was also a smaller company called Moome who had started making modules that fit right into certain CRT projectors which had a secondary analog input slot. The Moome card had a DVI or an HDMI input and did the conversion of the signal right in the projector, therefore not requiring extra wires external to the video projector the way the HDFury did.

As a result of these third-party products, and Kal negotiating with HDFury to be the authorized website for their tech support via our forum, our forum members quickly exceeded 10,000. Many people were buying these HDFury signal converters for their CRT projectors; however, the original first-generation LCD and plasma flat screens also needed these HDFurys as they had no digital inputs. Kal had his hands full, as the early DVI and HDMI signals were very buggy and glitchy, and often the picture would blank out when a TV program switched to a commercial break. The HDFury forum was the busiest as a result of the signal problems.  Kal also did the same for the competitive Moome product and had a separate section on the website for it as well.

There was one annoyance of the HDFury. A large US based company called Monoprice decided to sell the HDFury as well. The HDFury company in Taiwan would allow customers to buy their unit with or without the power supply. The power supply was an extra $50, and since the DVI and HDMI video source, such as a video game, HD cable or satellite box, or BluRay player had power coming out of the connector, in theory the HDFury shouldn’t need the extra power supply to run. As a result, Monoprice brought in thousands of HDFurys without the power supply option and thus undercut our website that sold it with the power supply by $50.  The harsh reality was, however, that many of the HD sources didn’t provide quite as much power out of the HDMI port as they were supposed to, and thus many HDFury installations didn’t work. Monoprice, not being a technical company, didn’t provide customer service. Instead, they would simply send those complaining customers to our website, and Kal and the other forum members would assist with troubleshooting at no charge or effort on Monoprice’s part. Kal ended up selling a lot of power supplies, and getting a commission check to match. I personally was bent out of shape that he lost the original sale of the HDFury, and we did all of the dirty work for Monoprice at no charge.

At one point, there was a falling out between Kal and one video scaler company regarding his commissions of their sales. They threatened to pull Kal’s dealership off our website, and Kal called their bluff, and removed their product from our site. Not expecting this, the company called me and asked me if I knew just how large the commission checks were to Kal. Since I was so busy with CRT projector sales and repairs, I really didn’t know, and when they threw a number at me of his last check, I realized that maybe I should have asked for a piece of the commission pie when I was offered it. Still, that was my own decision, and I didn’t hold the success of Kal’s sales against him at all.  Whenever I got an email regarding the ‘third party accessories’ that Kal was taking care of, I’d simply send him the email, and he’d deal with it, leaving me to my profitable sales and servicing.

In the end, the scaler company that had the beef with Kal went under, and Kal moving to the better quality Lumagen brand scaler paid off, as he’s still selling it on the site today.

Things got even more interesting around 2007 when Kal, who lived 3500 miles away in Ottawa, called me. Kal and I had always done business via email. We may have chatted a couple of times when he was starting up the website, but we’d never met, so his phone call was a bit unusual. He said that he was a bit rattled, as he’d received a supposed letter from Fox/Warner, the movie company mogul and was told in no uncertain terms that we needed to cease and desist selling the HDFury within 30 days, or they’d sue us into oblivion for infringing on their precious DVI/HDMI digital signal. The thing was, the email ended up in his spam folder, and neither he nor I had received a hard copy by mail. Neither of us knew whether the letter was legit or not. After some discussion, we decided not to do anything until we received a written letter.

Sure enough though, two weeks later I received an official letter on Fox/Warner letterhead, the identical letter that they had emailed Kal. We decided that Fox/Warner had deeper pockets than we did, so Kal gave HDFury 30 days’ notice that we were going to stop promoting their product.  The letter also told us to take down the HDFury forum section of the website which we did.

HDFury was none too pleased and also screwed Kal over commissions, but I believe that was eventually resolved. The core problem behind the cease-and-desist letter was, of course, money. Every electronics manufacturer that made DVI/HDMI compatible devices were paying the movie companies royalties, with the exception of HDFury. HDFury had to shut down production for some time, while they dealt with the royalty and/or license issues. Eventually, HDFury paid the movie companies the substantial license fee they wanted, and they started up production again. HDFury never came back to our website to start up the tech support form again, though. Funny enough, Fox/Warner never approached Moome with the same letter. I guess the Fox executives figured that if the connections to the analog signal weren’t readily available, they couldn’t be accessed to be recorded.  Stupid Fox executives! They greatly underestimate us nerds! We can access any signal, anytime, anywhere! In reality though, given the low cost of Blu-ray discs, very few if any people actually bootlegged a high definition video and audio signal. It was just too expensive to crank out a fake Blu-ray disc, and the demand simply wasn’t there.

I’d written a lot of articles for the curtpalme.com website which quickly went to one of the top hits when you searched for CRT projectors on the internet. Between 2001 and about 2010, I received an average of 50 emails a day, and there would be at least one day a month where I’d do nothing but sit in front of the computer for 8-10 hours, just answering and deleting emails. I ended up with a bunch of email sub-folders on my computer, such as ‘repairs’, ‘projectors to buy’, and ‘projector sales’. Still the demand far outweighed the supply, and there was no way I could supply everyone that wanted a projector. A few people who were techs to some degree would buy their own projectors from surplus sellers such as the govliquidation site, and while some people made out fine, most people ended up coming back to me for assistance when they received the projector and it didn’t work. I repaired a ton of modules over the years.

As a result of my CRT sales and service I made quite a few acquaintances all over the world. As a result, I started visiting some of these people, especially down the West Coast. I loved California, and once a year I’d do a road trip from Vancouver down the I-5 to Los Angeles, then over to Scottsdale to visit Tim, one of the Electrohome experts, then to Las Vegas to gamble my token $100 on slot machines, and back home.  About a month before one of those trips, I posted on my website forum that I’d be doing the drive, and that I’d be happy to go out for dinner with fellow CRT enthusiasts. Since I’d given a lot of help to CRT owners, I met a lot of people and got a good number of free dinners out of the deal. One person that responded in the affirmative was from a forum member named Jay Allan. Of course, on the internet, you never know if that’s a real name or a pseudonym. He invited me to his place just outside of Los Angeles, and said he’d fire up the BBQ, and make some tri-tip. That sounded great to me. As a joke, and since I was single at the time, I said “And bring some dancing girls” with a smiley face emoji. Another forum member posted “Well, since it’s Jay, that won’t be a problem.” I didn’t know what to make of that, so I left it alone. I grabbed Jay’s address and drove down. I ended up heading up a winding road to the top of a bluff, overlooking a part of Los Angeles, and he met me at the back of the four-car garage, and I pulled in. Jay was about my age, and just a generally nice guy.

He showed me around the 7,000 square foot multi-level mansion that he was renting, and I was blown away. Later, once I found out what work Jay does, it’s obvious that renting out hillside mansions is an essential part of the work.  Since the house was built more-or-less on a cliff, it wasn’t very deep in size but instead had several floors with a completely flat rooftop that could house 150+ people for one helluva party if Jay chose to do so. We stood in the kitchen chatting, and he asked all sorts of questions about his CRT projector, which I answered. After a couple of Cokes, I asked where the bathroom was, and he pointed me down the long hallway. As I walked down the hall, I couldn’t help but notice about twelve black-and-white pictures of topless women, all in their early 20s, and very good looking, adorning the walls.

Coming back from the bathroom, I commented to Jay “Nice photos.” He smiled, and said “Thanks. I took all of those.” So I asked him if photography was his hobby, and he started laughing, and said “You don’t know what I do for work, do you?” I said “No, I have no idea”, and he says “I am one of the main porn photographers here in the Los Angeles area, and both Hugh Hefner of Playboy fame and Bob Guccione that owned Penthouse magazine will ask for me by name to shoot certain girls.”

Well, now he caught my interest. The next three hours were spent chatting about the California porn industry and CRT projectors. I asked Jay (which was a pseudonym) if I could ask him a bunch of questions, and when he said yes, my first two questions were “How many of these women have you slept with, and how many have deep rooted psychological problems?” His reply: “As many as I want, and almost all of them.”

He continued to explain that most of the women come to Los Angeles in the hopes of being an actress. When their saved money runs out and they have no work, they can either head back home, broke, or they can turn to the pornography industry. He said that if a woman is smart, she can make a lot of money in a very short period of time, and as long as they don’t partake in drinking and drugs, some of them will save up money to go to veterinarian school, or whatever career path they choose. Of course, many do get caught up in the party life, get hooked on whatever drugs, and then they often need to stay in the business for years. Most, however, are in and out of the porn industry in 8-9 months.

He pointed to one of the attractive girl’s picture on the wall and said “See this picture? Two weeks after I took it, she was dead of a heroin overdose’.” That was pretty sobering to me.
He told me a bunch of other stories not really suitable for print here but did say that he was approached to star in a porn ‘reality’ show (reality shows were just getting into the swing of things in the early 2000s). Jay said he was interested, but when he was told that he would be playing the part of a ‘creepy porn director’, he realized that it wasn’t going to be a reality show at all, and he passed on it. I learned a lot about the industry from Jay (more than I ever thought I’d know!), and since we also installed CRT projectors into two of the three porno theaters in Vancouver in the 80s and 90s, it was interesting to get information from the creation side of the business.

A few years later I took my then-girlfriend Barb to meet Jay on one of those trips, a bit hesitant to introduce her to him as she was a bit on the conservative side, but they got along great, and we had an amazing lunch that day. Sadly, Jay ended up passing a few years ago from a form of very rare and aggressive cancer. He called me a couple of months before he passed, saying he was going in for some new experimental surgery and treatment. He sounded great, so I was hoping for the best outcome, but later that year, a mutual friend of ours messaged me on Facebook, saying he was gone.

The company that manufactured Electrohome Marquee projectors (originally a Canadian company but sold to US owners years before I got into CRT) was called VDC (Video Display Corporation), and their facility was located in Florida. They also had a CRT tube division and sold new CRT tubes and also would remanufacture existing tubes. As with any old CRT television set, the CRT tubes were the heart to having a good picture displayed, and CRT tubes would typically last 10,000 hours. Due to the nature of how the colors combined on the screen, the green CRT would wear out first, then the blue, and the red one was usually good for the life of the set, 20,000 hours or more. So, having a good green CRT in stock or in your projector was key.

Remanufactured tubes were $500 US, new ones were around $800, and I ended up becoming a large purchaser of new and refurbished CRT tubes. As I was learning the newer higher end sets which were slowly coming to the surplus market, I managed to destroy at least one brand new tube, right out of the box, because I’d installed it incorrectly, or connected it wrong. All it took was a wrong connection once, however. Warranty… VOID!

The main CRT employee at VDC was named Charlie, and he was great. He’d worked for the company since the 1960s and knew everything about CRT projection tubes. He reminded me a lot of Dave, the speaker reconer at Van Audio, and over the years, he and I had some great conversations. Towards the end of the CRT business, probably around 2012 or so, he said that he was retiring, as he was 80 years old. He sounded like he was in his 50s. I wished him a happy retirement. VDC still had an inventory of tubes in stock, but by then, the CRT business had slowed down, and I was doing far less business with them as a result.

One day in early 2012, I got a call from Lockheed Martin in Texas. It was one of their techs who maintained the flight simulators. He said “So, you seem to know a fair bit about CRT projectors. Can you come down to Fort Worth, Texas, to rebuild a flight simulator?” I asked why they weren’t calling Barco directly, as the North American head office was virtually next door, in Georgia. His reply: “We’ve been trying to get them to return our call for 6 months. They aren’t calling us back.”

I told the tech that I would need a temporary work visa, as a Canadian couldn’t work in the US, for fear of getting banned for 5 years, as it was considered taking work away from a US citizen. Canada has similar rules in effect for non-Canadian citizens working in Canada.

When you’re Lockheed Martin, it’s amazing how fast they could get me a proper work visa. I then also got a call from the Smithsonian Institute, wondering if I could install a couple of video projectors for the upcoming Steve McQueen exhibit. It turned out that both locations wanted me on site within three weeks of each other. Since I loved road trips, I decided to drive down to Texas, stop by a home theater trade show in Denver on the way, and then drive all across the southern US, working my way up to Washington DC. I’d then drive to Chicago towards the end of the trip, where a fellow home theater enthusiast named Cliff had arguably one of the best home theaters in the world. Every year he threw an open house for a weekend, and I’d been to a couple of previous meetups, and met a bunch of people that I’d messaged via my website or sold a projector to. Usually it was 30-40 people that descended on Cliff’s house for a weekend, and a good time was had by all.

Now, Steve McQueen… I thought it was a display to show 1970s movies of the famous actor of that era. No, it turns out there is a second Steve McQueen that I’d never heard of before. He was an African American artist most noted for his yet to be released ‘12 Years a Slave’ movie. Before he did feature films, he did video shorts, about 8-9 minutes long, to critical acclaim. All this was new to me, but I caught on really quickly. What Mr. McQueen did was shoot his shorts on 16mm B/W film, then transfer them to DVD (not Blu-ray which was higher resolution, just a regular DVD), and then projected those onto a screen with a CRT projector. Why a CRT projector, and why not a new digital one? Steve had apparently auditioned every digital projector known to mankind, and to him, only the CRT projector showed the raw, gritty image he wanted.

Steve’s right hand woman’s name was Sue, out of the UK, and she would oversee his art installation (which could be combined with other artist exhibits), to make sure the display went the way she wanted. Generally, at the grand opening Mr. McQueen would show up, and a big party was thrown. In the case of the Smithsonian, they already had the projectors, they just needed someone to do the calibration.

So I planned my massive road trip in my 6-month old new Mazda 3 that I’d put a big stereo into. I started at the beginning of September 2013, and drove down to Denver, Colorado, to go to the CEDIA home theater trade show.  I spent a couple of days there, and having done business via the curtpalme.com website with multiple suppliers, they were happy to see me.

I continued on to Texas. While I’d been to several states in the US in the past, I hadn’t gone further east than Arizona, and never to Texas or the Eastern states. Arriving at Lockheed Martin, I was in a new world. The security was significant, for obvious reasons, and I had to lock my phone up outside the technical areas, as I was a foreign national. The staff in the control room had to turn off their monitors as I walked by, if they had anything critical on the screens.

Lockheed had a 5-projector simulator that they were having problems with. These were high end Barco projectors, top of the line, in fact, that consisted of two sections: one section housed the CRT tubes and lenses, the other housed the electronics to drive the tubes. Both were connected with a 6’, 6” in diameter umbilical cord that carried all of the control cables. Lockheed had a full tech department with lots of high-end Barco parts, as well as CRT tubes – they just lacked a technician that could do a tube swap in the five projectors, along with a recalibration.

Getting on site was like giving up your firstborn. The security detail was intense, of course. In fact, when I told the tech that I was going to be driving down, he asked if I was on a no-fly list. I laughed, and told him that I loved road trips, and had never been to Texas.

I spent a week pulling projectors off the simulator with the mini crane that was built into the top of it, taking each projector to the shop, and dropping tubes in. By the end of day 3 I had retubed all of the projectors, and then it came time for alignment and calibration. That was the long and boring part.

Since CRT projectors do all of the calibration adjustments internally for focusing, color balance, and symmetry of the image (geometry) and convergence (ensuring that all three CRT tubes, the red, blue and green were lined up on top of each other on all parts of the image), you spend long hours working all of the controls on the remote control. When you have adjacent projectors whose images overlap to form one large image, the calibration is even more critical.

What I lacked was a test unit called a colorimeter that balanced adjacent projector images in the overlap, or ‘blending’ zone, so as one image faded out, the next projector faded up. Get the blending zones incorrect, and you get hot spots, or patches of uneven color or brightness. I’d recommended a fellow tech out of Chicago to do the color balancing, as that was his specialty, but they passed, due to lack of budget. Halfway through the last day on site, the Friday, I had the convergence and alignment pretty bang-on and tried my hand manually at the color balancing. I had two of the four zones reasonably accurate, but the other two weren’t great. I knew that without the colorimeter and experience on how to use it, I wouldn’t get it better than what I had it. I was hoping Lockheed’s tech would approve.

I also noticed that the center projector was very dim and dark compared to the other four. I did some playing around with the projector adjustments, but it was still anemic. Their tech came and took a look and said “Oh, that middle projector is still weak. We thought it was the tubes, which is why we called you down.” Great, NOW you tell me!

So with a few hours to spare, I swapped input cables between projectors.  Now the projector to the left of the middle one, that I’d swapped cables with, was dim, and the center one was super bright, as I’d left the brightness cranked up to compensate. Quickly turning down the middle projector, I realized now that the fault wasn’t the projector at all, but the fault was coming from the computer mainframe outside of the simulator. I swapped the video projector cables back to what they should be.

I had their tech show me where the rack was, thinking that maybe one of the video cards for the middle computer was bad. Instead, I found the output of the computer for the middle projector going to a box on the floor, which was a video splitter. One output went to the simulator, the other to a local LCD computer monitor, so that they could see at the computer rack what the computer system was doing. That box (an Extron brand) happened to have a video gain control on it, which is exactly like a volume control on a stereo. It was turned almost off. These video boxes have a unity gain, generally recommended for these systems at the 12:00 position, and I reached behind the rack, and turned that gain up.  I went back to the simulator, looked at the middle projector picture, and it was back to normal. Their tech was a bit embarrassed as that’s something they should have figured out themselves.

I asked if the images on the simulator was OK. He looked and said “It looks better now than when they installed the system 10 years ago.” I was a bit confused, as a mandatory piece of equipment when balancing the blending zones on any flight simulator was that colorimeter. I asked if the installation company ever set up the blend zones, and he said “No, we were told that’s as good as it gets.”

It’s interesting to see that large levels of BS exist even at the highest installation level. He shook my hand and said that they might have me down again to do another simulator, although that never happened.

From Texas, I drove all across the South, through Louisiana and Georgia, taking pictures the entire time. I met up with a number of CRT projector customers that I’d sold projectors to, getting the odd free meal, and seeing lots of home theaters, from mediocre to absolutely fantastic, depending on the owner’s skill, and budget. Almost all of the projectors I sold were to DIY clients that couldn’t afford the 6+ figures for a custom built, professionally installed theater.

Continuing on to Washington DC, I went to the Smithsonian art building. Everything government owned in DC was closed due to the government shut down while President Obama was in charge. I found an open door at the art building and was immediately jumped on by security. I explained that I had an appointment the next day, and that I just wanted to make sure I had the right building, and indeed I did. I then got kicked out and spent the rest of the day exploring the city, which was spectacular. I had allowed 3 days to adjust two projectors supplied by the Smithsonian, and met up with Sue. She actually showed up on the second day, and I’d calibrated both projectors on the first day. I knew Sue would be critical, so I made sure that everything was done to a tee.

Sue came in, and so did the chief mucky-mucks of the Smithsonian.  We chatted for a bit, and Sue picked up the projector remote and started playing with it. Soon enough, the Smithsonian people said “Well, I’m sure you’ve got work to do.  We’ll leave you to it and will see you end of day tomorrow when you’re wrapped up.”

They left, and I looked expectantly at Sue. “Well?” I asked. She smiled and replied “Well?”  I got ballsy and said “So, I’m expecting you to critique my setup: give it your best shot!” (I’d tweaked the heck out of the projectors the day before. She smiled again, and said “Did you see me playing with the remote while we were in the meeting? That’s so I looked to be busy. You set the projectors up great – let’s go explore the city”. I said “We can’t bail out at 10:30 AM on the second day of the three-day install! I feel guilty!” She agreed, but by noon we had walked the entire museum and were bored to tears. The Smithsonian staff were no-place to be found, so we got out of there. Little did I knew that Sue was a physical fitness freak, and we ended up walking seven miles around the city until dusk.

The next day we did meet with the Smithsonian people, who signed off on the installation, and I was on my way again. I ended up meeting up with Cliff and friends for another home theater meetup in Chicago and then drove home. I put 17,000 km on my car in about 5 weeks and took 3000 pictures. It was the best road trip of my life, and I can’t wait to do it all over again.

I sort of knew that this road trip was the last hurrah for CRT projector business, but I did get a couple of reprieves that extended it slightly. I met a buddy named Tim that lived in Scottsdale. He was the Electrohome projector specialist online, and I’d driven down to meet with him a few times. He knew the setup of those projectors better than anyone, although he was not at the level of repairing circuit boards like I was.

He called me one day in early 2004, and said to go look at the government liquidation website, as there were dozens of brand-new CRT tubes at auction. Each tube had a starting bid of $25.00. The only problem was that each tube shown was a red one, the least valuable of the three colors. As I looked at the 100+ listings of tubes, I realized that the thumbnail picture of each auction listing was identical. I called Tim back and told him what I’d seen. It made no sense for the government to buy nothing but red tubes, and since the person listing the auction likely wasn’t a technical guy, he was just being lazy, and used the same picture for each listing, saving him a bunch of time. Tim and I, and one other fellow who was in on the listings each decided to bid on only select auction lots, so that we weren’t bidding against each other.  Now, each tube originally had a cost of well over $3,000 US, and I was prepared to go up to $100-200 per tube, depending on how the auctions went. I still had a number of Electrohome projectors which these tubes would fit in and suspected that they would also be a hot seller to people that had Electrohome projectors in their home theater.

To the surprise of all three of us, we were the only bidders on all of the CRT tubes, so we got each of them for $25 each. When they showed up 10 days later (I think I got around 40, Tim also got 40, and the third fellow got 25 or so), we indeed discovered that there was a good mix of red, blue and green tubes in the boxes all in very dusty, but sealed factory original VDC boxes. Several still had the original price on them, $3,400 US each. Since the three of us bid at random, we each ended up with a random mix of tubes, and so we did some horse trading, so that each of us could get as close to complete sets of tubes as possible.

