Where were you in ’72?
Though ListenUp opened its doors in 1972, the story actually begins two years before then at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where friends Stinson and Weiner shared an intense interest in music, film, and high-end audio.

Walt, an economics major with a technical diploma in electronics, was also a student of photography. Partnering with artist Steve Clark, he created a multi-media presentation featuring a slide show illustrating Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman, with music from a state-of-the-art sound system he had assembled. “This show energized my thinking about the relationship between the emotional impact of music and the equipment that reproduces it. The sound quality made a huge impression on the audience.”

Meanwhile, as manager of the college’s campus film program, Steven soon realized the audio wasn’t cutting the mustard: “The sound system where the movies were shown on campus was kind of crummy, so Walt and I hauled our own equipment over to the auditorium and rigged up our own hybrid system.”

This began the first of many experiments with film soundtrack reproduction and early forms of surround sound. The reaction to those experiments was “pretty positive,” according to Weiner. “Of course, it was a bunch of college kids getting to watch Yellow Submarine for free, so who knows?”

Kidding aside, the pair did become quite adept at setting up high-performance sound systems, and for a time they were co-workers an electronics store near campus. During the June 1972 Consumer Electronics Show they made the decision to start their own retail business, and they sold their extensive record collections to raise some seed money.

After scouring the U.S. Statistical Abstract for demographic trends they grabbed Walt’s wife, Mary Kay, piled in the car and embarked on a major road trip, personally visiting over 15 of the most promising markets. They liked what they saw in Denver, and in late 1972 ListenUp opened at Exposition and Pearl – the location that still houses the original retail store to this day. (Over the years this space has expanded from 700 to 11,000 square feet and now includes the service center and professional division.)

“You have to remember what the landscape looked like back then,” says Walt. “A whole generation of people was mesmerized by popular music, more than ever had been in the past. Equipment was not very sophisticated – there was more emphasis on the cabinetry, or the console, than on the sound. At the same time, though, there was tremendous development going on in electronics. But most people didn’t know about it, and most companies were slow to incorporate the advances.”

Putting ListenUp on the map
Working with limited capital, a retail location without a lot of foot-traffic, and no advertising budget to speak of, the pair faced a formidable challenge: how to get the word out about their new venture. Soon, however, an opportunity presented itself.

Walt was disgusted with the poor sound quality of a local radio station’s regular weekend concert broadcasts from Ebbets Field. “I called Don Zucker, KFML’s general manager, and told him that I could dramatically improve the quality of the broadcasts, and I would do it in exchange for advertising – he wouldn’t have to pay us. Well, he thought that was a great idea – especially the part about not having to pay us. We tagged all the shows with the line ‘Sound by ListenUp’ and they ran a ton of radio spots for us.”

Walt and Steve in front of Ebbets Field nighclub in downtown Denver, circa 1974.

Eventually the strategy worked wonders. The live concert broadcasts became a radio mainstay in the area, generating much-needed exposure for the fledgling firm (as well as Ebbets Field, which was named Billboard magazine’s “Club of the Year” in 1975 and 1976), and the phrase “Sound by ListenUp” became a badge of honor for both commercial venues and residential systems. In the short term, however, there was a lot of sweat-equity contributed by the young entrepreneurs.

“We were open from 10 'til 10 seven days a week,” says Steven, “and when we got the Ebbets Field gig we either traded off going down there or we had to close early. We’d broadcast and tape the show, then go back to the shop and listen to the tape, because we were so busy during the actual show we didn’t have a chance to enjoy it. It was a pretty hectic schedule.”

This treasure trove of tapes also provided source material that was much more sonically advanced than LPs of the day. “Although there’s a lot to love about LPs,” says Walt, “they have a tendency to get noisy and they have a fairly limited dynamic range. They couldn’t match the fidelity of reel to reel. Those tapes fed our passion for trying to get closer to the performance, and they gave us a better source that allowed us to evaluate equipment – they helped us hone our views about exactly what equipment was audiophile-quality and what was just run of the mill. We had been at the live performance and we made the tapes ourselves, so we knew exactly what they were supposed to sound like.”

