The Stereo Doctor Story

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry ... you’ll get your home and car audio equipment repaired! Here it is — the unabridged TRUE STORY of a boy, some test equipment, and the miracle of electronic technology.

CHAPTER 1: Young Man With A Live Wire

It was the Summer of 1958, around the same time that both Madonna and Michael Jackson were being born, that a man took his four year old son on a tour of the magnificent Shasta Dam in California. The young boy was impressed by the majesty of the massive man-made structure, but when he saw the giant electricity-generating turbines, he was mesmerized. From that simple spark, the legend of the Stereo Doctor began.

Enthralled by electricity, the young lad began tinkering with his dad’s old portable radio. "I remember," he says today, "that the big song of the day was ‘Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’ by Brian Hyland." Trying to figure out what made the sound come out, he took the back off the radio and started fumbling with the tubes and wires.

Within a few years, and still not quite to age ten, he had his own monaural RCA record player, which he saw fit to convert to stereo — all the better to play his growing collection of Hi-Fi records on. His collection, which then consisted of mostly pop records, was about to get a jump start.

CHAPTER 2: The Doc Meets The Beatles

As with hundreds of thousands of youngsters around the United States, February 1964 was a turning point for the young Stereo Doctor. On February 9, a quartet of young men from Liverpool came to America and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. "I was just amazed by what I saw," he says. "They weren’t like anyone or anything I’d ever heard. I was knocked out." But not as much as the girl from next door, Jennifer Booth. "She went nuts," says the Doc, "screaming and crying. I couldn’t believe the effect they had." [The Beatles]

The effect The Beatles had on the young Doctor was to make him a life-long fan. (He has a remarkable collection of Beatles’ memorabilia, some of which he displays today in his Dublin, Calif., store.) Later in life, he ventured to Liverpool to retrace the footsteps of his musical idols.

All the better to play his Beatles records on, his parents bought a Curtis Mathes console unit with FM Multiplex and a stereo phonograph. "I’d sit and listen to it for hours," he says, "playing records and listening to FM." By 1966, just into his teenage years, the Stereo Doctor-in-training was already fooling around with his own speaker designs.

Among the first of his many mentors was John Booth, Jennifer’s father. "He got me going on audio," the Doc says. "He had built a Heathkit audio system with a Garrard 80 turntable and Wharfdale speakers. The first speakers I designed and built — using Electro-Voice drivers and a twelve-inch Electro-Voice woofer — were copied from John’s designs."

CHAPTER 3: School Days

Now seriously addicted to audio, the young Doc became known as "The Kid With The Portable" at Fairview Junior High in his hometown of Lafayette, Calif. "I’d listen to FM at lunch and between classes," he says. He also made his first entrepreneurial effort at this time. "I’d buy Wint-O-Green Lifesavers for a nickel," he recounts, "and sell them at school for a quarter."

But selling nickel candy at a hefty markup was not his dream career. "We started a band called Phyllum Ploriferus(?)," the Doctor says. "We got the name from a scientific term from something we were learning in a biology class. We played one gig together. I was the lead singer."

Also while in junior high school, the neophyte Stereo Doc was bitten by the CB Radio bug, at a time when the Citizen’s Band was still in its infancy. "A friend of mine named Roger Kruger got into Ham radio," he says. "I got kind of interested in it then, but it led me into the Citizen’s Band. I got a 23-channel, tube-type, crystal-controlled CB radio and built a four-element Yagi antenna." From the hilltop location of his parents’ home, "I got out all over the Bay Area," he says.

That early foray into two-way radio later evolved into a full-blown interest in Amateur radio. Today, he DX’es the world on the Ham bands as W6AV.

In 1968, his burgeoning interest in audio was also growing. "I had met another of my mentors around ’68," he recalls. "His name is Ken Stroube, and he had returned to Lafayette after serving in the military. We met via the Citizen’s Band and became friends."

Stroube had brought back an audio system that he had accumulated in Germany that included a Pioneer SX1500 receiver, Elac 50 turntable, Sony 355 reel-to-reel recorder and Wharfdale speakers. With Stroube’s encouragement, the Doc built what he calls his first "big time" separate component system, complete with a Garrard 40B turntable and Shure cartridge, a Nikko 501 receiver and, of course, home-built speakers.

Stroube also turned the Doc on to the pleasures of two Berkeley institutions: Leopold’s and Rather Ripped Records, each an oasis for record collectors and audiophiles. This discovery led the Doc to the purchase of his first bootleg record album, the unreleased Beatles "Get Back" LP.

CHAPTER 4: Rockin’ In The Seventies

As the ’Seventies ran the course from Acid Rock in the early part of the decade to Disco in its latter days, the Doctor watched as the audio industry evolved from mostly western manufacturers, such as Heathkit, Marantz, McIntosh, H.H. Scott, Harman-Kardan and Dynaco, to Japanese makers like Pioneer, Kenwood and Sansui.