Several months later, another bunch of tubes showed up on the Gov Liquidation site. Since the original lots went for $25 each, the gov’t decided to list tubes now in groups of 5, with a starting bid of $25 each. This time, only Tim and I bid, and won every lot at the opening $25 bid. Again, we had to ship a few tubes back and forth, but I ended up selling about 10 sets of three tubes for $1,700 US for the set of three. Not a bad profit for having to do nothing but flip boxes.

There were a couple of other random CRT projector related finds that I scored on. One was a random email from a company in Spokane, WA, in the middle of nowhere in eastern Washington state, in January of 2010 or so, asking if I wanted to buy 12 high end Barco projectors out of a simulator installation. I didn’t realize that there was a military base in Spokane, but as an ignorant Canadian, what did I know? I said I was interested, but I’d have to take a drive there, and with the weather conditions, could it wait until April? I offered to only take some parts out of these projectors at $100 each, as I didn’t want the whole units, as they weren’t the desirable top of the line ones, but rather the one model down. The seller agreed, and when I googled the seller, all I could come up with was a construction company, which made no sense.

Still, in April, I drove out to Spokane, to the address they provided. Sure enough, it was a construction company. I asked the guy in charge what the deal was with the projectors, as they also had a bunch of JBL speakers sitting in their front office. He told me that the simulator was for driving tractors on a farm (which made sense, since Spokane was in the middle of farm country). He told me that the US government had spent millions of dollars on this simulator, complete with computer systems and the big JBL speaker systems…only to never use it. Apparently, the staff watched movies on one projector, as that projector had a Fox logo burned into the middle of the tube. I asked to see the projectors, and he took me to an adjacent room. I spotted the top-of-the line lenses on each of the Barco projectors, worth at the time about $1,000 per set at the retail level, and every home theater projector owner wanted them, as these were the highest resolution lenses ever made.

I was truthful with the seller and said “You made a mistake on the model number when you emailed me. Instead of the middle of the road projectors that I was expecting, these are actually second from top of the line.” I told him that I’d be ripping him off at $100 each, so I offered him $500 each, but now I wanted the entire bunch of projectors, not just a part out of each one. However, I’d only brought $1,200 US with me, for the 12 parts that I originally wanted. I gave them the $1200, said I’d send a bank draft over for the balance as soon as I got back to Vancouver, and could they find pallets or boxes to put all these projectors in. He agreed, and I did take two projectors with me; no more could fit into my Rav4.

Back in Vancouver, I powered up the two projectors that I had brought back and listed them on the website. I sold two of them instantly, for $3,000 US each, and had Kal put an article of them on the main page of the website. I had a couple of inquires but the projectors sat there for a few months. Finally realizing that I should probably part them out to get the balance of my money out of them, just as I was about to, I got an email from the Greek military. The fellow asked if I still had all 12 projectors, and I told him that I only had 10 left. He said “No, we want all 12.” I told him that two were already sold, but I’d be happy to sell him the other ten. He then asked for a discount. I concurred and offered the remaining 10 projectors at $2,700 US each, realizing that I probably wasn’t going to sell them otherwise.

At the time, around 2016 or so, it was widely rumored that Greece was about to go through bankruptcy, and I wasn’t about to get shafted by any country. I therefore put in my original email back to the tech from Greece that payment would be needed in full to ship the projectors.
I was told that the tech would forward the information to their accounting department and cut a purchase order. That was fine, but I needed payment up front. A couple of months went by, and I heard nothing from the Greek government. I decided to play some dirty pool and emailed my tech contact. I said “I just got an email from the US Air Force who also want to buy these 10 projectors – are you still interested?” Of course there was no email from the US Air Force, but Greece didn’t know that.

Within 24 hours I received an email back from my Greek tech “NO, DON’T SELL THOSE! WE WANT THEM!” A couple of days later, I did get an email with a purchase order, but of course that purchase order said ‘net 30 days’ for payment. Nope, that wasn’t going to fly. In my most politically correct wording possible, I emailed back saying I’d need payment in full before they shipped.

As expected, I received an indignant email back saying to the extent of ‘hey, we’re Greece, who are you to tell us that we’re to pay up front?’ I insisted, however, and forwarded my original reply that stated ‘payment up front’. Then I got radio silence. I emailed my tech guy back three weeks later, ccing the accounting department, asking if they were still interested. I received a short reply back ‘the check is in the mail’.

Sure enough, 10 days later, I received an envelope from the Greek Consulate in New York City for the $27,000 US, but it was hand-written. Being familiar with many online scams at this point, I took the check to my bank, and asked how long it would be before I knew that the check had 100% cleared, and not bounced. I was told that it was three weeks. I emailed the Greek accounting department back, saying the projectors would take three weeks to ship, as my bank had put a hold on the check until it cleared. That check did clear, and Greece got their projectors. As I suspected, these projectors were hard to come by, and since Barco’s support for their CRT projectors had ended long ago, the few people that still had this model of projector were desperate for backup parts.

Recycling the Recycled Electronics

In 2012, things were getting a bit tight. CRTs were not in demand anymore so I started throwing a bunch of the parts and projector chassis out. British Columbia was a bit late to the recycling process, but as a result, they ended up with a pretty streamlined system, studying what other provinces and the US were doing.

It turns out that around 70 of the local bottle recycling depots around the greater Vancouver area were also accepting discarded electronics. At first it was CRT TVs and CRT computer monitors, then it expanded to computers, and small appliances. I took several trips to the recycler a couple of miles from my house and dropped off the junk parts. I noticed that people were also dropping off flat screen TVs, usually the first-generation ones, which were now very popular… and expensive. I asked to speak to the manager, and was directed to a chain-smoking manager/owner named Karim. I explained that I was interested in paying cash for any broken flat screen TV that didn’t have a smashed screen. He smiled, shook his head and said “No, people have already asked. I’d lose my franchise of the recycling depot if I got caught selling stuff out the back door.” I asked him a bit about the recycling process and he explained that there was a large smelter in the interior of BC where things were stripped down and the various metals were separated. Unlike some states in the US that sent large cargo ships full of recyclables to China, where who knows what protocols were followed to get the precious metals off the circuit boards, BC did it all in house.

Realizing that I was getting nowhere with him, I thanked him and started walking out the loading bay doors. Just as I was walking out, a woman was backing up her SUV with a large CRT TV in the back. She opened her back hatch just as I was walking by, and since CRT TVs were heavy, I decided to be nice, and I picked up the TV for her, walked it into the loading bay, and put it on a cart for Karim to deal with.

There was a yellow line across the asphalt where the asphalt ended, and the concrete of the building started. Karim looks at me and says “You know, if you dropped that TV on the outside of the yellow line, then technically it wouldn’t be considered part of our recycling inventory, and you could have taken it away at no charge.” I saw my in with Karim. I looked him straight in the face and said “I’ll tell you what. I live 3 minutes away. If you see a flat screen TV come in, have the customer drop it outside of the yellow line, and call me. I’ll be there in 5 minutes, and I’ll give you $50 for it.” Karim smiled and said “Give me your card.”

Over the next 8 years or so, I gave Karim thousands of dollars in cash, and I carted away truckloads of gear.  As the price of flat screens came down, I’d have to adjust the pricing of what I gave Karim, but we both ended up happy. The recycling depot expanded, so I could come in the back door un-noticed, and Karim told me which staff to trust, and which ones not to.  As the select staff got to know what I was looking for, they’d stockpile it for me, I’d walk in with a fist full of $20 bills, would hand them to Karim, and fill my Rav4 with loot. I sold all of it on Craigslist and eBay once I had fixed them up. At one point I expanded my takings to laptop computers as well and sold them starting at $10 on eBay with no reserve pricing and with only minimal assurance of a working laptop:  i.e., it turns on, screen looks good. Some only went for $10, but I got a couple of later models that went for over $100: not bad for 10 minutes’ worth of work, plus the 3 minutes to list them.

Between the TVs that I got from the TV shop in the 80s to what people threw out at the recyclers, the amount of valuable stuff that needed minimal work to get going was astounding.
Sadly, Karim sold the recycling depot around 2019 and told me not to try and approach the new owner: “He’s an asshole.” While it was tempting to go back a few months later to see if his comment held water, I realized I was too busy installing sound systems to worry about repairing more recycled gear with Sound Solutions. It was a good money maker though while it lasted.

We landed another large sound system installation in 2012, but under the strangest of happenstances. That was the Coquitlam Centre shopping mall. They had been our clients since around 2000 or so, how they got a hold of us is anyone’s guess, but we maintained their outdated sound system for a couple of years before we got the go-ahead to upgrade the amplifier rack that dated literally from the late 1970s. We put in a couple of Bose amplifiers, and told Coquitlam Centre that really they needed a full speaker replacement, as only around 20% were working.

As is typical for shopping malls like this one that was built in the 1970s, stores will renovate, or close, and another one takes its place. If a mall sound system wire is cut during the renovations, it’s largely ignored, since the background music of the mall isn’t considered important, and the mall manager probably won’t even notice that a speaker has stopped working. Also, if the mall has a leak in the roof, drywall and speakers are taken down, wiring is cut, and no one thinks to install a new speaker. Since the shopping mall speakers are daisy chained, much like the string Christmas lights, when the wiring to one is disconnected, the ones down the line also end up going dead.

Some time in 2009 we were approached by mall management to give a quote to upgrade all of the speakers in the mall. It was a significant undertaking, as we had to do the work at night, there were back corridor speakers to install, and about 120 speakers throughout the mall. Luckily, the maintenance staff knew the building inside and out, and we were able to find all sorts of access hatches that got us above the ceiling to run wiring and to install new speakers. We quoted a speaker quality significantly better than the regular tinny speakers used in malls, and we suggested to put in three ambient noise sensing mics, so that it would sense a crowd of people in the mall during busy times, and gradually ramp up the music and paging levels so that they could be heard.  In areas like the food court, the ambient noise can fluctuate greatly during lunch and dinner times, so this was a good option.  The Peavey system also claimed that it could sense how many speakers were connected to each amplifier, and if a contractor would cut a speaker wire, we could get it to send a text message to the mall manager, stating there was a change in the load, indicating that possibly a speaker line was cut, and in what area of the mall it was.

Exciting stuff, and we quoted a state of the art (at the time) Peavey Mediamatrix system, complete with a touch screen at the sound rack.  I couldn’t wait to do the install. The total came to around $130,000, and we figured it would take 6 months to do. We supplied the quote, and like a good salesman, I followed up 3 months later to see where we stood. I got the ‘we don’t have the budget this year, try us next year’. So, I waited. I followed up in 2010 and 2011, and nothing doing, the budget wasn’t there.

In October of 2012, I got a call from the mall manager: “Curt, if I cut you a PO, can you get the system installed by the end of the year?”

Well no, that we couldn’t do, there’s no way I had the crew to do the job that quickly.  So he asked “Can you get all of the equipment on site by Dec 31, 2012, and then do the install in 2013?” Well…that was probably do-able!

I contacted all of the suppliers and got confirmation that we could indeed get all of the equipment to site by Dec 31, and we made plans to start the installation in January of 2013. Sure enough, I got the PO within a day. We went to the mall as equipment arrived to make sure nothing was damaged, so I asked Ken the mall manager why all of a sudden it was a rush to get a new system in, when the order had lingered for 3 years. He replied with the following:

One of the anchor stores was called Zellers. Zellers was the Canadian version of Kmart, offering discount products at many locations across Canada. Eventually Kmart went into receivership, and the Target store chain bought out a bunch of their Canadian locations, and Target moved into Canada. As the Zellers was being gutted, a dump truck backed into the main gas line into Coquitlam Centre, triggering a mall evacuation, and very few people heard the emergency page, due to almost none of the speakers working. This bit of news made its way to head office in Toronto that deemed ‘GET A HOLD OF THE SOUND GUYS.. NOW!!!’

So, many thanks to that dump truck driver. Come forward, and I’ll buy you a beer.

Target eventually went bust in Canada, and that store is now a Walmart.

The installation went relatively smoothly, and the ambient noise sensing mics worked great. If you stood about 50 feet in front of the main entrance to London Drugs, there was a sensing mic in the ceiling, and if you loudly clapped your hands for about 20 seconds under it, the music level would ramp up. When we were testing the system over the course of a week, there was more than one after-hours staff meeting in one of the stores, and all of them looked out their closed window at the idiot (me), standing outside of their store,  looking up, slowly clapping his hands for 30 seconds. I did show one security guard why I was standing there clapping, and he thought it was the coolest thing.

We never could get the speaker load sensing part of the system working. We did get it to text my phone, but it either missed a change in the load (us manually disconnecting one speaker bank), or it would page every 5 minutes saying there was a fault. No one, even Peavey, could tell us how to fix the problem. I was disappointed, but the mall management didn’t care.

After 11 years, the Peavey system finally died, and then we got more work, upgrading it to a QSC Core 110f.

Around 2013, I received a bit of a reprieve from the certain death of CRT projectors. Sales were very slow at this point, and things were a bit tight financially; however, I wasn’t quite ready yet to get back into sound installations. What happened was that the super high-resolution video signal of 4K was introduced. I had seen demos at the CEDIA show in Denver when I started my long road trip the year before, and the demos were spectacular. Of course, the first digital video projectors were expensive, around $25,000 US or so. No CRT projector could do the 4K image though, so the multi-millionaires who had purchased the expensive top-of-the-line CRT projectors 10 years earlier now had the itch to upgrade to 4K. The first call came from a fellow in Seattle who had purchased two top-of-the line Sony G90 projectors. These projectors were all the rage between 1998 and 2004 at which point they were discontinued. Rumor had it that Sony had made fewer than 2000 of them worldwide, and even in 2013, new old stock ones were selling (slowly, mind you!) at $17,000 US. At the peak of the CRT business, a good used G90 would sell for $10,000 US. The fellow in Seattle had just purchased the first generation 4K Sony projector and wanted to dump the Sony G90 projectors for $500 each.

I was back to scraping by but wanted to take the risk at $500. I told him I’d have to make two trips, as only one projector would fit into my Rav 4 at a time. I expected to sell the first one quickly, then I’d have another $500 available for the second one.  He agreed (although I didn’t tell him I was tight on cash!) I picked up the first one, ran it for a couple of days in the shop, changed the memory battery that was known to fail, and sold it instantly on my website for $3,500 US. I then grabbed the second one and sold it as well.

In 2013 I ended up buying and selling 19 Sony G90s, and the following year, I sold 22. I did know for certain, though, that CRT was at end of life, and my 14-year cash cow was quickly coming to an end. I slowly had been throwing out older projector parts over the years, first the mid-1980s models that were becoming unreliable, and by the time I hit 2014, I really only had parts for the latest models. I was surprised how popular the old original Zenith was (through about 5 model changes) and how many were sold, as I still get an inquiry for parts for them about once a year, to this day.

Getting Back into Sound

By late 2012, I knew I had to get back into sound, so I started analyzing what exactly I wanted to do. I knew I didn’t want to do pubs, clubs, or restaurants, as many of the large chains were dealing with sound companies that had distributors and installers across Canada or North America. We couldn’t compete with them. As I was thinking about what to do, I got a call from a recreation centre, about three miles from my house, asking if I could come and quote them a new sound system for their conference/activity rooms. Why they got ahold of me is a mystery to this day, as they had never been a customer in the past. I flew to their location to take a peek. They had an old West Coast Sound system from the 1990s, and it was slowly falling apart. I put a proposal together, then realized I had a problem. I hadn’t used any of my sound company accounts in a decade, and while my account may still have existed at a number of suppliers, the staff had changed, and no one really knew who I was. All they knew was that I hadn’t purchased anything in ages.

I managed to land the contract for the conference room and managed to get a 50% deposit out of the facility. I did the installation myself, they were happy, and I got paid. I had a bit of money in the bank. Next up was the pool literally three blocks from my house, also in Langley.  This install was a bit more elaborate, and I called Rob and Rich to assist with the sound system. Pool sound systems are subject to a lot of chlorine exposure, and thus the equipment longevity is far less than at other facilities, as the chlorine slowly eats away circuit boards and components. This pool was no exception, and the wiring in the back of the rack was a nightmare.

I quoted weather resistant speakers along with a programmable computer system that needed some programming for it to function, and I designed the system so that various speakers in the deep and shallow end could be selected at the push of a button. I spent two days in agony trying to learn the computer programming. Fortunately, the customer service at the computer audio company was stellar and walked me through it. At the end of the second day, I got the hang of it and wondered why I was such an idiot the day before.

I realized after I landed the $27,000 pool contract, that I’d never actually seen the woman in charge in person. I’d emailed her the quote, she called me a couple of times, and then I was awarded the purchase order via email. My how things had changed in the 10 years I’d been out of the sound industry.

It took us about a week to do the sound installation. On the last day as we were fine tuning it she came up to me and said “This is by far the best pool sound system I’ve ever heard, and I’ve been to a lot of pools. Can you come up to Walnut Grove and quote a system for us there?” I was on a roll!

A few days later, I went to Walnut Grove. They also had an archaic sound system that had been affected by the chlorine, and the system sounded awful. The entire pool sounded like the teacher out of the Charlie Brown cartoons: you couldn’t understand paging or what music was being played. I was told that the whole job would have to go out for tender the following year, but they were very impressed by what they heard at the pool that we had just completed.

I decided that pools, rec centres and arenas were exactly what I wanted to do, and the opportunity presented itself at the perfect time. Now, a large portion of these facilities were installed and maintained by Greg at West Coast Sound. Before West Coast became this massive sound company that did the airport and similar large-scale installations, Greg had traveled around BC for years, taking care of all the remote towns and small cities that the large companies didn’t want to drive or fly to. By 2014, West Coast Sound was back down to Greg as the single owner. His ex-partners had moved on. Shawn now worked for PJS, a massive audio/video/data company, and Loooooorrrnnne had gotten out of the business, moved to Toronto, and was dealing with custom concrete countertops.

There were two local trade shows that took place every year, catering to the recreation facilities, managers, and staff. One was called the Recreational Facility Association of BC (RFABC) and the British Columbia Recreation and Parks Association (BCRPA). Both were tiny trade shows as compared to others. The RFABC trade shows usually attracted 80 to 100 delegates, and the BCRPA had around 300-350 attendees. As a result, though, the cost to acquire a 10’ x 10’ trade show booth was well under $1,000 CDN, a price that greatly appealed to me. These shows were generally held every May or June of each year.

The RFABC also mailed out a trade magazine to all of their members every quarter, and in every issue, West Coast Sound had a full-page ad running, listing all of their recent installations and names of the managers of those facilities. I signed up to receive the magazine and became a member of the RFABC. I signed up in the fall of 2012, so I received a couple of issues before the trade show in 2013, and every time I got a magazine, I’d see Greg’s ad and realize it would be a tough fight to take business away from Greg. Still, I now had a couple of installations under my belt, and I enjoyed the work. The money wasn’t bad either, compared to the restaurants we used to install.

I received my winter edition of the RFABC magazine as usual in late 2013 and skimmed through it.  I realized that I hadn’t seen the West Coast Sound ad staring me in the face as it usually did. I scanned the magazine again, and there was no ad. Curious, I called the editor of the magazine, and was told “Yes, it’s really weird, after 30+ years, Greg cancelled his membership to the RFABC and isn’t running ads.”

Naturally I seized the opportunity and told the editor to save the back page for me, that I’d be running a full-page ad in every magazine starting in the spring of 2014. Ads were around $700 for a full page, which I could afford.

Now, while writing this, I haven’t added anything from my personal life regarding relationships. There’s a number of reasons for this, but let’s just say if I outlined my personal conquests, it would take two full volumes, and the re-creation of many of these happenings would be best sellers on OnlyFans. Therefore, I am choosing to leave them out, with the exception of two women.

I met Barb online in 2014. We started dating shortly thereafter. I mention her as she told me that she worked in ‘communications’ for various cities around the Vancouver area. That meant nothing to me – she had to explain. She told me that she worked behind the scenes, and wrote press releases regarding events, and even for crisis management. I assumed she was a spokesperson for these cities, but she told me that no, she never wanted to be in front of the cameras but that she would write what the spokespeople would say to the news. I asked her to come along to the upcoming RFABC trade show, as having a pretty woman handing out the Sound Solutions brochures to predominantly male attendees would probably bring traffic to the booth.

Barb agreed but also said that I needed to clean up my presentation to potential clients. She had me get golf shirts with the Sound Solutions logo on them. She also said we needed some swag to give away at the trade show, so people would remember us. I was all in, but what to give away? Cigarette lighters went by the wayside long ago, and everyone was giving out pens and chocolate and tote bags with the company name on it. I thought the tote bags were a good idea, so we ordered 200 of them. They were dirt cheap, about $1.00 each. What to put in them though? I came up with the idea of coffee mugs, as every government worker would head right to the coffee maker as soon as they got to the office each morning. My stipulation was that they had to be large coffee mugs, 16 oz or bigger. My personal pet peeve were small 8 oz coffee mugs, as you were running to the coffee machine every 5 minutes as a result. Barb designed the mugs with our website and the logo on them, and I had a bunch printed up.

Barb was also very skilled at web site design. She took one look at the website that a friend had put together. She liked the basic idea, but she wanted to tweak it to look more professional. I had a few ideas for the website as well, so she got to work.

The trade show came around, and she worked her magic. Since there were only about 90 delegates, we’d taken just over 100 mugs and bags. Each bag had a coffee mug in it, and some brochures that Barb also made up, touting our installations, and some ‘show specials’ that we’d reduced the price of for 30 days after the trade show. I had purchased a trade show booth from one of the CRT projector suppliers down in Oregon, and I dragged the whole thing back up with me in my trusty Rav4. We made up signage, and all of a sudden, Sound Solutions had a professional presence. (If my clients only knew the crooked path I’d taken to get to that point). It also thrilled me to see nothing but red Sound Solutions bags containing my coffee mugs being carried by people up and down the trade show aisles.