As you can imagine, these “salad days” are remembered pretty fondly. “We worked with a whole bunch of crazy musicians, their sound guys and roadies, so there was a certain amount of hijinks that went on,” recalls Walt.

Custom installation, seventies-style
ListenUp did one of its first true custom installations at Tante Louise restaurant in east Denver in 1975. “Corky Douglas wanted to have a great sound system that fit into his upscale décor,” remembers Steven. “So we pre-wired the place and then hung some wall-mounted flat-panel speakers – an idea that was pretty advanced for its time. We added a Crown professional open-reel tape machine, and I even recorded some tapes so he’d have something to play.”

Other custom systems followed, both in commercial establishments (including quite a few discos and fern bars, one suspects) and homes, and a number of them included the then novel product category of on-wall speakers. By 1978 ListenUp had opened a full-fledged commercial/professional sound division, which eventually created large-scale systems at such well-known venues as the old Mile High Stadium, Folsom Field at the University of Colorado, Hughes Stadium at Colorado State University, Fiddler’s Green Amphitheater, and the National Western Stock Show Complex, to name just a few.

Over the Rainbow
Several years after Ebbets Field ended its glorious run in 1976, concert promoters Barry Fey and Chuck Morris were looking for a new, bigger room. They finally decided on a location at Monaco and Evans in Southeast Denver and named their new 1,300-seat venue the Rainbow Music Hall. ListenUp installed the sound system, as well as an on-location recording studio for more live broadcasts and taping.

“We created a pretty amazing system – it still gets talked about,” says Walt. “We were doing more live broadcasting than had ever been done in Denver’s history. We worked with KADX, KHOW, KBPI, KFML and several others. The stations covered a lot of ground – jazz, country, rock, free-form. And we worked with some of the legends of the music industry, such as Bob Dylan, Miles Davis and U2. It really was a heady time, with a lot of exposure for ListenUp and the Rainbow, which was, like Ebbets, named Billboard magazine’s ‘Club of the Year.’ Then we branched out into classical, recording the Denver [now Colorado] Symphony Orchestra, and the National Repertory Orchestra, too.”  

By the early eighties, having made a name for itself in both professional and residential systems (how often do you get to buy equipment from an outfit that has worked with Bob Dylan?), ListenUp was uniquely positioned to take advantage of the seismic change about to hit the audio world.

Setting the stage for the digital revolution
 “We bet our whole company on compact disc,” said Walt in a 1987 interview. While many audio retailers supported the new format, ListenUp was one of the very few that actually laid the groundwork for the CD market before products ever hit the streets.

In 1982 Steven attended the Japan Audio Fair, and while visiting the Sony booth he came across the very first commercially available CD player. (That’s right – the very first CD player!) He put on a pair of headphones and started listening to Miles Davis’ The Man With the Horn. “About five minutes later somebody started poking me,” Steven recalls. “I had lost all track of time, and my jaw was hanging down.” Immediately smitten with the new format, he brought back several samples of the new discs and technical information for further review.  

Around this time Walt’s term expired as president of PARA (Professional Audio Retailers Association), an industry trade group he helped found. He asked to be put on the Compact Disc Group, which was involved in the development and rollout of this burgeoning technology in the U.S. As the partners studied the specifications and determined that manufacturer support seemed to be strong, they gambled that CD was truly going to be the next big thing.

Walt and Steven went back to Japan and bought multiple copies of every CD they could lay their hands on – enough to fill two suitcases. Their return to the states turned into an episode right out of a sitcom, as the customs agents detained them, highly suspicious of all these strange plastic squares with the silver discs inside. Fortunately, after a lengthy discussion our heroes were finally able to explain that they were just keeping up with Japan’s latest technology.

