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Harmony A/V

In the late-80s, Harmony had a store on Fillmore, somewhere near Sacramento. I don't even recall if it had a sign in front, so no wonder everyone missed it! This was where I saw Conrad-Johnson for the very first time; Frank was fixing a HUGE power amp.

Anyway, I went to Lowell High, and when I passed through the West Portal neighborhood on MUNI Metro, you couldn't miss Harmony A/V. One of my classmates, Alicia (well, her dad) bought Marantz electronics from Harmony.

In those days, audio stores did not know how to deal with us teenagers, especially when I was accompanied not by my parents, but by my female friends. Frank and his staff could be busy at times, but they were, unlike many of the other stores, not jerks to us. And that's why, when we later weren't penniless, we came back to Harmony. In our experiences, only David Tam at Ultimate Sound, and Stewart Ono at Audio Directions in Honolulu understood that, if you treated us respectfully now, we would, when we became working adults, become future customers. The others short-sightedly wrote us off as penniless teenagers. Heck, in summer '92, when ACS and I went to dB Audio in Berkeley, the staff immediately steered us away from the expensive Jeff Rowland and Thiel, and shuffled us into the corner with the little Creek stack. Moreover, the salesman sported an obvious "I hope they don't breed" look. Poor guy didn't know that ACS worked at, and was very good at, Victoria's Secret, and was trained in reading customers.

When I entered high-end audio in 1990, I needed speaker wire for an Adcom GFA-535. No brainer; I went out to West Portal with my girlfriend, KJ. Frank (he is mentioned in the PAC IDOS post above) cut some AudioQuest F-14 from a spool, stripped off about an inch of white jacket, and twisted the copper leads together.

Later, we'd buy Grado headphones, B&K preamp, Pro-Ject turntable, and Totem speakers from Harmony.


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