At around the midpoint of the show, I had a potential client come up to me, asking what we knew about sound systems in gymnasiums. I told him I knew quite a bit, and he literally said “You have to help us; we’re screwed.” He was from Williams Lake, about 7 hours north of Vancouver. I smelled a road trip, and some potential business. He also told me that he used to use West Coast Sound for servicing for years, but in the last few months, Greg wasn’t returning phone calls. I told him I’d drive up to see him a week or two after the trade show.

True to my word, I drove to Williams Lake, coffee mugs and tote bags in my hand, and made a point of stopping at several arenas along the way. Everyone loved the fact that I’d dropped in out of the blue to check out what kind of sound system their arena or pool had, and that I dropped off a nice large coffee mug. Generally speaking, sound companies never just ‘dropped by’ the small town arenas or rec centres around BC as a ‘courtesy call’. I got really good at it within a couple of years, and gained a ton of business that way.

I learned the back story about the problematic sound and video system at the Williams Lake Community Centre. Their combination gym/theater was built as an official viewing centre for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, so that people in the North didn’t have to drive all the way to Vancouver to watch the games. Bleacher seating pulled out of the back wall when the theater/large screen projector was used to show all of the Olympic games, complete with two touch screens. They’d spent about $140,000 with PJS, the big boy installers in town. At the time, the HDMI signal standard was relatively new, and more often than not, when the Olympics went to commercial the screen would black out. Sometimes it would come back, and sometimes they’d have to reboot the projector or the cable box.  To make matters worse, the touch screens were flaky as well. One day, as the story went, one of the office staff found out how to get into the service menu of the touch screen (not an easy thing to figure out, unless you were a dealer for the manufacturer), and she found the ‘set to factory default’ button in the secret service menu. Thinking that would reset the system back to normal operation she pushed the button. Well, that wiped out all of the programming of the system, and the touch screen went back to factory default, nuking the memory.

PJS was called to site and apparently charged $5,000 to reload the programming (large companies don’t come cheap!). To add insult to injury, a few months later the same office staff member wiped the memory out a second time. Clearly, this was not a reliable, or user-friendly system. I was asked to get rid of the touch screens, to get rid of the large mixing console in the sound room that no one knew how to use, and to put in a simpler system, with easy-to-understand push buttons, and rotary volume controls that everyone could use. They also wanted to upgrade the video projector that was now sort of obsolete.

I designed a basic new system for the theater, complete with new mic jacks that were very user friendly. Our only other competitor was a guy named Ryan, based out of Vernon, BC. While the tender specifically stated no touch screens were to be installed, Ryan quoted a different brand of touch screen. His quote was thrown out, and we were awarded the job. We went up, did the installation, and demoed it to the client.

A couple of days after I left, Gary, the theater’s manager called. He wasn’t too happy. It turned out that there were a couple of glitches in the system, and he was wondering when I could come back up to look at the problems. I knew one was user error but given that we were the new kids on the block, I told him that I’d be there within 48 hours. When I got to the site he admitted that he was shocked because he figured I’d be back in the spring, six months later. I joked with him, saying that wasn’t the level of customer service we gave, but if that’s what he wanted, I’d reluctantly comply. Gary and I got along great, and the recreation center and theater became a long-time client. He also highly recommended us to a couple of managers he knew at the next trade show.

Another large installation we did was the Prospera Centre. This was an arena in Chilliwack, BC, and was a bit larger of an arena than we normally did, 5,000 seats. I was out quoting the local hospital and had arrived early. I noticed that there was this large arena across the street from the hospital that I had never been to. The doors to the arena had just opened, and I walked around the dimly lit arena, noticing in disappointment that they were using the exact speakers that I personally would have recommended. I figured that the sound system was fine, but I went to the main office anyway and asked for the manager. I was ushered into Glen, the manager’s office who said “Our sound system sucks, but we don’t have $150,000.” I looked him straight in the eye and said “I did a walk around the arena. Your speakers are the same makes and models that I would quote if we were starting from scratch. Those are fine, so take $50,000 off your $150,000. Second, I am assuming you have amplifiers that power those speakers, so assuming they all work, deduct another $40,000. I’ll have to turn on the sound system to see, but my guess is that the setup of the speakers is incorrect, or your main control system is poor, or not set up correctly. So, my guess is that for well under $50,000, we could do a significant upgrade that the staff and spectators are happy with. I’ll put my reputation on it.” I had Glen’s attention.

When I write quotes, I do so similarly to how I am writing this tome: very factual, straightforward, and I put technical terms or audio concepts into simple terms, so that the most non-technical reader of my quote can understand what we’re trying to do for them. In addition, I break the quotation down into bite-size bits, with individual pricing attached to the various sections of the quote. I explain what each upgrade will do, and how it will benefit the facility. If we’re doing a whole system upgrade, then again I will explain each part, and give options to upgrade the basic system with more options, such as subwoofers for more bass, etc.

When Glen and I went to the sound system ‘gondola’, where the broadcast booth was for their games, it was fairly apparent where the problem was. The single sound system rack was absolutely packed with amplifiers, far too many for one rack, and the wiring once I opened the back was atrocious. I checked some of the basic wiring, and the overall setup was completely wrong, resulting in what I call ‘a wall of mud’ of sound that reached the ice surface and the spectators. No wonder they weren’t happy. To top it off, the cooling fan at the top of the rack was blowing air downwards, into the rack.  Last time I checked, hot air rises, so the fan should have been sucking hot air out of the rack at the top and not blowing hot air back down into the rack.

I took some pictures and notes and told Glen I’d have a complete breakdown of his sound system problems, with solutions for each one. That quote, like many other quotes, got to be 11 pages long. By now I’d gotten used to writing long proposals, my typing wasn’t bad, and I would have long quoting sessions that would last all day. I’d then proof-read the quote on the next day but would also send it to Barb to check. I was king of the run-on sentences (and still am!) She’d roll her eyes, correcting a paragraph that was one single sentence. (“But I have a lot to say!”)

I emailed the quote over to Glen, who called me a few days later, and said “Holy shit, you weren’t kidding when you said you’d give me a detailed proposal. I know exactly what you want to do.” Glen was a life-long hockey guy. I’m sure he played in his youth, and now, nearing retirement, he was manager of the local Chilliwack hockey team. He was a no-bullshit, tell-it-like-it-is type of guy who was great to deal with. He told me point blank that they didn’t have the money at that point, but he’d be in touch. Sure enough, in the early spring of 2015, he gave us a $30,000 contract to upgrade portions of the sound system.

We added some speakers into the new restaurant that they were building, and I happened to have just gotten in on trade a good used rack the exact size of their existing one. I put a cooling fan into both racks (the correct way around) and moved half of the amplifiers over to the new rack. This cooled the racks down significantly, prolonging amplifier life.

The crown jewel, though, was the control panel that we installed in the rack, along with a new sound processor. This arena had a bunch of zones, including the lobby, the restaurant, the ice surface, the blue and red sections of the seating, etc. I mapped out where the speakers were installed throughout the arena, and had a black plastic panel made, showing each speaker location with different color LEDs, one for each zone. In a reverberant space, such as an arena, the fewer speakers that are turned on, the better, as there are less sources of echo. When a single figure skater was on the ice, with no one in the seating, the best sound would be had if only the ice surface speakers were turned on. When the arena was standing room only, then all speakers would be on, each covering a specific section.

I created a row of push buttons under the LED panel, and labeled them, so that even a newbie to the sound system room could figure out how to use it without instructions. Glen had one condition to finish the sound system: Complete it by the end of June, as the high school graduation ceremony was held at the arena, and he wanted perfect sound for it. Glen also mentioned that he was going on holiday and would be back about a week before the ceremony. We got to work, and I was almost done, doing final fine tuning of the system when Glen walked in, back from his vacation. The chairs were all being set up for the ceremony, and the entire concrete floor was covered in carpeting, which greatly helped the acoustics in the arena. I had soft music playing over the ice surface, when Glen yelled up to me “SOUNDS GREAT – BETTER THAN BEFORE!” Well, that was mainly due to the carpeting laid down on the arena floor, but hey, I’ll take the credit. I called down, and said “The real magic is here in the booth – c’mon up.”

He came into the sound booth and looked at our panel. I only had the ice surface speakers turned on, so those LEDs were on, and the rest were off. He said “Looks impressive, what does it do?” I told him to start pushing the buttons, and he’d figure it out. When I demo a system to a client, I let the client start pushing buttons, much as I did at the Bayshore hotel demo back in 2000. It was a sales trick I learned from Gordon: let the customer play with what he wants to buy, and there’s a much better chance that they’ll buy it.

Glen asked if he was going to break anything by pushing the buttons and I told him to go ahead and push them to see what happened. He started pushing the buttons to activate speaker zones, and the corresponding LEDs lit up, and he could hear the speakers around the arena start turning on. He did something that I have heard no customer do before: he started giggling.
With a big smile on his face, he turned to me and said “This is fucking amazing.” He called the icemen up to the sound room, and they started pushing buttons.

The high school graduation was a big success, but Glen asked me to attend the first hockey game of the season in September. I came back, the arena was filling up with people, and I eventually ran into Glen on the concourse. He held out his hand, shook mine, and said “I’ve been here for years, and all the regulars have come up to me and said “How much did you spend on the new sound system? It sounds amazing!”  I stayed for the game, made a few adjustments to the system, and acquired another long-term client. As a bonus, I sent a picture of the custom panel to the audio processing company who called me up a month later to interview me about the installation. As a result, we were front and centre of their website for a couple of months, and more than one friendly competitor called me to congratulate me on the install.

By the end of 2014, we were on a roll. We had product lines that we needed, lots of clients and potential clients. Since we would service any existing sound system to maintain a client until they could afford an upgrade and I’d travel all over BC since I was getting calls from any number of small towns and cities wanting me to come to site to recommend upgrades. For a number of years, I’d do the two trade shows that were two weeks apart and then do a ‘Sound Solutions Road Trip’. I put an advertisement showing the route I’d take in the bags we’d give out at the trade show, and also on the back page of the RFABC magazine. I went from Vancouver to Prince George, to Fort St John, then down through Alberta, to Cranbrook, and then back to Vancouver. I went loaded with my toolbox, about 30 mugs and bags, and literature. That was an exceptionally effective way to follow up with clients I had just met at the trade shows and usually ended up with one large install commitment before the road trip had even been completed.

Let me side-step here for a second to talk about sales reps. Not the ones that I had hired, but the distribution reps that would call on me to sell me equipment. By and large, these people are pretty darn useless and get paid a salary for doing… nothing. At least that’s my own experience.  Here are a few examples.

Now, if you haven’t already guessed, I am a bit of a shit-disturber. I don’t generally go with trends and I like to do things my own way. See the Bose story a bunch of pages back. The irony of most of the sales reps that I dealt with was that the two who called on me on a regular basis, I did little business with. Our installations were fixed, and we didn’t deal with musicians or bands, so the sales reps that sold primarily sound products that were aimed at musicians got little business from us.

Now, I don’t expect sales reps to call me every week to push new products down my throat, but I do expect them to alert me if there’s a new product line that is released, or if there’s a demo or clearance sale about to happen. I usually stocked up if I thought the equipment was needed.  By and large, nada, no information was forthcoming from the sales reps. Considering we were moving significant product by the 2010s, this was disappointing. No, we weren’t a national chain music store that placed orders in the 100s of thousands of dollars but considering that Sound Solutions was a 2-3 person team, we moved a ton of equipment and we paid our bills on time. A lot of the time I had a better relationship with the accounts receivable ladies than the sales reps, as I’d call them before the current payment was due. A couple of examples of the sales reps that (didn’t) call on me:

Lectrosonics- a digital signal processor company that I signed up with for the first few arenas. To my knowledge, no one was selling the Lectrosonics products in the Vancouver area, at least not that I had seen.  They worked well and were a good introduction for me as to what digital signal processors could do. Once I got over the learning curve of programming the damn things, I sold a bunch of them over a couple of years. Lectrosonics had one sales rep for all of Canada who worked out of the Ontario area. I believe I talked to him once as we were getting set up as dealers, then the only time I’d hear from him was via the bulk email that was sent from head office to all of his dealers.

You’d figure a sales rep would check his sales numbers, and when there’s a significant blip of sales in an area that hadn’t had any previously, he’d take notice, and worst case, send a ‘Hey, thanks for the sales’ email. Nope. Nothing.

Lectrosonics’ specialty was in very high end wireless mics for the movie and TV industry, and when it became apparent that they weren’t going to expand the digital signal processor lineup, I moved on to the far more flexible QSC brand that had touch screens and iPhone control.

Years later, after I’d dropped selling Lectrosonics, I finally got an email from the sales rep “Hey Curt, I noticed you haven’t sold anything in a while, can I help in any way?”  Of course, I couldn’t leave it alone, and fired back something like “Well, it’s high time you noticed. In the years that we were a Lectronics dealer, you never bothered to call once, so it’s been my great displeasure in not working with you.” Of course, that response then got me the sales call I had wanted since we started, and he admitted that the digital signal processor line was pretty much dead in the water.

The best sales rep would be someone who completely understands a client’s business needs on a technical level and comes up with new products before the client needs it.

Jumping ahead a bit in the timeline, we signed up with QSC.  QSC was the next level of digital signal processors and was neck-in-neck in competition with Biamp, who had a larger market share at the time. It seemed like everyone in town was a Biamp dealer, so I went with QSC, the underdog at the time. QSC was distributed in Canada by SF Marketing who was one of the largest, if not the largest, pro audio distributor for Canada. I met with Sam, who stated the expected yearly quota of $20,000 of QSC product. I smiled and said “No problem”, learning over the years to bluff as well as the next guy.

SF Marketing repped a bunch of other pro audio products including speaker lines and amplifiers. One day on Facebook, shortly after we signed up with QSC and SF Marketing, a sales rep from the US made a post in a pro audio group about a new line of speakers.  Without thinking, I commented “Well, I’d sell it if my sales rep would ever contact me.” Little did I know it was the vice president of US sales that had made the post, and of course he saw my glib comment, and the shit hit the fan. The VP of sales called me, I explained that I had little contact from the sales rep since signing up with SF, and within the hour, I got a call from Sam, who I correctly assumed had gotten reamed from his higher-ups. To his credit, he ate some crow  and we sold a bunch of the speakers as a result.

One final note about Sam and SF: One day I got a call from a young-sounding person asking what a QSC Core 110f was worth because that he’d come into a few of them. The QSC Core 110f was the digital signal processor that we were selling a ton of, and the thought of being able to buy a bunch at a discount was super appealing to me. It was apparent that the caller knew nothing about these QSC units and we spent some time on the phone talking about it. I offered him $1,000 each, and then he told me that he had a bunch of other stuff that came with them: a road case, some speakers etc. I tried prying some information out of him as to where they came from, as all I could think of was that some other contractor had gone under and these had come from their stock, but the seller wasn’t forthcoming with any information. So I decided to call Sam, as this seemed a bit fishy to me, and if they were stolen or grey marketed, I didn’t want anything to do with them. I explained to Sam what the seller had, including seven of these Core 110f units. Sam said “Oh, I know exactly where those are from. We had a QSC training seminar a year earlier, and after the seminar, the van that the equipment was stored in overnight got broken into, and all of the QSC gear was stolen.”

Well, that explained everything. Working with Sam, I decided to be a sleuth for SF and called the seller back asking to come out and see the equipment. I told Sam I’d get an address of where the seller was located etc. I went to go see the equipment and the seller was a fairly young kid with a newish wife and an infant, living in a condo in Burnaby, just outside downtown Vancouver. Indeed, it was all the gear as Sam had described, and the seller and I came to a handshake deal of $8,000 for everything. I told the seller I had to go to the bank to get cash and of course I called Sam, who in turn called the police. As it turns out, the seller was an innocent bystander to the crime. He ended up buying an abandoned storage locker at auction and paid something like $6,000 for everything in it. He willingly turned everything over to the police, and the police went to the storage locker company that had sold the locker, and ‘strongly recommended’ that they refund the young seller his money.

Sam promised me a bunch of SF swag, pro audio jackets, etc. I was happy to help, and wasn’t really expecting anything, and of course that’s exactly what happened. At retail, the equipment and time to assemble the training hardware was close to $50,000, and I didn’t even get a thank you email from someone high up at SF Marketing. I wasn’t sore about it, but it again points out that ignoring the details of small things can add up. I guess my reward was selling a ton of QSC product and making money off each installation. Sigh.

Simply because nothing is ever destined to remain the same, we noticed a significant slowdown starting late 2014. I did a record number of quotes, however, and since we were a small company, we usually were awarded 50% of what I quoted on. I waited for the purchase orders to roll in as usual. Instead… crickets. Nothing was awarded at the end of 2014.  No big deal, surely 2015 will be a banner year. Nothing.

For all of 2016, we did exactly one installation, over on Vancouver Island, and that was because the Campbell River arena literally blew up their sound system from the front to the back. Whoever did the last installation hung speakers incorrectly, but initially I was called over because 7 out of 8 amplifier channels blew, leaving the arena with almost no sound. I went over to assess things, and found all sorts of problems, such as a blown subwoofer and a defective module in their processing unit that was injecting a bunch of hiss into the system. I quoted $14,000 to repair and partially upgrade their system. Management asked if there was any way around this cost, and I said “No, compared to similar arenas, I quoted you low since we’re reusing most of your equipment.”  They relented, and we did the install.

It turns out that the BC government had put a spending freeze on upgrading or replacing sound systems, and the various managers that asked me for quotes in 2014, 2015, and 2016 didn’t know it. Thus, no work. I was still doing lots of service calls, but those barely pay the bills. The money is in doing full system upgrades and retrofits.

Towards the end of 2016, I was getting a bit desperate, as my savings were dwindling quickly. No one could tell me when the spending freeze in the arenas would end, and I wanted to work. My competitors weren’t getting work either. So when I wasn’t doing quotes that went nowhere, I was spending time in my shop, and on Facebook. I had joined many vintage audio groups, and over the course of a year or two, I noticed that there weren’t many reel-to-reel tape deck techs in these groups who knew what they were doing. There were lots of techs in the groups that could repair a blown amplifier channel, change a cartridge on a turntable, or change a belt in a cassette deck. A reel-to-reel tape deck, however, was treated like some magic voodoo was needed to repair them. As I noticed this more and more, I also noticed several well-known studio technicians, particularly Eddie in Minneapolis, and Bob in New York, who worked on super high-end expensive studio mixers and effects units, and simply didn’t have the time for consumer reel-to-reels. “Hmmm”, I thought, “Could this be an opportunity to duplicate the CRT projector model of business and put up a reel-to-reel website?”

By this time, Barb had completely revamped the Sound Solutions site, and every time we did a new installation, we’d immediately put it front and center as a feature on the website, so that other arena managers would see what we did. We also acquired the QSC line of products, which included a fancy audio control system that could be run off a computer, a touch screen, and most importantly, an iPhone, via an arena or rec centre’s Wifi system. This was cool stuff! I had met a fellow geek named Brad via the CRT website and was friends with him on Facebook. The challenge I had was that I hated programming and I was seeing him take decades-old touch screen systems and turn his newly purchased home into a smart home, all controlled via this ancient touch screen. I messaged him and asked if he wanted to learn the QSC programming, and that I thought it might also be a good fit for the church he attended. Brad lived in Pennsylvania, but the programming files and info could easily be emailed back and forth. He jumped on it and thus became my programmer… if I could get any sales, that so far were nonexistent. I had plenty of quotes out there though, using the new QSC system.

I asked Barb if she wanted to put a website together for my reel-to-reel venture, and we came up with a very reasonable price per hour for her to do so. There’s not a chance I was going to get her to do it for free (I don’t think she would have regardless of the fact that we were dating). I wanted the website to look a bit different than the Sound Solutions one.  I also needed a good name, so I came up with Reel to Reel Tech as the name for the website (reeltoreeltech.com). In September 2016, with no sign of the sound installations coming back to life, I started writing the website material. As with the CRT site, I put up a lot of basic information about reel-to-reel decks, the strengths of the various makes and models, how to clean the tape path etc.

I found there were three distinct people coming to reel-to-reel decks. You had older musicians and engineers who were still recording on tape and needed to get a machine serviced, as well as people over 50 that still had their reel-to-reel decks in a closet. Either they were pulling them back out to listen to their old tapes from 40 years ago, or their wives were doing some cleaning, came across the old tape deck in a box with a bunch of tapes, and they’d tell their husbands “You’ve had this since before we were married – get rid of it.” The husband would find me online and then sell me the deck. The third group of reel-to-reel users were usually young musicians who had only recorded into a laptop computer, also called a ‘DAW’ (digital audio workstation), and were discovering analog recording for the first time.

Once I had the website up and running and fleshed out a bit, I used every opportunity to plaster it all over the vintage audio Facebook groups. Oh, you need to know how to clean your tape deck, well here’s an article for you. You want to know the strengths and weak points of various brands of decks? Here you go. I ended up spending about an hour a day putting my various links to articles on the website on various Facebook groups, and within a couple of months, gained some recognition there as ‘there’s this tech in Vancouver that really seems to know his stuff’, and I’d get the odd email. I’d been advertising my repair and sales on Craigslist for a number of years, but that didn’t really gain a lot of traction, maybe one or two repairs a month.

I launched the website in March of 2017, and in June of 2017, two things happened simultaneously. One morning I went down to my computer, turned it on, and found 20 emails sitting in my inbox, wanting to know about reel-to-reels. Where did this come from? The next day, another 20. The following day, 25 emails. Before June of 2017, I was typically getting one email a week regarding reel-to reel tape decks.  Soon enough I found out where this flood of emails had come from: My website had hit google searches, and since there were very few websites dedicated to reel-to-reel decks, I was on page 1 of Google, right after the eBay and Reverb ads. Go figure.