ListenUp forged a partnership with Sony and then cranked up the Denver public relations machine, featuring the first sample CD players in countless radio programs, TV broadcasts and newspaper stories. In fact, Walt personally took CD players to radio stations KBCO, KCFR/KVOD and KBPI and spun the first compact discs ever played on the air in Colorado.

With the market sufficiently primed, ListenUp became Sony’s largest dealer of CD players in the country for 1983. For several years, until they became a mass market commodity, ListenUp also offered one of the broadest selections of compact disc software in the country, which further hastened acceptance of the then revolutionary format.

How did an independent dealer in Denver become such an important player in this product introduction?

According to Walt, a lot of the competition didn’t want CD to succeed. “Record stores definitely didn’t want the format, because they already had two formats – LP and cassette. Audio dealers didn’t want it because a lot of their business was in turntables and cartridges. They thought if they could maintain the status quo they could protect their revenue stream. But we never thought we could protect the status quo – and we didn’t want to. I think that’s been a hallmark of the company: we understand that technology is an unstoppable force, so it’s best to try to get ahead of it a little bit instead of trying to play catch-up.”

ListenUp (and its principals!) really came of age in the '80s.

New headquarters, same philosophy
At the beginning of the new millennium, ListenUp was faced with a challenging situation when the T-Rex highway project gobbled up the ground under LU’s corporate headquarters and forced a relocation. Because headquarters includes the corporate office, custom installation department, and warehouse facility, the move proved to be quite an undertaking – and an opportunity.

Walt and Steven decided to re-invent the previous custom showroom and create a whole new experience for customers interested in whole-house entertainment. The new showroom boasts lifestyle vignettes and demo areas for cutting-edge systems, the pièce de résistance being the Reference Theater. A collaboration between ListenUp and Keith Yates, widely regarded as the world’s leading residential theater designer, this system truly expands the boundaries of home cinema performance.

The ListenUp Reference Theater at our new custom showroom has been nationally recognized.

Walt explains the impetus for this new system this way: “The company has always had an obsessive focus on quality – quality of the customer’s experience and quality of the equipment. We believe that we have a responsibility to try to recreate the emotional impact of the performing arts in someone’s home. And that’s not an easy task. Some might say it’s an impossible task. But with the advances that have taken place in electronics over the years we’ve been able to get closer to the ideal – and the Reference Theater represents our best efforts.”

Much as the reel-to-reel tapes did back in the Ebbets Field days, the Reference Theater also provides a type of testing ground in which the experts at ListenUp can accurately evaluate different equipment and thus make more informed recommendations to customers. (The Reference Theater will be profiled in an upcoming issue of Home Theater magazine, so be on the lookout!)

Technologies for today and tomorrow
Contemporary homes now include a number of different electronics systems, and here’s where ListenUp’s 35 years of wide-ranging experience really comes in handy. “Our knowledge of commercial systems prepared us well when home systems began to get more complex,” says Steven. “Commercial systems have always had to be installed, of course, so it was an easy transition to apply those skills to residential jobs.”

It’s quite a bit different than the esoteric music systems that were ListenUp’s bread and butter back in the seventies, and yet, according to Walt, the ethic remains the same. “Now we’re involved in ‘technology contracting’ and we do a lot of systems integration, but we still try to bring some artistic sensitivity to the job. That sensitivity has traditionally meant that we support the vision of a musician or director and try to recreate it as closely as possible. Today, that sensitivity might also mean having respect for the architectural integrity of the home when we tie security, automation, lighting, distributed audio/video and home theater together.”

So what does the future hold?

“More and more, people are going to get their content over the Internet,” Walt believes. “That’s a fairly fundamental shift in content delivery – away from analog wires and hardware platforms to digital wiring and software platforms… Structured wiring has become an important part of new homes, and once that’s in place, then you’ll want to hang products off that infrastructure. ListenUp is positioned very well to provide those sorts of value-added services.”

For the foreseeable future, then, it all comes down to custom systems and maximum service. For ListenUp, it always has.