"I mostly got out of the CB hobby and more into audio," he says, looking back. "I sold my Nikko receiver and bought a top-of-the-line Pioneer SX828 receiver for $429 — full retail, with no discount — and upgraded to a Garrard SL95B turntable with a better Shure cartridge, plus a Sony TC630D reel-to-reel deck, and a Sony eight-track recorder."

That last piece of equipment led to another entrepreneurial venture. "I would record two full record albums on an eighty-minute eight-track tape and sell them for $4 each," he recalls. "I earned enough to pay off my entire upgrade."

His electronic and audio expertise also led him into another endeavor in the music industry around the same time. This time, instead of being in front of the microphone, he worked sound for a local group known as Rock Island. "The band occupied a lot of my time," he says. "We worked pretty regularly for a few years, until about 1974, when they split up."

Meanwhile, the Doc had begun attending Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, Calif., where he met another of his mentors, Mike Meyer, an instructor in the school’s Electronics program. "He was a pretty brilliant technician," the Doctor recalls. "Through him, I became more interested in the tech end of electronics."

His career path becoming more evident, the Doctor decided to buy a small repair company with two friends in Walnut Creek, Calif., that specialized in fixing guitar amplifiers, PA systems and musical instruments. The business was short-lived, however, but the Doc was on his way. Mike Meyer had found work with California Sound Engineers in San Francisco, and the Doc would tag along with him on Saturdays, hanging around and doing gofer work.

"The owner of California Sound offered me a job eventually," the Doc remembers. "He asked me to organize their parts department. I said, ’Why not?’ After a few months of begging, they finally ’put me on the (repair) bench.’ I began with turntables, and that became my specialty. They started calling me ’Mr. Turntable.’"

After about a year of enduring the daily cross-Bay commute, Meyer found out about a small repair shop in Walnut Creek that was on shaky legs. He took his soldering gun there and, in a few months, brought the Doc along as well. Along with two other technicians recruited from the DVC Electronics program, the business began to make a turnaround, despite resistance from the owner.

"He fought change kicking and screaming," the Doctor recalls. "Finally, the four of us got fed up and met on our own one Friday morning — without the owner — and it came down to ’Why are we doing this for someone else?’ And from that, we decided to start a company of our own, together."

CHAPTER 5: Going Solo

In late 1976, the foursome — which included Gary Hammer, Tom Ciramitaro, Meyer and the Doctor — began operations in the garage of Meyer’s Pleasant Hill home. Rapidly building a reputation for quality work, they were able move to their enterprise, dubbed "The Sound Company," into a storefront location in Concord after only a few months. It was shortly thereafter that the Doc and Ciramitaro bought out their partners and ventured out on their own.

"We built the company up very nicely," the Doctor recounts. "We got a good reputation locally and the business grew as a result. Not only were we doing repair jobs, but we were reconditioning used Hi-Fi equipment and selling that as well."

Deciding to venture out on his own, the Doctor sold his interest in the company to his partner in 1982 and hung out his own shingle as — what else? — "The Stereo Doctor," working from a showroom and shop on Village Parkway in Dublin, Calif. Following five years of steady growth, he moved his firm to the current Amador Valley Boulevard location in the same town.

Having watched and participated in the growth of the audio industry from his early boyhood, how does the Doctor feel about the all of the changes that have taken place?

"It was once a gentleman’s hobby," he says, "but the mystique in the hobby is gone today. In the early days of audio, it was all new. The industry took off after World War II with broadcast television and Hi-Fi audio, and it was all like smoke and mirrors, like magic."

"Audio has grown up," he notes. "I remember being a kid and hanging out in the audio department at the White Front store, literally like a kid in a candy store. Now, mass merchandising is the rule."

CHAPTER 6: El Doctor de Estereo — Una Vida Romantica

But the Stereo Doctor’s life has not been entirely wires and a high probability of electrical shock. Along the way, he found time to marry the girl of his dreams. Fate, of course, had to play its hand first.

The Doc met the future Mrs. Doc while both were school kids. "We were in junior high, and we met on the playground," he says. "That was probably 1967 or 1968. We dated for a while in high school and were friends, and then she went away and got married when she turned eighteen." But it wasn’t the good Doctor she wed.

One day, five years after having graduated from high school and while still hauling around his broken heart, the Doc remembered his beloved’s birthday (easy enough, being just one week before his own) and tried to contact her through her father’s car dealership in Walnut Creek. To his amazement, he learned that she was no longer married. Their "first date" was their high school reunion, just a short time later, and — ain’t life swell? — they were wed in June of 1978. In November 1979, their daughter, Heather, was born.

CHAPTER 7: Audio Equipment — The Final Frontier!

The Stereo Doctor Story has many exciting chapters still to be written. As the industry evolves, so will the Doc ... to Infinity (and Onkyo, and Paradigm) and beyond!

Watch the young Stereo Doctor and his beloved, Mrs. Stereo Doctor (no, that wasn’t the name she was born with, you dork!), as they battle the forces of evil and defeat the dreaded Cheap Imported Receivers From Hell!

Mrs. Stereo Doctor (left)