At exactly the same time, the BC government released the budget for sound system upgrades to facilities (there may have been other areas affected – I have no idea), and the phone started ringing, and emails came in, asking for me to update the quotes I had sent out anywhere from 3 years to 2 months ago, so they could cut a purchase order for the work. On June 1, 2017, I had no sound system contracts on the go. By June 30, I had $250,000 worth of purchase orders in the door. I called Rich, who was now an independent contractor, told him that we would be really busy for the rest of the year, and to free up his schedule. He was on board.

Luckily, with the latest revving up of Sound Solutions, I made sure I paid all my bills on time. With low overhead, working from home, and me only having to pay installers when they did a job (and most were agreed upon flat rates that we all negotiated ahead of time), we were finally in the black, and paying on time wasn’t an issue. Heck, a number of times I paid in less than 30 days, taking advantage of some 2% quick pay discounts.

For the next few years, we were all over BC doing installations. From Kitimat to Ucluelet, to Fort St John, and Creston, we did installs all over the place. It was a bit of a juggling act, balancing sound installs with the reel-to-reel work that was still coming in strong, and the website was also gaining traction.

Rich and I had a system worked out where I would design the system and go over it with Rich ahead of time. With most locations, I’d take a drive to site, in or out of town, take a bunch of pictures of where speakers had to be hung, how the building was constructed, and where the amplifier rack would go. I detailed everything with notes and also sent the customer a list of requirements we needed, such as electrical power and conduits, work that Sound Solutions was not capable of doing.  I would then ship the large and heavy equipment to site and build up the racks and the QSC system in my shop at home with the programming that Brad in Pennsylvania wrote, and test everything for 48 hours. Then I’d ship the rack out, or if it was small enough, Rich would take it up in his truck. He’d do the installation by himself, accompanied on occasion by his son Joel, who assisted in running wires and terminating cables. Once Rich was 2 days away from completing the job, he’d call me, and I’d make my way to site. We’d spend the next day walking through the entire installation, testing each room and zone, setting levels etc. Then Rich would leave, and I’d do the system demonstration to the clients, and made sure that everyone knew how to use it. Brad’s programming was very intuitive, and usually I’d just sit the arena manager in front of the touch screen and let them play with it. Usually I’d get the “That’s it – it’s that easy!”’ statement, indicating a job well done.

Rich was a killer installer. He wasn’t the fastest, but any time he hung a speaker, I knew there was zero risk in it ever falling. The speakers we pulled out, however, I can’t say the same for. Lots of the work was downright dangerous and didn’t meet any safety standards. Rumor had it that one of these speakers actually fell down in an arena, about six feet behind the iceman, but it was covered up, and work by the competition continued. From what we were pulling out, I’m surprised there weren’t more disasters…or injuries.

Not all quotes or installs went smoothly. One case in point was the Fort St John pool. During my road trips after the trade shows, I’d stopped in a couple of times to the pool. It was another West Coast Sound system that was nearing the end of life.  They told me that the sound system would go out for tender soon, and could I please submit a quotation. They were on a fairly tight budget, and I quoted a system suitable for a pool, with weatherproof speakers. Rather than quoting the expensive QSC digital control system, I decided to go with a simple panel, so they could turn the speakers on and off based on if they wanted background music everywhere, or to only have sound in the shallow end for aquacise classes. This was a pretty standard configuration for all pools.

When I do quotes, I give a system price, and do not break down individual product pricing. I do however list each item that we will supply, such as:

• Rolls preamplifier
• QSC power amplifier
• Custom built speaker switching panel.

I then write the quotation description that matches the list of items supplied, so that an end user can understand what they are getting, and what the system will do.

I submitted my bid before the tender went out. The manager then told me that the system would go out for tender, and I’d have to resubmit my quotation in accordance with the tender rules and regulations. I was used to this, so this was nothing new.

A couple of weeks later when I got the tender, I saw that the city had literally cut and pasted my entire list of items to be installed onto the tender form, right down to the ‘custom built speaker switching panel’. I was pissed, but submitted my quote regardless, hoping that they’d award the job to us, since the year previous, I’d assisted them over the phone to get one of their speaker zones working when their existing mixer broke down.

To my dismay, a company out of Calgary was awarded the job. When I called the pool, the manager said “Sorry, your price was really close: you were only $600 high compared to the Calgary quote.” I calculated the difference in distance of driving time between Vancouver to Fort St John versus Calgary, and Calgary was a few hours closer, which made up the difference in the quote…

Fortunately, thanks to Barb, every one of my quotation forms had a lengthy legalese disclaimer and set of rules at the end of the quote. One of the points listed was that the quotation was the intellectual property of Sound Solutions and was not to be shared with other sound companies or used in a public tender without express written consent from Sound Solutions. Did I have any recourse here?

I had started a Facebook group for Audio and Video Sound Contractors and Owners that had about 6,000 members in it. It was a great place to get information about running a business, and to share ideas, so I posted a thumbnail sketch of the scenario which I’d never run across before. I had varying responses, from “Bill them $5,000 as a design fee”, to “You’re screwed – you can’t do anything about it.”

I decided to send them a bill for $750 as a design fee along with a strong letter highlighting the notes at the end of the original quotation. I sent the invoice and the cover letter to the pool manager, to the finance department, and to the mayor. Maybe I’d get blacklisted by the city, maybe not. By billing $750, I made up the difference of the $600 price difference of the winning company’s bid, plus a $150 ‘eff you’ addition. Three weeks later I got an email from the pool manager, apologizing for using our quotation, and they indicated that the check was in the mail. Sure enough, I received the check a week later, and yes, it did clear. I felt good about the competitor getting the installation.

From 2017 to 2020, Rich and I worked our tails off. We landed all sorts of arenas, pools and rec centres. We also got the contract to install the sound systems at four hospitals: Langley (literally across the street from my house), Peace Arch, Eagle Ridge, and Royal Columbian. All of a sudden we had to work night shifts; however, we were only doing one hospital at a time. Rich and his son Joel worked on all of the hospitals, and we were busy for months. Each hospital needed about 300 speakers each, and our suppliers loved us.

We generally didn’t have many problems on the jobsites. Rich and I each had our roles down pat and did lots of prep work before we went to site. The one exception was the pool in Grand Forks, BC. We had installed a new QSC sound system with a touch screen and iPhone control to replace a woefully inadequate sound system, where two tiny Bose speakers tried to cover the entire pool area which failed miserably. It took a good two years to be awarded the contract, but in the end, we got the job. The sound system sounded and worked great, and the manager and staff loved it. About two weeks after we finished, I got a call saying that the touch screen wasn’t showing anything but a blank screen. This indicated that the touch screen was no longer communicating with the main digital processor in the sound rack. I had the manager reboot the system, and sure enough, the touch screen came back to life. Two more weeks, and the same thing happened. I made the 5-hour drive to Grand Forks, and swapped out the main processor unit, since obviously something was glitching. No problem: that’s what customer service is for.

Two weeks later, the touch screen failed again and needed a reboot. Another drive to Grand Forks, and I changed the touch screen, and the network switch. Two weeks later, and it died again. WTF? Every time you rebooted the system, it would work fine. Finally, after the 4^th trip to site, Marg the manager pointed out that the problem only occurred overnight. They’d use the system until the pool closed, then they’d come in the next morning to a blank screen. Instantly I guessed what the problem was. The power in Grand Forks was somewhat unstable and would suffer from ‘brownouts’ which is exactly the opposite of a power surge. During the night, the power would sag, the lights would dim with no one in the building…and lock up the digital processor. I took one last trip to Grand Forks, with a UPS, that would ensure stable power even if the incoming power surged or sagged a bit.

During that last trip, the Grand Forks pool would permanently be ingrained in my brain.  I was up on a 6’ ladder looking at the computer network switch that was mounted on a 2 x 4 above the T Bar ceiling in the lobby (small town IT guys can have iffy installation standards). As I was looking at the modem, I thought “Gee, I haven’t smelled that smell since I was a little kid.” I have no idea what exactly the smell was, but that’s what I was thinking. I took one step down the ladder after putting the T Bar ceiling tile back…and the next thing I know I have a splitting headache and am lying on the floor. I’d blacked out coming down the ladder. I hit the tile floor with the back of my head, and now I had cracked my skull open, and had a bad concussion. I’d booked an Airbnb for the night, brushed off any assistance from the remaining staff at the pool, and walked to my car, and went to the Airbnb. Apparently, I was coherent enough to swipe my Visa, and all I could think was that I wanted to sleep off my headache. Of course, with a concussion, that’s the absolute worst thing to do. That’s OK: ‘Curt strong like bull, smart like stick.’ I fell asleep.

The next morning, I woke up remembering my fall the night before and slowly opened my eyes. I felt OK, no dizziness. Then I sat up, and I had massive vertigo. I looked at the nice pillow on the bed and realized that there were blood drops all over it. Like a good Airbnb guest, I did the obvious, turned the pillow over, and left. I had to drive home the 5 hours to get back to Vancouver – in my concussed mind, I had no choice. I could rest when I got back to Vancouver. Luckily, I was driving my newish Mazda 3 that was low to the ground. All I could remember thinking was “It’s a good thing I didn’t have the Rav4, or the back-and-forth motion of sitting a lot higher would have made the drive unbearable.”

I got home at about noon, rested for an hour, and finally decided it would be a good idea to go to the emergency room, and the hospital was literally across the street from my house. All Vancouver (and probably Canada’s) emergency rooms have waits that are hours long, and I knew I’d get nothing accomplished for the rest of the day. At around 5 PM, a late 20s-something woman with a very low-cut top sat down right across from me, and she proceeded to lean down and poke around in her purse a number of times. Being the dirty old man I was, I figured I’d have a bit of a show even if I had a massive concussion. At around 6 PM, I was finally ushered into the back examining area and was told to sit down and wait again. Sure enough, the same woman came in around the same time and dug around in her bag again. I was amused.

Around 7 PM, someone high on some serious drugs came into the back examining area. The person was high as a kite, screaming and shouting, and all of us were abandoned, with all hands on deck to attend to the meth head. Typical.

Finally, I was examined, told that I did indeed have a bad concussion, and that I was to be called back in to get an MRI taken. I was told I’d be called over the weekend. No such call came. By Sunday I was feeling pretty good and was more-or-less back to work. Finally, 10 days later, I walked over to the hospital to see whatever happened to my MRI. Langley hospital had no record of it being ordered. This was May of 2018. I finally got the MRI in February of 2019, at which time I was told that everything looked fine.

I ended up with one lasting effect from the fall: to this day, if I am looking straight ahead, and look straight up, I get instant vertigo, until my head gets level again. I’m fine if my head moves slowly, but the sudden movement triggers that vertigo. To date, I don’t know what caused that blackout.

Sometime around 2017, I received a spam email advertising reel-to-reel tape deck reels and fancy NAB adapters which were used to hold the 10” reels to the tape decks. I saw the email by chance, as with several email addresses that I use, I got lots of spam every day. I hovered over the email, and was about to delete it when I decided to reply to it, to see if the sender was legit (AI wasn’t around yet in 2017).  I emailed back, asking for some samples, and to my surprise, I received an email back within 24 hours, in decently written English from ‘Stephen’.  He asked me what I was looking for, and I told him I’d like to see a 10” reel, a 7” one, and an NAB adapter. Stephen complied, and sure enough, about 10 days later, I received a box in the mail containing a plastic takeup reel, a 10” reel, but with only one metal flange side attached, and a single NAB adapter. I took them into the shop and played around with them. All seemed to be solidly made, and with the pricing quoted, I could make good money off these, all depending on the cost of shipping from overseas. Of course, Stephen was smart, and by sending only one NAB adapter and one metal flange, I couldn’t go and resell these samples, as they were incomplete.

I realized that I was wiring money to an unknown entity (they didn’t take PayPal or a credit card so the only option was a bank transfer), and once the money was sent, it was non-recoverable. I decided to place a minimal order, but that was still in excess of $2,000 US. Still, the payoff could be large if it was all legit.

Sure enough, about a month later, a few boxes showed up, and I’ll be damned, I got everything that I ordered. I put everything up on eBay after I calculated my costs, and while I wasn’t going to be able to pay my mortgage off the sales of these reel-to-reel accessories, it was a good way to get in a bit of extra income. Immediately I placed another $5,000 order to get the reels in all available colors and styles that the supplier had.

Sales were brisk for about 18 months; however, I soon found that the manufacturers were selling on eBay as well from overseas, and while I was one of only a couple of dealers in all of Canada, Stephen’s counterpart set up a ton of dealers in the US as well. Soon, the pricing had to come down, and now the profit was minimal; however, it was necessary to flesh out the sale of a reel-to-reel tape deck with fancy looking reels and the various accessories that the buyers wanted.

Early on, there was a problem with color consistency of the blue reels, and Stephen supplied replacements at no charge, although I had to pay for shipping. Still, I was able to sell the flawed reels at a discount, which more than covered the shipping costs. Each year the accessory product line expanded, but with the added competition online, I now stock fewer reels and other accessories than I used to, just because I am not selling them in the quantities I did back in 2017 to 2019.

By 2018, we were swamped, and Rich and I both made good money. The company was super stable financially, and on top of it, I got even more recognition as a good tape deck tech and was receiving regular repairs from all over Canada and the US. I started a Reel-to-Reel Tech Facebook page as well, and the amount of people that joined steadily grew. I’d post about troubleshooting and weird problems that I’d found in the course of repairing these vintage decks, and while I didn’t give people the exact information usually about what the faulty part was, the description alone was enough to keep people interested, especially those that weren’t techs. I worked out a deal with Canada customs so that I could bring decks to Vancouver for repairs and then take them back down to the US and only paying minimal taxes on them. This was all approved by the customs supervisors on both sides of the border, as I wanted to keep my nose clean. After all, business would tank if I ever got banned from the US for any length of time. Between the sound installs and the reel-to-reel decks I was working 90 to 100 hours a week. This wasn’t unusual, but it got extra intense during those years.

In 2019, I tried hiring a new sales guy. His name was Bruce and he was a bit older than I was. He seemed like a nice guy, and we had a couple of meetings over dinner to discuss what he could do for Sound Solutions. He had some technical experience and had done some installations, so he seemed to be a good fit. I should have known better when I asked what his typing skills were like, and he said ‘fair’.

Bruce was one of those guys who couldn’t quote a single pair of speakers without screwing something up. His typing skills were nonexistent, something that I don’t understand with the world revolving around the internet. I had to correct all of his quotes, at least for formatting so that it looked like something more than what a 4-year-old would type, but there were tons of mistakes within the quotes as well. His favorite thing to do was to use the US dollar cost for an item and then mark it up. Considering the USD was worth around 40% more than the Canadian dollar, his retail pricing ended up being our Canadian dealer cost. Luckily, he didn’t send any quotes out, and his line when I called him out on his mistakes was “Sorry about that.” He’d then proceed to do it again. He was of help manning the trade shows, but that was about it. He did pick up a few sales, but with the time I spent correcting his quotes, I would have been faster doing them myself.

Luckily, when Covid hit, it was the perfect excuse to lay him off, as the Canadian government gave both employers and employees an ‘out’ due to slowing business.

There was a funny post-script to Bruce. I started getting phone calls at Sound Solutions to supply window intercoms so that people could talk through the newly installed glass and plexiglass barriers installed between a cashier/customer service person and the general public. I went to my overseas supplier that I was already buying tape reels and accessories from and asked if he could source the window intercoms as well. There was also a company called Haven, in California, that made US built intercom systems, but they were significantly pricier. I did see that there were much cheaper offshore intercoms being sold on Amazon and other websites, so I knew that cheaper options were out there. My customer service rep sourced some units and they were indeed dirt cheap, around $19 US per system, plus air shipping, putting them at around $30 US landed cost in Vancouver.  I ordered 50 of them to start and put them up on the front page of the website. I started getting orders.

Bruce called me after I got my first shipment of intercoms in, and told me all about his grandiose plan of selling window intercoms to banks and hospitals, and that he’d already put a website up to sell them. I bit my tongue and didn’t tell him that I already had my stock in and was selling them fast and furious. Bruce came up with some fantastical numbers about how many he would sell within the year, netting him a small fortune. I said nothing.

Now, Bruce didn’t have a lot of money saved up. He’d had a divorce in his past but was doing OK. He ended up trying to work with some Canadian distributor but ultimately decided to buy the intercoms directly from overseas. I didn’t know his source, whether it was Wish, Temu, or directly from some manufacturer. I, on the other hand, worked with my amazing customer service rep, who knew all the ins and outs of Asian companies that cranked out cheap electronics. As he explained to me, many vendors on Alibaba and Wish didn’t actually have product on hand. Some would order the items in as they received orders, and delivery times were thus lengthy, and some of the products simply didn’t work. Since they were located in Asia, no buyer of such a cheap item in North America would spend the postage to return the item, as it was usually more than what the item was worth. My sales rep also told me that there were relatively few companies making these window intercoms, but the ones that did made them in massive quantities. During the quality control (QC) tests, many intercoms would fail, and those would be farmed out to these Temu/Wish and Alibaba sellers, and only the working ones would be sold at a somewhat higher price than the defective ones.

When I got my first 50 in, I tested 10 of them, and they worked flawlessly. They were cheap, they probably wouldn’t last more than two years, but we were all hoping that Covid would be over in a few months. I sent out mailers, advertising them for $249 CDN. The install was easy, would take all of five minutes, and was do-it-yourself. After I tested 10 of them, I decided to start selling them without testing them, to see if any would actually be returned. I made sure I always had lots of stock just in case I ended up with a bad batch.

Bruce, on the other hand, blew his $5,000 life savings on window intercoms from some supplier in China that he wouldn’t disclose. He also offered installation services, and assigned regional sales reps, all designed to make him rich…and maybe famous. Bruce called me up about a month later, since he finally saw that the window intercoms which he was selling were front and centre of my website. He accused me of stealing his idea, and I told him that I’d been selling them already right from the first phone call he made to me outlining his complete business plan. He wasn’t happy, but I’m pretty sure he believed me. I really didn’t care one way or the other.

A few weeks later, after I’d already placed my third order with my supplier, Bruce called me, freaking out. Virtually all of his intercoms were defective, and rather than spending about 10 minutes per intercom at a bank installing the intercom system at a teller window, since the installation requirements were minimal, he and another installer spent about four hours opening countless boxes of his intercoms, trying to match up units that would work. More curious than trying to help my ‘competitor’, I told him to bring a few over. Maybe it was a simple problem. As it turns out, from the outside, the intercoms that Bruce was selling looked identical to the ones I had on my website and had zero problems with. We opened the intercoms, both mine and his, and saw only minute differences in construction. For all intents and purposes, they were the same and likely came from the same factory. (Or, perhaps the company he was buying from was cloning…not successfully…the units from the company I was getting them from?)

Long story short, there was no simple fix for Bruce’s intercoms: they all had serious manufacturing problems. At that point, I offered to bring in window intercoms for him, marking them up a small amount so that Sound Solutions would make a profit, and he’d get some installs. I knew he’d blown his life savings on his defective intercoms, so I looked him straight in the eye, and asked “Are you sure you want me to order these 50 intercoms for you?” He said “Yes, I really need them.” About three weeks later, I called Bruce to come by, and he looked me straight in the eye and said “Oh, I never told you to order them. I found another source that’s cheaper.” I really don’t lose my cool often, but in this case, I gave Bruce a piece of my mind. I called him every name in the book, told him to get the fuck out of my shop, and to never call me again. I really wasn’t that mad because I knew I’d sell his abandoned order in no time, but it was just the principle of it all that pissed me off. I never talked to Bruce again.  Within the year, his website was gone, and his untold riches never came true.

We ended up selling those little window intercoms all over BC: we sold well over 250 of them and I had exactly two come back under warranty, both with broken power switches. Technically they don’t qualify for warranty replacement, since it was physical damage, but I was making so much money off each unit that I sent out replacements for free. We had great customers like BC Ferries and many hospitals around the province that all ordered multiples for each location.
We also became a large dealer for the $1,000+ Haven intercom systems. Places like the RCMP and city halls didn’t want the cheap units: they were willing to spend the big dollars for intercom systems that were bulletproof. That’s not an exaggeration: Haven did make a bulletproof version to be used in prisons. I got along great with their sales rep, and we became the largest Haven dealers in Canada. Every sales inquiry from Canada to Haven’s office in California was referred to us. It was great product.

2020 – The Year of Covid

In 2020, Covid hit, and the world shut down. We were in the middle of doing a couple of installations, and in January, the city of Kamloops, three hours outside of Vancouver called, and asked if we could quote a new sound system at the Sandman Arena, their 5000-seat arena. I drove up and looked at the system that West Coast put in sometime in the late 1990s. Unlike some of the other work that I’d seen Greg do, this install was actually well done: it was just nearing end-of-life. I put together a quote, which went into the 6 digits. We would need an 80’manlift to access the high points of the arena, pull out all the existing speakers, and put up new ones. Our work was sped up as we could reuse the original wiring, which was in great shape, and wire doesn’t wear out.

I’m not quite sure where the city of Kamloops got our name from. We hadn’t done any work for Kamloops, but in short order they gave us their football stadium first, in 2019, and then the Sandman arena in 2020.

We submitted the quote and waited. With the shutdown/lockdown of Covid, we couldn’t do any sound installation work, so I got to work repairing the many reel-to-reels that I had purchased and accumulated over the last few years. Somehow I always ended up buying more decks than I ever had the time to fix.

For me, Covid was awesome. I kept reading online about people going stir crazy, being able to do very little, however for me, it was a godsend. I could sit at home in my shop and repair decks all day long. If I got tired of reel-to-reel tape decks, then I’d switch to some of the cassette decks, amplifiers, etc. that I had. I was having a blast.

