Rethinking The Traditional Stereo Store Once and For All

As I type, I am flying over Calgary and Edmonton enroute back to my home in Los Angeles from a business trip to Amsterdam. I just spent the whole week in Europe seeing clients – specifically Dali Loudspeakers – who are clients as part of the Lenbrook Group. I was invited to go to Denmark for my first time, definitely not my last, to see the Dali factory with a handful of top Canadian audiophile dealers. At dinner in Aarhus, Denmark, the second largest city in the country and a very cool town, we got into some deep conversations. We talked about how John Pax, Harvard’s 33-year-old PhD director and audiophile enabler in the music school, has never once stepped foot in a traditional stereo store (read that story here). This is mind-blowing but true: he’s bought Maggies and McIntosh with his Harvard audio budget but he’s never bought them the way that most of us have. Not in a stereo store. 

Is It Possible That Traditional Stereo Stores Are Now Just Obsolete? 

Overhead is a killer in the audiophile world, especially for dealers. The concept of “build it and they will come” is a globally proven historical failure. Building a bigger, fancier, more acoustically-treated, more custom-installation store is just not a smart business move. This concept has been tested in Beverly Hills, Oslo, Philadelphia, Japan and elsewhere with a zero percent success rate. Just having everything in stock or on display doesn’t make it more tempting to buy for audiophiles. If building the ultimate audiophile store is a proven failure.

Rent Needs to Be Considered a Marketing Expense in a Modern Stereo Store

Audiophiles with experience know how to buy gear. They know how to buy things used. They know how to buy things out of state with no tax. They have every trick in the book wired. Many know that they really should support their local dealer if they want to keep one or two around in their area, but this support is often done under protest by weary consumers. 

Every audiophile dealer aspires to sell to lifestyle customers but, other than lip service, what do they do to find said well-heeled folks? One place to look is rent. Rent is evil, but if you put a retail (or some form of hybrid) store in a location where wealthy people shop, that brutal monthly nut becomes more of a marketing expense than a sheer overhead play. When I was growing up, there was a boutique grocery store in Cherry Hill, New Jersey (home of no cherry trees and no hills, by the way), called Zagara’s. This place was magic in its day. They had the best produce that us I-talians love. They also had a great butcher. They had an equally great fishmonger. Everything on the shelves was curated, and the smell of fresh baked Italian bread permeated the air. The place was glorious. One spot down from Zagara’s in Marlton, New Jersey was a traditional stereo store. This was long, long ago, and they would get legitimate walk-in traffic from Philly sports athletes and other folks capable of spending real money on audio and video. Both retailers are gone now, but they thrived for decades in a symbiotic win-win retail relationship. Perhaps reinventing how a dealer looks at rent could change the outlook for their business? 

We Are Suggesting That Traditional Stereo Stores Need to Be Fully Reinvented

Joe Cali, the consensus greatest stereo salesman in world history (as well as my old boss at Cello Music and Film Los Angeles, along with Mark Levinson, in the 1990s) has a new retail store built around the Danish brand Gryphon. I just visited The House of Gryphon this past week in Denmark, and their gear is stunningly high-end and sonically delicious. What Cali did that was so smart was to locate his showroom inside another custom installer (Cali does the custom installation for Hollywood’s celebrities – like ALL the really big ones – it is a crazy list) at The Pacific Design Center. If you’ve never heard of the PDC, it is a giant shopping mall for uber-expensive interior design elements: $30,000 sofas, $400-per-yard fabrics, crazy expensive stuff – like Gryphon – sell like they aren’t all that crazy inside the walls of the Blue Whale, as it is known. The PDC is supposedly all “to-the-trade” but uber-rich people walk the halls. You never know who might present themselves out of nowhere, and a huge, life-changing sale can happen out of nowhere. Joe is onto something here. 

I would argue that this is the case. Traditional retailers look down on custom install guys because they don’t have a store per se, but the CI guy is using his client’s money to buy the gear, thus never has to “floor” much or “inventory” much with their own money. This is a key reason why CI guys often drive Ferraris but they get in trouble with that act, too, when they show up at their wealthy client’s home and forget that they are a subcontractor, not an upper-class one-percenter (plus). 

There are creative ways to go about selling audio that could merge the earlier concepts without blowing up your overhead. Here are some ideas that I would look into if I ever were to become an audiophile retailer …

I don’t go to the San Fernando Valley very often, but the best reason to do so is to fly somewhere on a private jet from Van Nuys – the most trafficked private airport in the world. Real estate isn’t crazy expensive at airports, especially FBOs (fixed-base operation) for private jets. Imagine if you had a cool setup of world-class headphones, eye-catching turntables and vinyl on display at the FBO that, say, NetJets flies from? The guy who can afford $500,000 for a fully consumable jet card can afford any audiophile turntable that he desires. So can most of the people on his jet going to God-knows-where. The issue with this client is accessibility and awareness. It isn’t like he is going to miss his flight when he’s paying $8,000 an hour to fly somewhere. The plane will wait for that track from Dark Side of the Moon to finish. 

My friend Raman Dooman ran the Brioni Store on Rodeo Drive, which is how I was fortunate enough to get men’s suits well above any price that I could ever afford. Dooman had a display at The Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills and made sure some of the key executives were taken care of well. If the concierge gets someone looking for higher end men’s clothes, where are they sending him? There are even little clothing boutiques in the hotel that quietly do well. Could an audio store thrive with a little listening room at The Peninsula? It is possible, based on the rent. I can tell you that the old guy who I met (one-half of an adorable couple) who drove his 1936 Bugatti sedan with his wife to tea at The Peninsula can respectfully buy anything he or his wife wants. She likes the harp player, so perhaps they want that experience at home? That can be done in this nontraditional audiophile retail model. 

Is Traditional Retail the Wrong Way to Look at Modern Audiophile Stores?

There are other successful audiophile models like the one followed by Sunil Merchant at Sunny Components in Covina, California. He is the top CH Precision dealer in the country, but his industrial building is near train tracks in a nearly all-Asian neighborhood, about 30 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Merchant sells just as many million-dollar audiophile systems as Joe Cali at the PDC or Maier Shadi at The Audio Salon in Santa Monica. Merchant’s model is to offer great sound and a great experience that requires you to drive there. This is the opposite of the FBO or Zagara’s model, but this low-overhead model works, too.

Final Thoughts on New School Audiophile Retail Stores

In February, I was talking with the impressive young Lucca Chesky, before the two of us presented at Harvard University how to get a killer job in the audio business. Lucca is 18 years old and he had already figured it all out. His made-in-America speaker business is cranking out 3D-printed high-value speakers as fast as they can to keep up with the mighty demand so good for Lucca. What he told me that was mind-altering was that he gets all his news from TikTok. What? That’s Chinese spyware, dude. The kids don’t care and the ways that we’ve always done things are  different now. We need to accept that and adjust accordingly. 

Change is not a concept that traditional audiophiles thrive on. Those who can’t adapt will be lost, simply put. The way we consume goods, specifically luxury goods, and media is all different now and it is not going back to the old way. FutureAudiophile.com is killing it on Instagram in 2026 (thank you, Eric Forst), but I am now looking at how to make authentic videos for TikTok. Adapt or die, right? The same goes for audiophile retail. The times they are a-changin’ and we are in an evolve or die model. The good news is that change and evolution might be hard, but they come with a really big upside. 

Would you consider buying your audio gear from a non-typical audiophile dealer? Where do you normally buy your audio gear? Where do you see yourself buying your gear in the future? Share your two cents on this matter and we will post your comments ASAP.