Interestingly enough, my ability to cross into the US was unimpeded. According to the border guards, since I was doing business with the US, I was considered to be no different than a UPS or FedEx driver and could cross the border at any time. Once I was told that I could only cross once every two weeks, but after a few months, that restriction was lifted. According to the Canadian border guards, I couldn’t go just anywhere I wanted to: I was limited to the post office, and to the gas station, and my shipping depot. Then I had to turn around and come right back.  That was fine by me.

Taking time off from sound system installations was a nice change. I was just sitting at home and heading to the border once a week, or once every two weeks. I posted on all my online ads that I was only shipping once a week due to Covid and had no problems: everyone was understanding.

In June of 2020, we got the call from the City of Kamloops. Once everyone figured out that Covid wasn’t quite the killer disease that everyone thought at first, we got asked by the City if we wanted to go ahead with the Sandman arena quotation that we had submitted in January. Boy, would we ever! I called Rich, whose work was a bit slow, and I ordered all of the equipment, programming and speakers that we needed to do the install and had it all sent to site. It took Rich a good month to do the install as there were many speakers to be removed and reinstalled, and due to the shutdown, we weren’t in a rush to finish the job.

The one part of the existing sound system that we couldn’t access were all of the amplifier racks, containing about 34 amplifiers that powered the speakers around the arena. The city had lost the keys for the racks, so all we could see through the smoked plexiglass rack panels were the green power indicators of the amps. Since the existing speakers worked for the most part, I told the city to plan on replacing the amplifiers, but they should last a year or two.

Once we started firing up the new speakers, though, we did find that several amplifiers were blown, and others in non-critical areas would cut in and out on occasion. I did some quick math, since the amplifiers were located in an upper level of the arena and were on 24/7. These poor amplifiers had around 200,000 hours of run time on them, and were indeed at end of life.
I sent an email to the city, saying that while the sound system worked, they should make immediate plans to replace the amplifiers, and recommended a series of 10 new amplifiers that were all digitally controlled and run off a computer network rather than analog signals, which would come in around $45,000.

Three weeks later, the city gave us the purchase order, and we were back to ordering amplifiers, and spent another two weeks in Kamloops installing them. Ultimately, we gave the city a great sounding arena, and outside of a couple of minor hiccups, when things started opening back up in the fall, the first hockey game sounded great. It was the largest sound system dollar-wise that we had installed.

There was one kicker that we didn’t expect. A couple of years after we did the Sandman arena, I got a call from my contact at the city, asking for me to come up to assess the sound system at the football stadium, as apparently the football team wasn’t happy. I got this third hand, so I gave a price to come up for the day and was waiting for the approval to do so.

That weekend, I got a panic phone call from someone at the stadium, saying they had no sound whatsoever. Fearing the worst, that the main amplifier had failed, I had the staff member climb the steel ladder in one of the maintenance rooms to get to the mezzanine, where the amplifier was installed in a small rack. Five minutes later, he called back, saying that the amplifier was missing out of the rack. I had him send me a picture of the rack, and sure enough, the 4000-watt QSC amplifier wasn’t there. A bit relieved, since this now wasn’t my problem, I told the caller that he’d have to track down whoever removed the amplifier. I was hoping it wasn’t stolen. I got word back on the Monday that it was a local sound company that had removed the amp for whatever reason.

I decided to call that sound company, a local company in Kamloops, and asked to speak to the person that had removed the amp at the stadium. The guy got on the phone, and while avoiding responsibility for removing the main amp of a working system, informed me that the Kamloops football team had just issued them a purchase order to upgrade the system. What? The city paid us over $75,000 to replace their original 11 year old system just over two years ago.

The competitor told me about all the reasons our sound system was incorrect, and that the football team was installing new light posts all around the arena to install new speakers, and my guess was that the new installation was even more expensive than ours was.

You can get two sound guys in a room, and they won’t agree on anything. I wasn’t going to argue with him. He did tell me that the city of Kamloops was very disorganized, and that the right hand never talked to the left hand. All I could do at that point was laugh, but I certainly was a bit disappointed that one of our flagship installations was now null and void, and that the single massive speaker that the city paid well over $25,000 for, including renting the crane to get it onto the roof of the recreation centre, was going to be abandoned on that roof. Folks, this is your tax payer dollar working for you! I messaged my contact at the city, told him that apparently our sound system was being ripped out, and that a purchase order was already issued to the local company for a new system.  He seemed very confused, but that’s the only extent I got involved with it. We had a good run with Kamloops for over a year. Rich and I did some great work in those Covid years, and we had our installation method down pat.

I did find out that I did get Covid, likely twice, both times while doing installations, and even though I was working side by side with Rich, he never caught it. I got lucky: while I felt a bit down, it was much milder than the typical cold that I got, and I just worked through it. I took a Covid test for the first time while driving down from an installation 8 hours out of town, and that’s when I tested positive. I realized that a couple of months earlier, I had felt the same way but never took a test that time around.

We got another installation in Quesnel, as we’d done a lot of work for them, in 2021. This time it was to install acoustic paneling in a little community hall where the acoustics were so bad that you couldn’t hear a thing in the room. We worked with a local acoustic panel company (Primacoustic, owned by Peter Janis), and crossed our fingers that the amount and size of panels were enough to solve the problem. Primacoustic’s sales rep did the typical “They are easy to install – you’ll do fine.” Yeah, I’d heard that from many sales reps before!

Rich wanted me to come with him to do the install, which was a bit unusual, but I took a few days off, and on the 8 hour drive up and back, we talked about our memories of CSE, and Rich told me a bunch of stories that I didn’t know about, such as some of the debauchery that took place at pubs and clubs after hours. I didn’t partake in those, generally, so it was an entertaining trip.

The installation of the acoustic panels did indeed go as planned, with minimal effort on our part, and even as we unpacked the panels from their cardboard boxes, and laid them against the walls to see how many we’d install per side, we noticed a massive difference in the acoustics already. That took me by surprise, but since acoustic panels simply absorb sound, they did their job even before they were on the walls. Another successful install in the books, and I was ready to take on more of them if they crossed our path.

It was around this time that I realized I was burning the candle at both ends, with both the sound installs and the reel-to-reel sales and repairs going through the roof. I was working 100-hour weeks, 7 days a week, but in reality, I wasn’t really working since I loved what I was doing. Still, at age 57, I figured something had to give.

I carefully assessed my life and what I wanted to do with it. Rich and I were a great team, but to advance Sound Solutions, I would have to hire some more key people such as a sales guy, another installer to work independently or with Rich, and someone to do CAD drawings and documentation, which was always our weak spot. With public tenders that Western Sound did, full manuals of wiring diagrams and copies of all of the owner’s manuals of each item installed would have to be put in three ring binders and turned over to the city as part of the job.  With our retrofits of sound systems, there was no such demand, and while I did provide user manuals that I’d write up at the end of the install, I never provided wiring diagrams, just like Greg at West Coast also never did. More than once, going back to do a service call on a sound system I’d installed years earlier, I’d be scratching my head, wondering what the heck I’d installed. I always figured it out though. As our installs got larger, we did start labeling wires and did a much better job wiring up our sound racks.

I realized that I’d taken Sound Solutions pretty much as far as I could take it. We’d done several 5,000 seat arenas but we never did a 15,000-seat arena like Rogers Arena in downtown Vancouver because those jobs always went out to public tender, and low bid won the job. With the bigger companies falling all over themselves to win these big jobs, the final price of many of those installs were done at close-to-cost, simply to keep the staff of the larger companies working and employed so they wouldn’t go elsewhere.

Finding good quality techs and installs was also becoming more and more difficult. A lot of the ‘lifers’ were starting to retire, the bad techs were constantly being fired and hired by yet another company, and the thought of luring away a good tech from a competitor by offering them more money didn’t really appeal to me…or my pocketbook. I also realized that having done around 30 recreation centres, 40 arenas and pools, and other related types of installs over the previous 10 years or so, once you’ve installed one 1500 seat arena in a small town, you’ve pretty much done them all. Sure, the installs all varied a bit, but the QSC sound systems with Community speakers were becoming pretty cookie cutter for us. I had no interest in going after other markets like churches, and the sound systems we sold to school gymnasiums were even smaller and more simple than the arenas and rec centres we were doing.

The reel-to-reels, however, were more interesting to me, as well as more challenging, While I was up to speed on the typical consumer stereo reel-to-reel deck, there were also a bunch of high-end studio decks that were coming up for sale for cheap on the surplus market. Those were all pretty new to me, and I’d purchased a few over the years from local studios, including Mushroom Studios which had recorded Heart, BTO, and several other bands of note. These larger multitracks required around 100 hours of work to rebuild them, and several thousand dollars in parts and man-hours to get to perfection. My name was slowly creeping out there as a guy that knows reel-to-reels, and I’d sold a few multitracks to home studio guys with good results.

My only concern was that the whole vintage audio thing could fade out at any time, leaving me high and dry. The CRT projector thing had died within about three years: what if reel-to-reels did the same thing? Several factors cemented my decision:

One of the last installations I did with Rich was at the Comox arena on Vancouver Island. I’d quoted it a couple of years earlier, and we finally got the go-ahead. It was two arenas, with one main one, and one practice arena, plus a lobby, and the typical features of an arena. Once again Rich and I did the install together and during the install I noticed that Rich was working about 30% more slowly than he had on other jobs. While the install went well, I spent a number of hours waiting for Rich to finish the speaker installation he was working on, while I had already finished my portion of the job.

A couple of months later, Rich finally found out (or finally admitted to me) that he had had a micro-stroke a year or so earlier. This had slowed him down and also made him paranoid to drive long distances. This was definitely a problem, as it completely impacted how he and I would approach an installation from the years we did previously. I had no time to assist Rich throughout the entire installation and to spend a bunch of days out of town. That’s not how we had worked over the last 20+ years.

Another significant thing was the product availability of the items we needed to do our installations. Since 2020, I’d read in the various Facebook groups for sound contractors that I was in, that many other AV installers had product delivery times delayed by months. For some reason, all of the equipment that Sound Solutions was using wasn’t affected, from our headset mics, to the QSC processors, to the amps and speakers. By 2022, however, multiple of our product lines were massively affected, and as a small company, never mind a large one, we couldn’t afford this. Some key items were months out, with other items being discontinued when China couldn’t supply the chips. One of these items were our Aerobics headsets that we’d sold for 5 years, and we were the largest dealers in Canada by this point. Overnight, they were discontinued, because one chip in the headset portion was no longer available. I had to resort to all sorts of creative ideas to come up with products. We switched amplifier lines as needed, and I had to purchase some used audio processors on eBay to get installs done on time. Apparently, lots of other contractors had the same idea, as our regular dealer cost was around $2300 US for a new one. Within a couple of months, the cost had surged to as high as $4,000 US for a used controller as the availability became zero from QSC.  I can’t say that I’m proud of installing used equipment; however it got the job done, and I always had a spare one in stock in case one of them shut down.

Throughout 2022 to 2024, product availability was spotty, and every sound contractor shuffled and shimmied around various product lines so that they could meet job deadlines.

The final straw was that I was always on call 24/7, but even more so with the completion of the hospital sound systems. If I was out of town doing an installation, I wasn’t around to take care of another site. I’d been on call for most of my life, especially when I was taking care of night club systems. It wasn’t a problem then, but it was a bit tiring as I was approaching my late 50s. Many times a customer would call on a weekend, not expecting to get a hold of me, but just to leave a message. I’d take the call, and people knowing that I was on call 24/7 actually was beneficial for us winning jobs.

When clients dropped off reel-to-reel decks for repair, their parting words were always “Oh, no rush to get to it; it’s been in the closet for 30 years, another year or two won’t matter.” Considering I was working from my shop in my garage, I’d always tell customers I’d have decks repaired within 2 weeks, and to please pick it up within 2 weeks of it being completed. Even back in the TV shop days, customers would ‘forget’ to pick up their sets, and one of my jobs was to hound clients to come and get them.

With Rich and his medical issues mounting, I made the decision in mid-2022 to sell Sound Solutions after being in the sound industry for 38 years. Because my accounting books were now in order, getting financial statements wasn’t a problem, and I put together a list of assets.  I started calling all of my friendly competitors (I’d learned long ago from the CRT projectors to be friends with your competitors), but all of them told me “When you find someone to buy the company, tell them that we want to sell as well.” I realized that my competitors were all around the same age as I was and eventually wanted to retire.

I then sent an email to all of my suppliers, saying that Sound Solutions was for sale, thinking that they might turn me into a young entrepreneur to buy a turnkey operation. I also told Rich that the company was for sale, but that I’d highly recommend him to the new owners, once I found them. I also approached Solotech, a large worldwide sound company out of Montreal, who were rumored to wanting an office in Vancouver. They went as far as sending me an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) that I signed. I emailed them over my financial statements…and promptly never heard from them again.

By now, almost a year had passed, and I was no further ahead in trying to sell my company.  I wasn’t going to call PJS, the big guys in Vancouver, as they were known for giving poor customer service, and I wanted the legacy of Sound Solutions to be preserved. By fluke, Peter Janis came over to get an amp repaired, and we chatted a bit about my potential sale. By this point, Peter had sold his group of companies, but rather than retiring, he started a new company called Exit Plan, which was helping company owners like myself to retire, and to exit the work force.  I told them who I was looking for to buy the company and told him that there were a few players that I didn’t want to talk to. Peter, being the straight shooter that he was, looked me in the face and said “You shouldn’t give a fuck as to who you sell the company to. Your only concern is that they have money to buy you out. You’ll be forgotten within a year of leaving the company. There will be no legacy. You want out. Find someone that allows you to do that.”

I realized that Peter was right, and it completely changed my outlook of selling my company. The new owners were recommended to me by a fellow out of Toronto that Sound Solutions had done occasional work for. David had a company that would source out installers all across Canada when an internationally based retail store would open a location in Canada. From Aritzia to Bootlegger to Starbucks, he handled most of them. He and I would chat once or twice a year. While I never met David, he was a really nice guy, and always paid his bills.

He recommended that I talk to Dylan and Andrew who owned a company called EightForty. I’d heard about them as they did work for David as well, but I think I’d only run across them once. I called Andrew up, and we went for lunch.

As I was thinking of selling the company, I had to come up with a price. I talked to my accountant as the Vancouver sound industry was not cash rich, and based on the assets and net profits, I came up with a  number sounded about right. I was dating a woman named Elisabeth, who told me to add $50,000. I argued with her, but she said “You can always come down in price; you can’t ever go up,” so I relented and decided increase my asking price another $50k.

At the lunch meeting with Andrew, we went over what the company did, who our clients were, and the concerns of the industry, product availability, blah blah. Andrew looked me straight in the eye and said “I don’t have a problem with that number.” I sheepishly told Elisabeth that night that I might indeed get an extra $50K thanks to her. I ate crow for months after that admission!

Andrew and Dylan were in their 30s (I think) and worked well together. It took a few months to put the sales agreement together. In addition, between my lawyer and theirs, who conveniently went on vacation that summer right after one another, the sale got delayed and delayed. I finally insisted on a quick conference call between all of us, including the two lawyers, and an agreement was hammered out. For the lawyers, it was filling out a generic company sales form, but to me it was important. I didn’t want a Western Sound sequel. I financed Andrew and Dylan over three years, with $50,000 down, and $15,000 payments for just under three years, due every 3 months. Andrew signed a personal guarantee. They were young, but owned a commercial building in South Vancouver, so there was money somewhere.

Just as the negotiations started, I got an email from BC Ferries, asking if we would quote on the redo of the Tsawwassen ferry terminal sound system.  I had done some business with BC Ferries before, but only selling those window intercoms because of Covid.  Now, a couple of years earlier, BC Ferries put the Horseshoe Bay sound system out for tender and had dictated that the QSC brand was to be used throughout the installation and so I thought I was a good contender to quote on the job. I conferred with Brad my programmer a lot, as the programming end of things was a lot more difficult than anything we’d ever done for the arenas in the past. Brad was confident he could handle it. I went to the site meeting, and no fewer than 17 other sound contractors were present. Everyone and their dog showed up to quote it, including PJS, and a large electrical contractor named Houle Electric who had offices in numerous cities around BC. A number of years earlier, they had opened a low voltage division, so they were quoting sound systems, telephones, data cabling etc. I’d run across them a few times before. A couple of times we won the job out from under them, and other times they’d win the bid. Houle had taken a bunch of well-known staff from other companies around the Vancouver area as they’d started up. Houle had a ton of employees all over BC, over 200 I believe, so they were a big player in the commercial market. Knowing that with so many companies bidding, I went low on my profit margin, and thought I had a good chance at winning it. No, to my disappointment, Houle got the BC Ferries Horseshoe Bay job. Now, almost 2 years later, here is the project manager from BC Ferries emailing me, asking me to quote the larger Tsawwassen ferry terminal.

Right around the time that the Tsawwassen ferry terminal came out for tender, rumor had it on the streets that Houle Electric was shutting down their low voltage division. This was an interesting development, as I wondered who was taking over their clients. Many times, a rumor of the demise of another contractor is false news, but this time it was real. I called Houle and made contact with one of their project managers who was interested in having a meeting with me to take over some of their projects. This could propel Sound Solutions in a new direction and would be great timing with the new owners as well.

Quoting one of these large projects usually takes two weeks of work to accurately put together a proposal. You need to triple-check your numbers, beg for discounts from the suppliers, and take at least one visit to the job site. Any follow-up questions asked by bidding contractors would be replied to and then sent out to all contractors. On occasion, someone would bring up a valid question that no one else thought of, and you’d need to revise your quote. Once the quote was complete, you had to make sure it was submitted properly, that all areas that required a signature were signed, and that the proposal had everything done right. Once you thought everything was right, you said a secret prayer (even as an atheist, I’d say a contractor prayer!) and hope that you were awarded the job.

It was very unusual for a client to specifically talk to a contractor, asking them to bid, and I wasn’t about to waste another two weeks of quoting only to find out that someone else bid lower. I wrote back a politically correct email, asking about the Horseshoe Bay project, as to how far out we were with our numbers, since low bid usually got the job. I asked for the project manager not to name bid numbers, but to give me a ballpark percentage price that we were high by. If it was a couple of percentage points, I could deal with that, but if we were something like 15% high, then I was out of the running. I was in this to make money, not to keep staff employed. To my surprise, the project manager called me and cryptically said “Trust me, you WANT to bid on this one.” As the famous philosophers Bill and Ted once said “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.”(quote from one of my favorite movies Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure).

As luck would have it, I was out of town on the day of the mandatory site meeting, with no way out of it. Since I was in discussions with Andrew and Dylan at this point, I decided to test their mettle and sent them to site while I was out of town, and to take lots of pictures of the site.
Dylan went to site and took lots of notes, so that made things much easier to work with. Dylan also told me that the sales rep from PJS, who had put the current system into Tsawwassen about 10 years earlier, got into an argument with the project manager of BC Ferries while on site.

So, working feverishly on the proposal, I did spend another two weeks putting yet another proposal together, bounced it off Rich, Dylan, Andrew and Brad, and we submitted it. Since the ferry terminal was running around 18 hours a day, the switch-over between the old system and the new had to be seamless and done after hours. Not a problem!  A pain in the ass, but we could handle it.

A few weeks later, I got a call from the project manager saying that we were on the short list of contractors to get awarded the job. There was one catch: BC Ferries staff wanted to meet at my office to check out our facility. Crap! I worked from home, my workbenches had more reel-to-reel decks on them than sound systems, and it was a bit of a mess.

I called Rich:
Me: “Rich, I have good news and bad news.”

Rich: “Cool, what’s the good news?”
Me: “We’re on the short list for BC Ferries.”

Rich: “Holy crap, that’s great – what’s the bad news?”
Me: “They want to come see my shop.”

Rich: “Oh…Shiiiiiiiit!”

I spent a couple of days cleaning up my shop (which mainly consisted of my moving tape decks out of the shop and into my kitchen) and told Dylan to come over for the meeting as the sale of the company was nearly complete. The problem we had was that we couldn’t tell BC Ferries that, as we didn’t want to jeopardize the potential contract. Four members of BC Ferries showed up: the project manager, a couple of electricians, and their IT guy. It was a good thing that Dylan was there who I introduced as a ‘new staff member’. Dylan was an IT whiz, I was not, and when BC Ferries’ IT guy started talking networks, I deferred to Dylan, who spoke fluent Computerese.

It turned out that BC Ferries had a policy not to hire a small company for crucial projects such as this, because if the small company lost a key installer or programmer, then the ability of that company to service BC Ferries just went with that person. In the case of BC Ferries however, they’d hired the big guys, PJS, to install the last Tsawwassen ferry terminal system, only for them to drop the ball numerous times after the warranty was over.  For the Horseshoe Bay terminal, they then awarded that contract to Houle, who shut their low voltage department before finishing the job (Covid also delayed the completion of the Horseshoe Bay terminal by almost a full year). So, BC Ferries was screwed again.

The project manager admitted to me that he was sticking his own neck on the line by awarding the job to Sound Solutions, as we were that small company. We had, however, given BC Ferries great service with the window intercoms. He wanted to make sure that I wasn’t leaving the industry or selling the company. I couldn’t look towards Dylan, or I’d burst out laughing. Instead, I kept my best poker face on, and the meeting finished with BC Ferries saying we’d won the job and to expect a purchase order in the next week or so.

It turned out that my semi cleaned up shop was exactly what BC Ferries wanted to see. They didn’t want a fancy showroom; they wanted to see a facility where work was actually being done. I’ll be damned! I’m also guessing that Sound Solutions got noticed with the level of customer service we gave BC Ferries for those stupid little window intercoms. Who knew?

Selling Sound Solutions

Dylan and Andrew turned out to be a good fit in many ways to purchase Sound Solutions, but not so much in other ways.

We did our due diligence and massaged the numbers and inventory lists. There really weren’t any arguments or big changes to the contract, but since Andrew wanted a closing date in the summer, and the actual sale didn’t happen until October of 2022, I had to keep track of our ongoing installations and keep a spreadsheet of incoming and outgoing money, something that I wasn’t used to doing. Sound Solutions was still doing decent sales, so there was a lot of calculating to do. Based on the profit that Sound Solutions was making in the summer of 2022, the expected $50,000 downpayment ended up being around $1,400, as I’d kept the profits between July and August in my Sound Solutions bank account. I also lost out on the trade in equipment from the Comox arena, which I figured I could sell for around $5,000. Taking equipment on trade is something that I always did on jobs, and between selling the stuff for cash money on either Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, it generally added a couple of thousand dollars as ‘bonus money’ from each job. In the end, I realized that it was just more speakers that would be taking up room in my house, and I needed the space for reel-to-reel tape decks anyway.

I ended up loading up 14 pallets full of sound equipment that was picked up by Andrew and Dylan and trucked to their new location in South Vancouver.  I had no idea I had that much stuff at my place. Of course, the freed up room was immediately taken up by tape decks, and my entire basement, once filled with CRT video projector parts and then sound equipment, was now filled with reel-to-reel parts and scrap decks that I’d rob for parts.

I stayed on at Sound Solutions for 90 days, to assist with the transition. Andrew and Dylan changed a bunch of things in the company, and that took some getting used to. They used a program called Dext which would scan expenses, and then would compile all expenses so I could get reimbursed. I hadn’t needed to do that in 40ish years since I worked at Roscoe’s but of course back then it was all done manually. I was used to taking my gas receipts and throwing them into a plastic filing bin, and Bill, my accountant, would pick them up every week.

I assisted with doing the installation at the Tsawwassen terminal and built the rack in the Marketplace area. The ferry terminal had a number of problems with it that were unforeseen. There was a small amplifier rack at the main terminal, hidden in a back room. There were additional amplifiers throughout the building, which were each supposed to power the speakers in one berth. Thus, the main tower could page individually into the various customer holding areas for each berth. In reality, somehow all of the berths were wired together as one large zone, and the one tiny amplifier in the back room near the main cashier was hopelessly overloaded. Indeed, if you stood under one of the lobby speakers, you could hear the distortion of the pages, due to this poor amplifier being bogged down with too many speakers.

We quoted BC Ferries an extra $6,000 to spend a bunch of time to troubleshoot the wiring. Of course, no wiring diagrams existed for the sound system, so we needed to allocate a lot of time for troubleshooting. Surprisingly, BC Ferries turned the extra charge down and given that I only wired up the Marketplace portion of the system, I have no idea how that all turned out.

My understanding after the fact was that Andrew and Dylan managed to do the entire system switchover during the day, in-between sailing announcements, with zero problems. They also simplified the programming, as the program that the programmer at Houle had written was insanely complicated, and Sound Solutions took a bunch of unnecessary bits of programming out. I did see the Beta version of the touch screen system, and it looked very slick, and did exactly what BC Ferries wanted. A technical note that I found fascinating about the BC Ferries system: Most people know that almost all announcements now made in grocery stores, malls, as well as BC Ferries are digitally recorded, and played back in a digital playback unit. Long gone are the days of the 1970s, where a clerk stood in front of a microphone and announced “Attention K Mart Shoppers, for the next 15 minutes, the Blue Light Special is…”

The digital players of today can store hundreds or thousands of messages, and since there are no moving parts within them, as all the messages are stored on chips, the reliability is high.
In the control tower of every BC Ferries terminal is a touch screen where the operator will assemble messages. BC Ferries supplied hundreds of voice files to us, all recorded by the same person, such as:

• The
• 8:00, 9:00, 10:00
• arrival/departure
• of the
• Queen of Surrey, Queen of Coquitlam
• is at berth
• one, two, three, four

The operator then selected the appropriate bits and pieces of the message via their touch screen. Once the message was assembled to their liking, they would hit a ‘play’ button, and the bits and pieces of the sentences were assembled within the digital message player and spit out as complete sentences over the speakers. If you listen carefully to an arrival/departure message, you’ll hear that there can be bits of delays and inflections of the sentences that don’t sound quite right, as the player strings together the bits of messages. If you’re listening casually, and don’t pay specific attention to the sentence structure though, it sounds fine. Other messages, such as no parking, or safety messages are recorded and played back as full announcements, and there’s no hesitation. It’s definitely a unique use of the QSC system that I got to know and love.

Ironically, about half-way through the installation of BC Ferries, the project manager left to work at another area of BC Ferries, and as a result, my departure from Sound Solutions wasn’t noticed either. BC Ferries also had us do work at the Horseshoe Bay terminal, as Houle had left some loose ends behind and was now completely out of the low voltage installations. Between the BC Ferries IT guy, who was super knowledgeable, and the new owners of Sound Solutions, they got the system up and running.

I ended up working as an employee at Sound Solutions for over six months from the date of the sale of the company, mainly because Andrew and Dylan couldn’t find a suitable replacement for me. I modestly put forward that I really was doing the job of 2 people, given the amount of hours that I worked, and acting in all roles of the company, from chief bottle washer to installer to purchaser to technician. Finding someone that was technically capable was indeed difficult.

I finally gave my notice in April of 2023, as I really wanted to do reel-to-reels full time. I gave them the option to call me any time regarding any old installation that I’d done if they had questions, as I wasn’t going to leave any client hanging.

The one thing I told Andew and Dylan was that the only thing that separated us from our competitors was our customer service. People were used to shopping on price alone thanks to the internet; however, providing customer service for an installed system was key, and not just mission critical systems like the hospital paging systems and the ferry terminals. If a sound system goes down during a junior hockey game, even the politest of Canadians would smash the mic jack in a penalty box (which also gave Sound Solutions a ton of business).

They agreed; however, in the months following my departure, I received more than one call or email from customers that had my number, that the customer service of the new owners was greatly lacking, compared to when I owned Sound Solutions. I told each one that I was sorry, but I had retired out of sound installs.

The other thing I took great pride in was the Sound Solutions website. Every time I had completed an installation, I’d put it on the website and usually put it up as a banner ad on the front page as well. It kept the website changing regularly, and our list of customer references grew numerous times a year. To my disappointment, the website hasn’t changed at all since I sold the company. I turned over the website to Andrew and Dylan as part of the sale, but the only thing they changed was the address. To date, the last installation that Sound Solutions has done, according to the website, was in 2022. Not even the BC Ferries project is on the website.

Life Post-Sound Solutions

The first thing that I’d noticed once I left Sound Solutions is that the pressure of working 24/7 was gone. I guess it wasn’t really pressure, only the stress wondering if a sound system would crash when I was out of town. While owning Sound Solutions, it was always something that I carried with me wherever I went. Once I sold Sound Solutions, it was no longer my problem.  The reel-to-reel customers by and large didn’t care when they got their decks back, and if a home studio wanted a repair done overnight, or within a couple of days, I could charge a $100 rush surcharge. The vast majority of tape deck clients didn’t need their decks back in a big rush, and I could take week-long vacations with a voicemail message indicating as such, and an autoreply on incoming emails indicating the same. Life was good.

The next thing I noticed a few months out, is that despite devoting the better part of 38 years to sound installations (with a couple of deviations along the way), I didn’t miss it. I felt I had made the correct decision in switching to reel-to-reel tape deck repairs. The money was great, the demand was there, and soon I found myself turning away some reel-to-reel decks that were entry level or pre-1973, as these consumer tape decks were never designed to be working 50+ years after they were made. By refusing to take them in outright, I’d save the customer the time and expense of getting the deck to me and I wouldn’t waste valuable bench time when I was likely going to write the deck off as not worth repairing due to too many age-related problems with it. Most people are fine with me informing them to not send the deck in, and I’ve written several articles on the website indicating why I don’t take in these older decks.

Studio decks, on the other hand, are always overbuilt, and with the rare exception, I’ll take those machines in. They end up being very time consuming, but the musician or studio owner that wants that ‘vintage sound’ usually will pay to have one of these rare decks in good working condition.

It was a bit strange when heading through small towns outside of Vancouver, not to stop in to say hi to the arena or rec centre managers, but with someone else at the helm of Sound Solutions, it was no longer my job to do so.

The Texas ‘Barn Find’

Since the reel-to-reel website is consistently on the first page of Google when you hunt for anything to do with reel-to-reels, and as of this writing, my Facebook page has over 12,500 members, my incoming emails from people that discover my website occurs on a daily basis.
In May of 2022, I received a random email from a fellow named David. He told me that his dad had collected vintage audio equipment for decades. Now, at age 82, his hearing was fading, and he wanted to sell everything. The story sounded plausible, so I told him to send me some pictures of what he had, and I’d let him know if I was interested.  David told me that he lived in Portland, and his dad in South Texas, so he’d fly down at some point in time. He’d get back to me.

Now, with the rate of phone calls, emails, text, and Facebook messages, I tell people “If it doesn’t happen 10 minutes from now, or 10 minutes ago, I will forget about it.” Worse, since I can’t remember names worth a damn, I tend to be in my own little tech bubble. If a client calls me, and says “Hey, this is Mike. I talked to you about a month ago about my reel-to-reel” I won’t remember. If he says “This is Mike. I talked to you about my Otari 5050”, then I’ll remember the conversation instantly.

A few months went by and I didn’t hear back from David. Of course, within a week, I’d forgotten that he’d ever emailed, and I was on to the next customer.

As an aside, with anything vintage, whether it’s cars, cameras, or electronics that people want to sell, they tend to fall into three categories:

1. The first type of seller has an old reel-to-reel tape deck that hasn’t been serviced in decades. It may be tube, it may even be a mono machine that really has no value. Since the owner of this reel-to-reel hasn’t done research online, but knows this thing is 60 years old, he instantly thinks it’s insanely valuable, and wants $5,000 for it. He’ll never get it, but will say “Don’t lowball me. I know what I have.” No, actually, you don’t. I get calls from this type of person regularly, and I always turn down the opportunity to buy these decks, for obvious reasons.
2. The second type of seller also has a reel-to-reel that he wants to get rid of. He has done a bit of research online, sees that it may have some value, but may also realize that it’s been sitting in storage for decades, and isn’t expecting top dollar for it. I will usually buy a deck from this type of seller.
3. The third type of seller is the most desirable. He has an old deck sitting in the closet, with a box of tape that he made on it in the 1970s or early 1980s. CD players came along in 1984 though, and the seller switched to those, putting his reel-to-reel in the closet. His wife does some spring cleaning, stumbles across the deck and the tapes, and tells her husband that he should throw it out because it’s been in the closet for 35 years. The husband thinks “I paid $1500 for this back in 1979; maybe it’s worth something.” He finds my website, and to his surprise, I offer him $500 for it. He was expecting maybe $100-200. He comes over, I give him $500 for it and the tapes. As I then joke, the husband pockets $300, gives his wife $200, and both are happy.

So, on a Sunday morning at 7 AM, in November of 2022, I am on my computer answering emails that came in overnight, and as I am typing, I see an email come in from David in Portland. He tells me that he’d finally gotten to his dad’s place in Texas, and he’s attached a spreadsheet of 109 line items, with a bunch of pictures attached of each item.  Now, as you can imagine, I’ve seen many reel-to-reel decks in my lifetime, and even more so in the last seven years. I click on this spreadsheet, and my jaw hits the ground for 15 minutes. Listed on the spreadsheet are tape decks so high-end that I’ve only ever seen pictures of them. I’ve never seen them in person. For those in the know, the brands of decks were Crown, Technics, Studer, Ampex ATR etc. There were over 300 pictures that David had attached to the spreadsheet, and I could clearly see that all items were in a large shop type area, all spread out on tables. All pictures were of the same shop area, so I could tell that these pictures weren’t randomly chosen by a scammer that grabbed them from other postings online.

I quickly emailed David, asking for a couple of days to go over the list, as there was a lot to assess. I had no idea, of course, how many other people he’d sent this list to, and I wasn’t about to miss out on this treasure chest. He said ‘sure’, and I spent the better part of the rest of the day doing research on what some of this equipment was, and what the value was.

The two crown jewels were Studer A820s. They were the last top of the line deck that Studer made in the early 1990s and had every feature any large recording studio would ever want. They were precision engineered and were sold for around $15,000 US when new. I’d never seen one before, and this gentleman had two. He also had one Studer A812, the model one step down.

I had to do hours’ worth of research to determine a value. In the end, I offered two sets of pricing: One if I was to take the entire lot as sent to me; the other, with pricing about 20% higher per item, but then I’d cherry pick as to what I wanted. I also had to account for the flight and accommodation in Texas and packing and shipping. David’s dad was also named David, and the emails started flying fast and furious. Since David Sr. lived in a small town of 11,000 people in Fredericksburg, there weren’t a lot of shipping places available, so I decided to drop ship things like ratchet straps, moving blankets, boxes and bubble wrap to his location.  I also recruited my girlfriend to come with me and hired someone local to assist with the packing. Doing some math, I figured that it would take 4 people 4-5 days to box and pack everything up onto anywhere between 20-26 pallets. I use a logistics company here in Vancouver to ship the larger decks all over the world, and I was told that 26 pallets would fit perfectly into one 53’ semitrailer, which was considered a full load, Anything more, and they’d have to send two trucks to site to pick up the excess pallets, which would cost substantially more.

After agreeing to my price, and that I’d take everything, I sent David Sr. a bank draft for $5,000 around mid-November, and said I’d bring the balance in a bank draft with me to turn over to him when I met him.

We arranged for me to come to Texas at the end of January. I put a teaser up on my Facebook page about this ‘Maryland barn find’. I used Maryland, as there are many bargain hunters, and until the equipment was in my hands, I didn’t want someone online figuring out where this cache was. Sometimes you need to play better poker than your competition.  The reaction to me posting the pictures of some of the high-end equipment on Facebook was intense, and instant. I got hounded with emails and messages, asking when the gear was in, and what the condition was etc. I had to stall everyone and told everybody that I had no idea what kind of condition anything was in, as I hadn’t even been to site yet. I promised that I’d post more pictures once I got to Texas, and once it was all back in Vancouver. I also said that everything would need to be tested and serviced, and that the entire load would likely take the better part of two years to run through.

At the end of January, my girlfriend Elisabeth and I flew to Texas. I had a buddy Gord who lived in Iowa at the time meet me there, and he got there a day ahead of time. David Sr. lived on a 70-acre property with a narrow winding driveway from the road to his house, and the shop adjacent to it where all the equipment was located. Gord called me in a panic the day before I flew down, saying that there was no way an 18-wheeler would navigate this driveway to get the equipment out and loaded to get it to Vancouver. A quick call to David, and he arranged that we could move the equipment down to the local regional airport and use a hangar to pack all the equipment up. David Sr. had a large pickup truck, and I asked them to hire someone with a 1-or 3-ton truck to do a run or two from the house to the airport that was about 8 miles away. The Davids also found 26 pallets for us to use, and as expected, Uline the packaging supply company came through right on time and delivered $3500 US worth of packing products to their house.

David Sr. and Jr. turned out to be a great couple of people to do business with. As it turns out, David Sr. was an engineer, and had lived all over the world, from Europe to South Africa, and David Jr. had a great education as a result. About 20 years earlier, David Sr. and his wife decided to retire, and wanted to find a place ‘where we would be accepted, and we could give back to the community as well’. That place turned out to be Fredericksburg TX. David Sr. was still working at age 82, at this point building airplane hangars at these small regional airports. With south Texas being rich in oil, the oil tycoons flew in on their private jets to do business for a few days and needed a place to store their jets. David Sr. was happy to take their money. On the third day that we were loading equipment and took a run down to the airport, David Jr. took me over to the other hangar, and showed me a private jet that was on the larger side of what the oil barons came down in. The wingspan was 75’ and the jet could carry 22 people. The doors of the hangar were 80’ wide, so when the jet entered and exited the hangar, two extra people were needed to guide the plane in, so that the wings wouldn’t hit the hangar doors. As a result of this, David Sr. was in the basic construction phase of another hangar, with doors that were 100’ wide, eliminating the need for the two spotters. This is the oil life in South Texas.

Almost all of the equipment was indeed in one shop area. We started opening the packages of boxes and bubble wrap. David Sr. informed us that there were some of the original boxes for the equipment up a mezzanine in the shop, and sure enough, there were a ton of the boxes, some with manuals in it. That instantly added value to the resale of the equipment, as the closer it looked to new condition, the better. We spent 8 hours a day packing boxes and started hauling the packed boxes down to the hangar to stack on pallets. It was tough, physical work. I had planned to plug in some of the larger more valuable pieces like the Studer tape decks, but we were tight on time, so the only thing I powered up were the two Studer A820 decks. Neither of them powered up, but I was up for the challenge to get them going. We went out for dinner a couple of times, including one nice BBQ dinner at David Sr.’s home, and we all got along like a house on fire.

I was paranoid that customs would have a field day with this unusual load, so we hand-wrote a spread sheet, listing the item, make, model, serial number, and country of origin. As we got to the end of our list, it turned out that there were 8 large extra boxes in the shop that were unlabeled. Not wanting to snoop, I asked David Jr. what was in them, and he said “Oh, that’s more stuff that my dad bought. I didn’t have time to inventory them.” I opened a couple of boxes and found one of them to be full of new tape deck heads. A head for a tape deck is equivalent to finding a brand new engine for a vintage car, so a box of new and rare (and expensive!) heads was a big bonus.

We did get everything packed onto exactly 26 pallets and filled the 53’ semi trailer front to back. More than one pallet was 6’ tall with boxes stacked on top of one another, but everything fit. We did manage to take a half day off and had booked our return flight back on the Friday, 7 days after we arrived. The trucking company that showed up turned out to be from Surrey BC, the city next to Langley, and was well known in the Vancouver area (and likely throughout North America). As we were sitting in the airport lounge waiting for our flight, my logistics guy called me and said “All your equipment is in Vancouver already – when would you like it to be delivered?” It turns out that these truckers usually run 24/7, which is why they have two drivers. They take 8-hour shifts and made it from Texas to Vancouver in just over 2 days. Insane!

So as it turned out, David Sr. was an avid stereo connoisseur who discovered eBay in the early 2000s. We found many eBay receipts in the various boxes of parts that he had purchased. Since back in the early 2000s, vintage audio had little value compared to 2025, he managed to buy literally tons of equipment for pennies on the dollar. The total amount of gear was much more than on the original 109 item spread sheet. There were more like 250 items, and countless more if you inventoried all of the parts out individually. I listed many line items as ‘reel-to-reel parts’ on our customs spreadsheet but made sure that the total dollar value was equal to that of what I paid for everything. David Sr. pointed to a large bookcase in his office, and said “One of those binders is my will, leave that for me, but everything else are owners and service manuals to all of that equipment that you’re taking.” There were several large boxes of manuals that accompanied the equipment back to Vancouver as well.

Before I even left for Texas, I had another problem: Where to store all of this equipment that the semi trailer was bringing to me? A typical 10 x 10 storage locker would cost around $500 CDN a month, and for sure I’d need two. I’d done this with the CRT projectors back in the heyday and realized after a year that I’d forget what I had in the storage locker, and had run up monthly bills, without really utilizing the lockers.

Then I realized that around the back of my house, I had a large wrap-around deck, with the slab of the house coming out to the edge of the patio underneath it. What if we enclosed the underside of the patio? That would give us about 1500 square feet of extra room for storage. I called Rich, who was happy to plan it out. We used the same wood siding as the rest of the house, so that storage area blended in, and Rich put in a heavy duty set of shelving to set smaller decks and stereo gear on, as well as LED lighting, and some baseboard electric heaters to keep moisture out of the area in the fall to spring.

Naturally, the storage area wasn’t quite finished by the time all the gear from Texas arrived, but it was close enough that Rich could finish it while the gear was loaded in. To my delight, there was storage space left over, which meant I could buy… MORE STUFF! (Nah, I wouldn’t, would I?)

The shipment arrived intact, and the only casualty was one single broken caster that had fallen through a pallet and was sheared off as a result by a forklift. That’s a damage rate that I could approve of.

Between Rob, Rich and myself, we loaded everything into the storage area.  I had blown my life savings on this massive haul: the shipping and federal sales tax exceeded $25,000 alone. I brought the two high end Studer A820 reel-to-reel decks into the shop, as they were the two most valuable items of what I’d purchased. My concern was that if the house sprung a leak, or I had some other disaster happen, that I had no reserve funds to deal with it.

I got to work on these two decks, hoping for a quick sale. Without getting into massive technical details, these Studer tape decks all needed some serious rebuilding before they were considered to be reliable. That meant parts to the tune of around $1,500, and about 40 hours of labor needed to be invested before they could be sold as a reliable deck. A failure to replace many parts, and the deck would likely go down every year with a new part that would go down due to the age of the decks.

I was very nervous working on these high-end units, as I’d never worked on one before. While I had the service manual thanks to David Sr., there was always the risk of damaging something while working on the unit and I had no backup modules or parts. Even the two A820s differed from each other: one was an MKI, the second a later MkII, and many modules were not interchangeable as a result. Having learned my lesson from previous mishaps over the years, I would service one or two boards, put them back in the deck, test the deck quickly for functionality, and then move on to the next set of boards. That way I’d check my work as I went, rather than checking it at the very end.

About 20 hours in, I ran across four PC boards that only needed a couple of parts changed on each one. I decided not to check my work, but do the servicing on the four boards, then fire the deck back up. To my horror, on one of the LCD displays on the deck, I got a ‘data error’ message. I am super comfortable working on all things analog, but I can’t stand working on digital stuff. It takes a completely different mindset to work on data streams and micro-processors/computers. Literally breaking into a cold sweat, I cracked open the well written Studer service manual and checked the list of errors in the ‘troubleshooting’ section. As expected, all the manual said is that there was data mis-communication between some of the boards. That’s all of the information that the service manual had. I posted in Facebook groups, with a plea for other Studer techs to assist. Since the deck was pretty rare, I had few helpful posts.

For three hours I checked all sorts of things in the deck. Finally, as I was about to give up in desperation, I saw a 25 pin computer data ribbon cable that looked to be a bit crooked in its connector. Sure enough, while plugging the connectors to the four boards back in, I hadn’t seated one of them correctly. I powered the deck down, plugged the connector in properly, and powered up. The deck went through its power-up sequence, and started working properly.

Similarly, I started working on the second deck, and again, a bunch of hours into servicing it, the tape transport shut down and went dead. I hadn’t even done anything: the deck shut down mid-tape. Once again, I got very nervous, and started checking all sorts of things, with little indication on the LCD error code screen to indicate what the problem was.  A couple of hours into troubleshooting, I discovered that one of the main transport fuses had blown. I replaced the fuse, and the deck also powered up and ran fine. Fuses can blow on occasion for no reason whatsoever, or because they are a bit fatigued due to age. I call them ‘nuisance’ failures. I ran both decks for about 20 hours in the shop, and realized that while these were an engineering marvel, and a work of art, I had to sell them.

The problem was, because very few were ever on the used market, I had no idea what to value them at. I did find one online sale on a Canadian stereo website where a fellow got $16,000 CDN/$12,000 US for one back in 2022. In his description he listed the deck as functional, with one broken caster, but no indication that the deck had been serviced at all in recent years.
So, I figured that with the 40 hours and the parts I’d put into the deck, that mine should be worth $20,000 CDN/$15,000 US each.

Now I have a customer named Relu that was local to me and had used me several times to repair tape decks for him. His passion was playing with and using high end audio equipment, and with his disposable income, he would buy top of the line equipment but was always looking for the next model up. He owned a Studer A812, the one model down from the A820. Once the deal was sealed in Texas, I messaged Relu with a picture of the Studer A820 and asked if he was interested in buying it. Instantly he texted back, saying yes, hold the deck, and he’d buy it. This was in December of 2022.

When I got the decks going at the end of February 2023 I messaged Relu before I listed them on my Facebook page. He replied right away and asked what I was asking for each one. I told him $20,000 CDN. He came back with a $15,000 offer, which I declined. I told him that if I still had the decks a month later, I’d consider his offer. This was around 4 PM on a Thursday night. At 6 PM on the same Thursday, I posted detailed pictures of the deck, technical specifications (frequency response charts), and a list of things that I’d replaced in it and included a picture of all of the replaced parts as I do on all my ads.

At 7 PM on Thursday, I received an email from a retired lawyer just South of Seattle asking if I still had one of the Studer A820s. I replied in the affirmative, and he instantly sent me a deposit of $1,000 to confirm the sale. He’d pay the rest once he drove up to pick the deck up. I updated the ad on my Facebook page, stating that the one A820 was now sold.

At 8 PM, I received another email from a recording studio in New York, asking if I still had the second A820. I also replied ‘yes’, and he then asked if I also had the A812 that I also received from the Texas find available (I’d repaired and rebuilt that one right after I finished the A820s). I told him yes on that one, and he asked if I’d knock $1,000 off the price if he bought both. Sure enough, he also paid a deposit via PayPal instantly, so the three highest end decks from Texas were now sold. I was about to replenish my nest egg a bit, which was a relief.

On Friday morning, I received a text from Relu saying that he’d changed his mind, he’d give me the $20,000 CDN I was asking for one of the A820s. I texted back, saying “Sorry, you’re too late; I sold them both last night.” At 10 AM, he called me, almost crying that he’d missed out on these rare decks.

On that Friday afternoon, I saw a post on a Facebook reel-to-reel group, with Relu posting that he was looking to buy a Studer A820. A group member asked where he was located, and Relu posted ‘Vancouver, BC’. That person then said “Well get ahold of Curt: he has two for sale and is in Vancouver.” Relus’ reply? “Well, Curt promised me one of those, but he sold them out from under me.”  I was pissed. That’s not what happened, and I didn’t appreciate my name besmirched anywhere, especially when the statement was false. So, I responded politely to his post, saying “Well Relu, I gave you first dibs on either A820, but you wanted to haggle on my asking price, by 25%. You refused my asking price, so I had two other people that bought the decks. The moderator of that reel-to-reel group saw the thread, messaged me, and asked if I wanted him to kick Relu out of the group. I declined, but asked if he could remove the post as it was making me look bad. Sure enough, the post was gone within 10 minutes.

At 10 AM the next day, Saturday, there was a knock on my garage door. I opened it, and there was Relu with a bottle of wine as a peace offering. He’d seen his post disappear and realized that he’d overstepped being in my good graces. I didn’t have any hard feelings really, and shook his hand. He looks past my shoulders, sees both Studer A820s still sitting in my shop. He looks me straight in the eye and says “Go cancel one of those sales. I will go to the bank right now and bring you $30,000 cash.” While it was tempting, the internet was a small place, and the last thing I wanted was a bad reputation online by cancelling one of the two sales, only to have Relu go into all of the Facebook reel-to-reel groups and plaster the picture of the ‘new Studer A820 I just bought from Curt’, where the other buyers would see it. I didn’t need that reputation either, so I declined his offer.

In the end, I did sell both A820s and the A812s to happy customers, and I had about 40% of my entire investment back on the Texas purchase. Months later, I found out from another Studer tech that I had greatly underpriced the A820s. They generally sold for $25,000 US, and some as high as $35,000 US. In addition, Relu did find himself an A820 deck out of New York and paid significantly more for it than I was asking for my decks. I got supreme shit from my girlfriend Elisabeth, who gave me the ‘you can always go down in price, but not up’ line. However, now that I had money in the bank for an emergency, I could rest easier, and work on other items I had in the queue. With the low price I paid for the A820s, my profit margin was actually huge; however, yes, I could have made significantly more.

Months later, David Jr. and his wife came up to Vancouver, and we went out for lunch. I asked how many other people he’d emailed about all of the stuff his dad had, and he replied “No one. You were the only one. Had you not bought it, it all would have ended up in the landfill.” Wow, and I thought I lowballed on the equipment. Still, there’s very few people that will buy that quantity of equipment and have the cash and logistics to be able to store a 53’ semi trailer’s worth of equipment. There’s lots of ‘lookie-loos’ that claim they have the money, and want these ‘barn finds’ but when push comes to shove, most players drop out, leaving the opportunity for a select few.

There’s no question that I recognized many times that I repeated my CRT projector business model when I started up my reel-to-reel endeavors. The methodology was a bit different: this time I used Facebook and my website to promote the business rather than someone else’s website and eBay, but the end results were the same. I had carved out a niche business that was fairly challenging from a tech point of view, and once again, I was making money without actually considering it to be a job. It was a passion.

The Texas haul was the first of four barn finds in 2023, although the other three weren’t nearly as large as the original one.

In April of 2023, I noticed that many people were posting the same estate sale listing in lots of vintage audio groups on Facebook.  I clicked on the ads and saw that the estate sale was in Marysville, Washington, about 90 minutes from me. The vast majority of equipment was the Sansui brand, a reputable stereo manufacturer in the 1960s to 1980s. Later Sansui equipment was of lower construction quality, as most manufacturers started cutting corners, but the early stuff was great.

I called my buddy Gordon, who owned Innovative Audio in Surrey BC, about 40 minutes from me. Gordon had started as a small home theater installation company but had gotten tired of competing with the ‘I’ll hang your TV for $40’ Craigslist ads, and consumers that were shopping online for the best price. Gordon decided to make a move in the late 1990s to change his shop from a surround sound home stereo dealer to selling vintage audio equipment, which was just starting to take off at this point. He told me that business was dead in the water for 90 days, and just as he thought he’d made a big mistake, he got 5 minutes of coverage on one of the local TV stations, with Gordon telling the interviewer how vintage audio was making a comeback, and how people were going back to records and cassettes. That was the turning point, and Gordon’s shop is now 8,000 square feet, making him the largest vintage stereo store in all of Canada. He specializes in vintage stereos from the 1950s to the 1980s and offers full sales and service to virtually all brands of equipment, from turntables to speakers. What Gordon didn’t want to work on was reel-to-reel tape decks. Well, wasn’t that good for me? Gordon and I had a handshake deal going back about 10 years, that he’d refer me all reel-to-reel service and sales, and I’d send him all other inquires that I’d get. This has worked out perfectly, and Gordon also took 5 of the 26 pallets of gear that came in from Texas.

I alerted Gordon to this estate sale in Marysville, and I suggested that he call the estate selling company to see if they wanted to sell all of the stereo gear to us ahead of time. The only items that I wanted were two high-end consumer tape decks; Gordon could have everything else.

The estate sale company was interested, as it would save them time and money. By this time that estate sale listing had gone viral on Facebook, with lots of interest generated. It turned out that the particular sale was going to be the last one for that husband-and-wife company, as they’d done estate sales for over 40 years, and they were in their late 70s. You’d never know that by talking to them over the phone, though. They told Gordon that we’d have to act quickly, as they didn’t want to pull the audio gear ad a couple of days before the estate sale happened, as they’d have a riot on their hands. Of course, they had several other people inquire about buying it all, but when it came down to it, it was down to Gordon/myself and one other bidder from the Seattle area. In the 11^th hour, Gordon pulled out of the bidding, as he figured the equipment would need too much work. Heeding our handshake agreement from years earlier, I asked if I could make an offer on the lot, and Gordon gave me the approval. I’d received a list of equipment from the estate sale company, so I knew what I was getting. They told me the bid of the competitor in Seattle, and while it was close, I decided to offer an extra $1,000, and thus I won the bid.

I called up a buddy in Seattle and said I’d pay cash for him to find a couple of people to meet at the house in Marysville. We’d come down with a 1-ton truck, and load everything up as quickly as we could. He came up with a female friend who happened to be a body builder, so heavy lifting was a snap for her.

The house was a small rancher with a wheelchair ramp going to the front door. It turned out that the owner was a hoarder, and collected kitchen items, military items, vintage audio equipment, and test equipment to service electronics. He had enough kitchen utensils in his small kitchen to supply every house in a three-block radius. Ditto for the stereo equipment: he had way more than he’d ever need. It took a few hours, but we filled that one-ton rental van and headed through customs to pay the federal tax on the equipment.

I unloaded the truck with the help of a couple of friends and realized I still had some space in my newly built storage area. The crown jewel of the entire load was a set of vintage Klipsch Belle speakers, the second from the top-of-the line from the early 80s. The cabinets were in decent condition, but the grille cloth had some cat scratch damage. I’d ordered the new grille cloth, then found out online that the cabinet had to have some serious dismantling to replace the cloth. I was going to do it but also listed the speakers on the website Reverb at a slightly reduced price to reflect the damage. They sold within a week of listing them. The other choice item was a Sansui G-22000 receiver, also the second from top-of-the-line. This beast put out 220 watts per channel. One channel was blown, but the repair was easy enough, and I sold it for $8,200 US. With the sale of a couple of other items, I’d covered my cost of the haul. While I made good money on this load, Gordon ended up being correct: most of the gear needed tech work, and wasn’t in as good of a condition as I’d hoped.

In 2022, I managed to pay off my house that I’d purchased with the money I’d saved selling CRT projectors in 2002. Friends had told me that there’s nothing like the feeling of putting the key into the lock of a house that you owned, rather than a place that you rented. When I finally moved into my place in 2002, I didn’t have any of those feelings. I did, however, feel great when I paid off the house. Not having a mortgage payment is very liberating, not to mention a lot easier on the pocketbook.

In June of 2023, I saw yet another bunch of listings appear on Facebook in the various groups, all posted by a woman who was liquidating her dad’s pro audio repair shop. My ears (and eyes) perked up, and I messaged her as the shop was located in Tacoma, about 30 minutes south of Seattle, which was 2 hours away.

It turned out that her dad had this large repair shop for decades, and in the 70s and 80s was about the equivalent of Vancouver Audio Clinic. In their peak, they had 5 techs working. Her dad had passed away from a heart attack and had left this large shop behind. One of his three daughters was in charge of selling it all so I offered to drive down to take a peek, especially since she had some reel-to-reel decks for sale.  From the front, the storefront looked tiny and had a small retail area where he would apparently test-run equipment and sell some equipment, likely items that were never picked up. Once you went down the stairs, though, the basement was around 2,500 square feet full of 100s of raw speakers, speaker cabinets, parts keyboards that had been partially stripped, and all sorts of amplifier and mixer carcasses. I was really only interested in a couple of the reel-to-reels, as many others were too old to be worth dragging back to Vancouver. I ended up taking two van-fulls of stuff and spent a couple of hours giving advice on how a bunch of the equipment might be best sold. I also told her to call me when she was tired of selling and I’d come down one more time with a fist-full of cash to buy another van full of stuff that would otherwise go to the recycler. Sure enough, in September of 2023, she called me, and I did just that, picking up a few more carcasses of items that I might be able to repair, or rob parts off of. I did just fine with that haul of equipment as well.

The last haul of note at the end of the summer of 2023 was yet another digitization facility whose owner had passed, this time in Toronto. Thanks to my days doing CRT projectors, I had a buddy named Jeremy that lived in Toronto who I’d used once before to package up something that I’d purchased. What were the chances that he lived close to that facility? Well, it turns out that Covid was not good for Jeremy’s business, and as a bonus, he lived less than a half hour away from the site. He was all too happy to get the work, and over the course of a few days, he’d packaged another 11 pallets of stuff that I had picked up and brought to Vancouver. While in retrospect I could have walked away from this haul as it wasn’t nearly as good as the others, I ended up with a  ton of parts and will do better than break even on this load.

The streak of large reel-to-reel finds continued in January 2024. I received a call from a fellow in Kamloops BC, about 3 hours outside of Vancouver, that a stereo shop in Calgary had recommended me to repair his newly purchased Technics high end consumer reel-to-reel. He then proceeded to tell me that there was a digitization facility in Calgary where the owner had passed and all of his equipment was being sold off by his family. He gave me the number of that stereo store and we had a nice chat.  Apparently, the fellow ran his digitization facility out of his house and had five computer setups where he could digitize everything from 8mm camcorder video tapes, to 2” 24 track studio reel-to-reel tapes. He also apparently had some large format video machines as used in the 1970s at television stations that he could also digitize. All this was crammed into a small rancher type of house.

The thing was, the University of Calgary had interest in lots of this equipment as well, as they also had a large digitization/archiving facility on campus. I was put in touch with Nathan, who headed up this division, and he said that he wanted to take all of the large audio and video recorders, and it left me wondering if it was worth my while doing the 10 hour drive to Calgary, or if the house would be completely picked over by the time I got there. Fortunately, once Nathan heard that I was going to pay cash, he said that he’d leave a good portion of the gear for me, as all the university would give the sellers was a tax deduction receipt. Nathan also sent me a ton of pictures of what was in the house, and I saw it was well worth the trip to go.

Now, true to our nickname of Canada, the Great White North, making the drive from Vancouver to Calgary and back was a bit of a trek, as the highway wound through the Rocky Mountains which were always snowed in. Fortunately, that winter the snowpack was almost non-existent, and while I had a new Toyota Rav4 all-wheel drive, the road was completely bare, and we could have done the drive in summer tires.

There were lots of great items in the haul from Calgary, from high end tape decks to audio processing gear, as well as mixers. I also ended up with a rack of digitization equipment as well as the computer, so technically I could now digitize 24 track studio tapes as well. It’s just a matter of setting the system up. I ended up with 12 pallets of equipment from Calgary and now my storage area was almost full. I was repairing as many items as I could and selling them on eBay and Reverb, but by my estimation, it was going to take me around five years to go through everything.

In December of 2023, I received an email through the website asking if I had a switch for a certain Teac tape deck. Normally I don’t sell parts, as they are a low dollar item, and when it takes me 15 minutes to package up a $10 part I’m better off spending the time working on a tape deck that I’ll sell for $1,000. Still, the name of the emailer looked awfully familiar, so I decided to respond. (Don’t worry, I’ll reveal it in a minute!) I responded within a few minutes from when the message came in and told the client that I did likely have a switch in stock that I could send him; however, he had to have good soldering skills, as the switch had 12 contacts on it, in very close proximity to each other, and without knowing how to solder the fine wires to the switch, he could make things worse. A couple of minutes later the phone rings, and the voice says “Hi, this is Krist. You were just emailing me about the Teac.” We got to chatting, and he asked if I ever come down to Seattle. (This is falling in line with who I think is calling me, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions. After all, he’s just a voice at the end of the telephone; however, this person was in a band based out of Seattle). We chat a bit and I am determined not to act like an idiot and will keep things professional. He tells me that he’s been following my Reverb listings for a while.

The entire time, I am thinking to myself: “HOLY SHIT! I’m talking to Krist f’n Novoselic!” (And he called me!)

As the conversation is wrapping up, I can’t help myself. I say “I have to ask, is this Krist, from Nirvana?” (Krist Novoselic was the bass player in the band Nirvana). I hear him sigh a bit, and he says “Yes, I am.” I recognize that he’s probably expecting me to turn into a fanboy and will now spend the next 20 minutes asking him all of the same questions that everyone else has ever asked him (‘Hey man, I loved your band man. I bought all your CDs’). That’s the last thing anyone needs, and hey, I’m not a professional interviewer so what question could I possibly ask him that he hasn’t been asked millions of times before? So I just say “Cool, thanks for all the music you’ve given us.” All of a sudden he perks back up, thanks me, and that’s the end of the conversation. A few minutes later, he sends me an email with a link to what he’s involved in currently. Krist is more-or-less out of the music business.

It was a valuable lesson, to treat famous people just like everyone else, and not pester them with questions that they just don’t want to answer any more. A few months later, I received a similar call from Jeff Pilson, currently playing with the band Foreigner, but who first developed his reputation playing with the hard rock band Dokken in the 1980s. I did manage to ask Jeff what I thought was a bit of an obscure question about an unreleased song off the movie Rock Star which he also acted in, and he was a gentleman.  It’s still a bit surreal to me that famous musicians are calling me from time to time, wanting information in this little niche market that I’ve developed in the last few years.

The last significant find of tape decks came from Reverb itself. Back some time in 2022, I purchased a large Studer 24 track reel-to-reel tape deck out of a studio. These Studer A80 decks were the industry standard from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, and many top-of-the-line recording studios had them to record bands on. As reel-to-reel technology fell to the wayside as digital recording came to the forefront of many studios, the upkeep and maintenance required for these decks were no longer done,. As a result, these large 700 lb decks need lots of work done to them, and since there are 24 identical channels, a lot of the work is repetitive. Assuming no obscure problems, a thorough overhaul of these behemoths can easily eat up 100 hours of labour and $3500 in parts. Fortunately, with the resurgence of reel-to-reel decks, there is a demand for proper working Studer decks once again, and when  I bought my first Studer A80 from the old Mushroom Studios here in Vancouver, (Heart, Chilliwack, and Bachman Turner Overdrive all recorded there, as did the Incredible Bongo Band, back in 1973), I just wanted the challenge of rebuilding one of these decks (more than being concerned about reselling them).

As word got out that there was this guy in Vancouver that was buying these old Studer beasts, I ended up buying one out of Nashville and had it trucked up to Vancouver. It showed up all nicely wrapped in shrink wrap on a pallet. I took a quick look at the deck, signed for it, and the truck driver left my driveway. As I started unwrapping the deck, I noticed that an empty reel placed on the deck was all bent out of shape, and I wondered why the seller would include a useless reel. As I unwrapped more of the shrink wrap, I found out why: unbeknownst to me, the trucking company somewhere along the way had stacked another large heavy pallet directly on top of the shrink wrapped deck. The shrink wrap hid the damage nicely, but once I unwrapped the deck, I could see that there were no two sides of the deck that were square. It was like a car that had been in a bad crash: the frame was bent, and there was no repairing it. Fortunately, most of the parts were intact, and it was just cosmetic damage that had occurred to the deck. Still, in order to get it to resalable condition, I’d have to find an empty frame of another Studer A80, and get it trucked to me and do a transplant of the guts of the damaged deck. I posted in various reel- to-reel groups on Facebook and got the advice from someone to keep searching on Craigslist and eBay, that at least once a year, someone would list an empty frame of such a Studer A80. I searched for a couple of months, found nothing, and put the damaged deck into the corner of my shop.

In early 2025, I was in the process of listing another tape deck on Reverb, when one of their scrolling ads across the bottom of their home page caught my eye. It was an identical Studer A80 to mine, but just the frame of the unit. The unit had been stripped of its electronics audio channels and all of the transport circuit boards. The motors were still there, along with a bunch of the transport, and the carcass of the deck overall looked pretty decent. The asking price was a paltry $800 US. Since I wasn’t into the deck I’d purchased for too much money, the investment plus shipping for this second frame was a good deal. I messaged the seller to ask a couple of questions about the condition of the frame, and the next day he called me.  The seller turned out to be the owner of Ardent Studios, which meant nothing to me at the time. He was a really nice guy and he told me that Ardent Studios had started in 1966 and was now a 22,000 square foot studio facility. Their client list was a who’s who of musicians, including ZZ Top, Huey Lewis, Smashing Pumpkins, and many others.

Naturally, as the conversation flowed, I asked the critical question: “Do you have any other related reel-to-reel equipment you want to get rid of?” I ended up buying the carcass I needed plus two other later model Studer 24 track decks plus an industry standard Ampex machine plus a ton of spare parts. Another 5 large crates showed up at my house a week later, full of equipment.

I now have eight large 2” 24 channel decks in stock, with any number of others available for purchase. All of these decks have history on them, and I have the provenance to prove it (as Antiques Road Show would say).

The first deck I purchased 5 years ago came out of Mushroom Studios here in Vancouver. It was originally called Can Am Studios, but eventually changed its name to Mushroom Studios.

As I am writing this in November of 2025, I have been doing reel-to-reel repairs seriously since June of 2017. The business shows no sign of slowing down, and, in fact, the demand exceeds the supply and my available hours in a day to service and sell them. I’ve shut down incoming repairs for a few months more than once now, so that I could work on my own decks, that now are in excess of 300 units, not to mention the leftover defective sound equipment from Sound Solutions and the massive amount of cassette decks, turntables and amplifiers I have here. Some of the stuff is junk, or cannot be repaired; other units are worth thousands, once repaired.

Of course, switching from sound to reel-to-reel repairs left some problems behind, but others surfaced. A few of these are:

Tape Problems

I have a long article on the RTRTech website about tape problems, but the bottom line is, tapes will deteriorate over time, resulting in the tape oxide covering the tape heads, causing eventual muffled sound. Worse, many tapes made post-1975 also suffer from the tape binder, or the glue, that holds the tape particles to the plastic backing coming off the tape and coating the tape path. This will cover the entire tape path in as little as 20 seconds of playing a tape, creating very low and muffled sound, and the friction in the tape path also goes way up due to the glue covering every point that the tape touches. When a client tries to rewind one of these sticky tapes, the friction is so great that the fast wind function doesn’t work, as the motors within the deck can’t compete with this added resistance, and the tape doesn’t move as a result. I then get the inevitable call from the client, saying “You didn’t fix this deck right; it sounded fine for 10 minutes, and now nothing works.” I then tell the client that the deck is fine and that it’s a problem with their old tape. Some will understand, but others will argue, saying “I bought the best tape possible back in 1980: my tape is fine!” I then have to argue with the client, as most of these clients who buy decks from me or get them serviced are way out of town, so driving back isn’t possible. It got so bad back in 2023 that at least 15% of my customers were complaining about the quality of my repairs. Something had to change. I ended up putting a semi-rude notice right on the front of each deck, on hot pink paper, stating that any additional problems due to running old tape through their newly purchased or repaired machine was not eligible as a warranty claim, and additional re-repair/cleaning charges would apply. As a result, the complaints dropped down to 2%.

There were some customers that simply didn’t believe me. Case in point:
I had a client from the East Coast of the US send me a large Otari brand deck to my Washington state address. The deck with packaging was close to 70 lbs, so the typical shipping charge with $1500 insurance would run $200 US, each way. The Otari brand of decks is built like tanks, designed to run 24/7 in radio and TV stations in the 80s and 90s. They now have their share of problems, but now that I’ve worked on 40 or 50 of them, most of the problems are easy to solve, as with this client’s machine. I repaired it, then test-ran it for 12 hours over the course of 3 days, boxed it back up, and sent it to him. (It’s surprising how many additional faults creep into decks that haven’t been run in decades once you run them a few hours after an initial repair).

From the video clip that the client sent me before sending the deck in, it looked like he was running old tape through the machine, and indeed when I got the deck in, the entire tape path was covered with tape oxide and glue, causing at least a couple of the problems he was complaining about (slow rewind and muffled sound). I got that machine back to factory spec, so I was confident about the repair. I also sent him links to the ‘tape problems’ article, as well as the ‘tape path cleaning’ article on the website, saying that he’d have nothing but problems if he played his old tapes.

He gets the deck back, and within days calls me again, saying that the deck sounded bad, and had muffled sound, and that the fast wind function was super slow. He then told me that he had adjusted the head alignment screws on the tape deck. I asked him why he adjusted those screws, as without proper tech tools and knowledge, that was the last adjustment any end user should do, and that the machine was now completely out of calibration and would have to come back. (For those not familiar with tape decks, the head alignment screws are as critical as the adjustment screws on a carburetor on a vintage car. Go in and do random adjustments, and that carburetor now needs a trained mechanic to dial it in again).

He asked if he could pay me for an hour of my time via Facetime to show him how to align tape heads, and I replied that without the reference calibration tapes and some specialized test equipment, there was no way that he was going to be able to do it. Send the deck back to me.
So, two weeks later I did get the deck back, but now two of the head alignment screws were missing completely, and the playback head was dangling down by its wiring. Luckily, I have several scrap Otaris, and I calibrated all of the heads again, and once again ran the deck for 10 hours. Other than a very dirty tape path…again…and the missing head screws, the tape deck ran flawlessly. I charged accordingly, plus another $200 for the return trip, with a politely worded email linking to my two articles regarding cleaning the tape path and the ‘tape problems’ article. I also sold him a roll of brand-new tape, which didn’t have any of the flaws of his other 40-year-old tapes.

A week later he calls me, thanking me for the repair, and told me that the deck was sounding perfect. I thought that was the end of it, but I was mistaken.  Six weeks later, the client calls again. Once again, he says that the deck sounds muffled, and rewind is very slow. He’s quick to point out that he has ONLY run my new tape and hadn’t run any of his old tape through the deck. I ask him for a clear picture showing the tape heads and the tape path. At first, he sends me a tiny low resolution avatar size photo, so small that I can’t see anything. I then ask for a full-size picture, which he sends. His tape path is full of the same tape crud, oxide and binder, that is completely covering the tape heads and the tape path. At that point, I sent him an email back, politely explaining that not only is he lying to me regarding using his old tapes, but at this point I was no longer able to assist him in repairing his deck. He should find someone on the East Coast that was much closer to him to repair his deck. I never heard from him again.

I hate firing clients, and rarely do it, but I do consider myself to be a good tech, with a good working knowledge of most reel-to-reel tape decks. I am fully willing to take on the risks of repairing vintage audio equipment, and the potential for me to miss something is always possible, but when a client blatantly lies to me, I can no longer deal with them.

Looking Forward to Retirement

I will be turning 62 in December of 2025. My dad died at age 61, so right now I am older than he ever was.  I am hoping that I have 10 or so more years in me. Finding someone to replace me is nearly impossible. The kids these days want the latest technology (very few want to record on analog tapes), but finding someone with the interest of learning electronics and troubleshooting isn’t an easy task. It’s the same reason that Heathkit and Radio Shack went under. The popularity of building electronics kits and the do-it-yourself projects is no longer there. There are a number of active tape deck techs that are a decade or two older than I am who are still somewhat active, but likely aren’t working 80 hours a week as I am. As these older techs retire, most likely in the next 3-5 years, the art of repairing tape decks and other vintage electronics will become even more scarce. While I take time off for road trips on a regular basis, the reality is that I won’t be doing 80 hours a week in 10 years from now; hopefully not in 5.

I do plan on running through most of the items I have in the house, as my friends and family have no idea of the value (or lack thereof). My goal with the decks I repair today is for them to last another 10 years; however, the noose of aging components is tightening around all of this vintage equipment. Parts are failing now that weren’t failing five years ago, and the reality is, no manufacturer was expecting their tape decks that were made in the 1970s and 1980s to be in high demand in 2025. Still, even I am amazed at how many I can resurrect from the dead, and there aren’t many decks that come back for another service unless the client doesn’t keep his tape path clean.

I’ve been asked many times to relocate to other cities in the US and Canada so that studios there can have me local as a service tech; however, the US still considers tape deck repairs to be blue collar work, so that’s not going to happen. I happen to like Vancouver and the place I live in.

In April of 2025, the US and Canadian governments kicked in tariffs. As rumors circulated about what was going to be tariffed or not, I’d ask customs officers on both sides of the border what was new. I got no information whatsoever. Finally one Canadian border guard told me that when Covid happened in 2020, they were told of the travel restrictions the day that the rules kicked in. I stopped asking about tariffs as a result, as I knew it was pointless to ask.

When the tariffs did finally occur, most of the electronics items that I dealt with for Sound Solutions were exempt, as were reel-to-reel tape recorders and blank tape, much of which was manufactured in the US. By some small miracle, as additional tariffs came into play, including speakers, microphones and amplifiers, tape decks continue to be exempt to this day.

A few things have changed, however. For decks coming into Canada to be repaired, I need to register them at US customs, so that it is known that they are ‘US goods returning’. It’s a simple one page form that needs to be filled out, and I stop at US customs to get the form stamped before I go into Canada. Once the deck is repaired, I head down to the US with the form in hand, and customs acknowledges that the items were only being repaired in Canada. Not a problem.

So, what now?

On May 17, 2025, at age 61, I got married for the first time to my wife Elisabeth. She’s a good ‘Cherman’ girl, born and raised in Germany, and moved to Canada in 1988.  She eventually ended up in Langley, about 15 minutes from my place. We dated for three years before getting engaged. She came with me to Texas to help pack up the barn find, and put up with my nonsense in general. She also told me to raise the asking price of Sound Solutions by $50K. As I’ve told at least one friend…”She’s crazy, but she’s  my kind of crazy.” We had two wedding ceremonies, one in May down in Boulder, Colorado, attended only by my aging mother and my sister, who lives in Boulder, and then we repeated the ceremony at my house in Langley, and invited 40 friends.

To make things even weirder, her ex husband was the MC at the Vancouver wedding. Glenn and I get along great, so there’s no drama, ever. In fact, during my brief time at the microphone at the reception (held on my deck), I thanked Glenn for doing a great job emceeing; in fact, he did such a great job that I told him I’d use him for my next wedding as well. Elisabeth’s friends were horrified, and my friends just groaned, knowing my twisted sense of humor.

To date, we are not living together…yeah, weird, I know. We both own houses, and we’re in deep negotiations right now to see which house we’ll live in permanently.  My house is 60% workshop/storage space for reel-to-reel decks, and it will take a number of years to reduce my inventory, although I am working as fast as I can to do so. My goal is to sell/eliminate 80% of my inventory and stock over the next 5 years, and primarily use my house as a shop. Then I either move into her house, or she moves into mine. We’ll see.

I am now also something I never wanted to be…a…SOCIAL INFLUENCER! I am approaching 13,000 members on my Facebook group. Hopefully I do actually have some talent that I post about, doing tape deck repairs, and from time to time I will still jump into the CRT projector group and give  a bit of advice. Sadly, maybe I’d make more money if I wore a G string and shook my booty online. I hear there’s a demand for that by certain people.

The August 2025 US tariff situation

With the new government in place as of January of 2025, there were rumors of changes to cross-border shipments that were on the horizon. I’d done cross-border ordering of parts and equipment for all the various iterations of my company, and had done massive sales of CRT projectors, tape decks, and all other audio equipment into the US. For all of my online business, it’s the largest chunk of customers, around 90% of total online sales. Before April of 2025, the customs rules were that any sale under $2,500 US could be done as an ‘informal’ entry, in that I could do the paperwork myself, present the paperwork to a customs agent at a commercial crossing, they’d sign off on it, and I was on my way. I’d get random shipments checked, usually about once a year, and all was well crossing the border.

Any shipment over $2,500 US would require a customs broker to be used, which generally was a $100 fee or so, which I could easily absorb on a larger sale. There were no customs charges or duty or tax on any of these shipments; that’s the way it’s been for years. In addition, every sale which went through a customs broker also needed a person’s social security number (SSN), or an EIN, a business tax number. While a number of my customers owned businesses, there was, of course, a large objection to someone providing a SSN which went on customs paperwork, and as a result, I lost sales.

In April of 2025, I was informed by US customs that the ‘de minimis’ value had dropped down to $800 US. Everything $801 and above now had to go through a customs broker, plus a 10% ‘reciprocal tariff’ was now added onto every one of those shipments. This presented a problem, as all of the tape decks I sold that were beyond entry level were almost always worth over $800, so that impacted my sales greatly. I started to concentrate on super high end decks, and anything that I could sell under $800.

As of August 29, 2025, the ‘de minimis’ value went down to $0. This meant that absolutely everything sold to the US needed a customs broker, and as a result, it killed all of my under $500 US sales. Even if I absorbed half of the customs broker fees, no customer was going to absorb an extra 10% of a small purchase.

Naturally, the tariffs had far reaching effects. Many couriers stopped sending products internationally to the US, and other small home based sellers are also significantly affected, and time will tell if the tariffs get eliminated. I estimate that overnight, I’ve lost around 80% of my business. I am therefore spending a lot of time in my shop, repairing items, and stockpiling them until such time that I can sell into the US again without my clients incurring significant extra charges.

As 2025 draws to a close, the entire year has been a wash. Coming from a record sales and profit year in 2024 to a break-even point is like coming off a bad drug withdrawal (not that I know anything about that!) As any sales person will know, when you’re landing sale after sale, and the profits are coming in, then losing 90% of your sales market due to tariffs that you have no control over, it’s stressful and frustrating.

Fortunately, a good number of my US customers have stuck with me, working with me to overcome the tariffs, even though their purchase pricing went up. I also started listing items on a Canadian for sale website, Canuckaudiomart.com. Apparently, I had signed up several years ago, but never used it, as the eBay and Reverb websites were larger, and since clearing items through customs was a snap, I never worried about selling into Canada. That has since changed.

I had several sleepless nights worrying about the tariffs, but once I got over that (sort of), I’ve settled back into a good routine of repairing decks, and trying to liquidate the house of the 250+ tape decks and 1000s of other pieces I have here.

Regrets, I’ve had a Few….

Looking back at my life of employee and being mainly self employed for most of my life, there’s a ton of advice I could give future entrepreneurs, based on the mistakes I’ve made but also on what I’ve done well. Here’s a few of them:

• Chase your dream. I was lucky enough to be able to have a passion about electronics since I was a kid. Would I have spent the same amount of time had I invested into an ice cream store, or an autobody shop? Not a chance. If you have a passion for something, and think you can make a go of it, throw yourself into it. Be prepared to sacrifice relationships, spouses etc. for it, though, if you’re as fanatical as I am.
• Don’t be underfunded. This was probably my biggest flaw, although who knows, had I had more money behind me to throw into CSE Electronics, I probably would have dug myself a bigger hole. Still, not looking at the bottom line, and without a basic understanding of costs and expenses vs what I billed out, I could have made money much sooner.
• Get a good bookkeeper and accountant. Learn the basics about profit and loss. If you don’t know, have the bookkeeper explain it to you – that’s what they are there for. If they can’t explain it…well, find another bookkeeper.
• Hire good people. No question that a lot of time is spent finding a good employee. On the one hand, you don’t want people so good that they learn from you, and then walk away to a better job. On the other hand, what would be worse is if they start up on their own, and take your business away like Dave did. Despite our occasional differences, both Rich and Rob were decades-long co-workers while I had Sound Solutions. Neither screwed me over, and I trust each one implicitly.
• Treat your company as an entity, and not as a first born. I broke that rule all the time, and probably still do to this day, but if I don’t win a job, or a customer chooses not to buy from me, I don’t take it personally, or stew over it for a week as I used to. (I’ve now allowed myself one day only.)
• Be prepared to pivot. No business or company is ever completely stable. The Hudson’s Bay Company and Sears both shut down after being in business for many decades. The spending habits of people change, and especially in the technology realm, nothing is constant. We were lucky, in being a small business, that we were able to pivot quickly as a new opportunity came up, and as new technology came into play. I know of one person that’s still thinking he can have a successful business selling CRT video projectors. Those died in 2004, more-or-less.
• Take risks. Over the 38 years that I had Sound Solutions/CSE Electronics, the two most profitable ventures were the detours into CRT projectors and reel-to-reel tape decks. Within the sound realm, it was potentially the McDonald’s modification to the HME drive through headset system and chasing after the arena/pools/rec centres when I found out that my competitor semi-retired. As the great philosopher Steve Winwood once said, “When you See a Chance, Take it.”
• Study the history of any company you are thinking of buying THOROUGHLY, and trust no one. While the education that I got out of Western Sound was priceless, the way I did it was terrible. I don’t wish that route on anyone. But…it was my own stupidity. No one else’s.
• Hire a good webmaster. Put together an effective website. My personal pet peeve is finding a website that tells you absolutely nothing about what that company does. Millennials and GenZs seem to want to throw catch phrases on websites that sound great. I want to see services, products, and proof of work (such as the installation page on the Sound Solutions website). Get your website to be on page 1 of Google, as the RTRTech website is. The amount of daily inquiries for reel-to-reel decks, and even the Sound Solutions website was staggering. (We sold a somewhat obscure brand of products imported locally, called Factor Electronics. I googled one of their products one day and was amused to find that the Sound Solutions website was listed above the actual Factor Electronics website.)
• Don’t be afraid to fire someone. Over the years, I laid off more people than I fired, primarily due to the Western fiasco; however, the staff is there to make money for the company. If they don’t perform, they are out. I did that to Gordon and to Bruce. I had no regrets letting them go.

Watch your bottom line. As illustrated several times throughout my story here, things can be going exceptionally well, and due to whatever circumstances, they can change overnight. Have a backup plan, and make sure you can move your company in other directions if technology changes. I’ve done that several times over the years, while I’ve seen other companies flounder and shut down.

Where are they now?

Since I’ve mentioned many people in this story, I’ll do my best to summarize where key people are now.

Father Kurt – passed away at age 61 due to late stage prostate cancer which his doctor failed to diagnose earlier. He passed when I was in my 20s.

Mother Daisy – still living at age 88, and until early 2025 was living with my sister in Boulder, CO. Mom ended up developing fairly significant dementia, so my sister moved her into an assisted living facility. She did recognize Elisabeth and myself when we came down to get married. We go to Boulder every year, usually in May or June to visit.

Sister – Retired. Goes to Alaska regularly to (recreationally) drive a team of Iditarod dogs or does leisurely hikes up to the Everest base camp. Crazy woman!

The first family home at 1842 MacDonald Street – surprisingly is still original, I just drove by there in July of 2025. The house next door is getting a studs-up renovation, but other than a fence and hedge at the front of the property that was put there some time in the 1980s, the rest of the house looks the same.

Our second house at 990 Wavertree Rd which we moved into in 1970 was sold by my mom around 2018. It was promptly torn down, and the 2200 square foot rancher was turned into a 5000 square foot monster home by developers. They sold it in 2021. The property is no longer recognizable from when I lived in it.

Childhood Friends

Drew had a long career with BC Hydro, then formed his own company. Lives in Vernon, BC, and is now semi retired and has been happily married to Jackie for many years.

Raymond – high school buddy lives close to 100 Mile House, BC, semi retired, has a fly tying business, and still repairs stereo equipment.

Arden – high school buddy and lawyer – passed of a massive stroke when he was 42.

Ming – high school electronics buddy – obtained a B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from UBC in 1987 and after a 34-year career as a digital chip designer is now semi retired.

Mike – study partner at BCIT – works for an IT company. I see him about once a year or so.

Ray – Owner of Gregg TV- the TV shop shut down some time in the 1990s, and the building now houses a specialty liquor and wine store. Ray retired and lives in Powell River, BC. We’re in touch from time to time.

Roscoe’s

Charles – owner- post Roscoe’s, he went into work in the movie industry, producing films and TV series. I’ve tried reaching out to him via Facebook, but he won’t respond.

Teri – went into the helicopter industry, and ran a very successful helicopter company out of Kelowna, providing forest fire fighting and heli-skiiing services throughout Canada and the US. Has since retired.

Terry – Moved to the US, and owns a very successful rigging company, providing services for large scale sound, lighting and video productions.

Dave – I lost touch with Dave, but he too is in the staging industry. I haven’t seen him since Roscoe’s shut down

Ian – is in the trucking industry last I heard.

CSE Electronics

Laurie – is now a woman. I lost touch with her after I saw her last at an electronics supply company, sometime in the 1990s.

Shaun – ended up becoming a sales rep for Crestron, a large control company, but ended up heading the AV department at UBC (University of BC) for years. Is now retired.

Lorin – works at CTV television as an audio production engineer.

Rich – worked with Sound Solutions for decades. Sadly passed of a stroke in 2025.

Patrick – worked at a couple of competitive AV companies, until he moved to Gibson, BC and started his own AV contracting and production company. He’s now semi retired, and I see him about once a year.

LOOOOOOORRRRNNNE – moved to Ontario, and has a company that makes custom concrete countertops.

Vancouver Audio Clinic

Andrew – after the demise of Van Audio, he went to work for BC Transit.

David – owned Vancouver Audio Speaker Clinic for years, until his passing in the early 2000s.

Fred – went to work in the movie industry as a special effects operator/designer.

Maurice – moved back to Quebec where he was from.

Marty – worked in IT for a number of years, and now lives in Mexico, off grid.

Gord – went to work for Canadian Airlines, and sadly ended up addicted to fentanyl. No one has heard from him in years.

Sound Solutions

Gordon – worked as a sales rep for a number of other AV companies in the Vancouver area. I would assume he’s retired at this point.

David – worked for a couple of competitive AV companies in the Vancouver area after his own company failed to gain traction. Moved to Saskatchewan after arthritis no longer allowed him to do installation work.

Mat – moved to 100 Mile House, and lives in an off-grid cabin there.

Rob – is still involved in the AV installation field, doing work for Shaw Cable, and a couple of other companies. We see each other regularly.

Acknowledgements and Thank Yous

A big thank you goes out to the following people:

All my co-workers who believed in whatever vision they thought I had. Mostly it wasn’t a vision, it was flying by the seat of my pants, and you came along for the ride. You may have been stoned.

My wife Elisabeth. She knew it was true love when I dragged her all over North America to buy assorted old electronic equipment. The thing is, she does the same thing while thrifting, just not with electronics. We’re a definite match.

Drew – he was an integral part of my electronic life who spent many hours teaching a nerdy kid about transistors and Ohm’s Law, even though I had no idea I needed to know what it was at the time.

My friend Sandy who took over my website work around 12 years ago, who and still keeps my websites on page 1 of Google.

To all my friends and family who have supported me over the years, helped me when I was down and out, and joined me for a few steak dinners when things were up.

To the few people that shafted me over the years, whether clients, suppliers or the odd subcontractor. You couldn’t keep me down, could ya? I got stronger thanks to you.