About

Heyo! Thanks for stopping by. I've always felt the About me page on websites is underutilized so this one will be a good time if you're in for some reading haha. 

I started fixing electronics when I was a wee lad at the age of 11. I had a Nintendo DS Lite that stopped working and after it sat in a dresser drawer for a few months, I thought to myself, ya know, I bet there's info on the internet about this! Now mind you, this was in 2006 the year after YouTube was invented but fortunately for me, there was a video showing how to fix the exact issue I was having and it came down to bad solder joints on a capacitor as I recall. My dad took me down to the local RadioShack where I purchased my first soldering iron! I'm sure the soldering job was a complete mess but when I put it back together, the console fired up! I was so stoked about it that I wanted to do it more and figured that if this was a common issue, there must be other people whose consoles I could repair. Back in the day Craigslist was the spot for advertising a service like this so I made an ad and started fixing peoples game consoles. I recall people being a bit caught off guard when they came to the door and found an 11 year old excited to repair their device haha. 

By the time I was 14-15 or so I had gotten a lot better at soldering and my interests had broadened. My parents let me move their Sony CMT-HPX9 all-in-one stereo into my bedroom and as any teenager would...I thought it needed to be louder! So I started riding my bicycle down to thrift stores and looking for speakers! As some of the people who've been collecting for a couple of decades or more would recall, in 2008-10 vintage stereo equipment had not come back into the mainstream yet and thrift stores were a literal gold mine for this sort of stuff. I recall picking up Yamaha CR 1020s or the like for $25 multiple times. I found all sorts of cool equipment but it started with just one Polk Audio RT15i that I swapped onto the Sony all-in-one to improve the sound. I think it was $1.99 at the Salvation Army. From there I upgraded the other speaker, then eventually gave the whole setup back to my parents and used whatever receiver/amplifier combo I found at the thrift. By the time I was 16 my room had more speakers in it than I could use and I had a plethora of gadgets like digital clock/timers, equalizers, reverb units, etc and I was in heaven. I acquired a large set of Altec Lansing speakers shortly thereafter which got so loud in my tiny 12x12 bedroom that I could knock stuff off of shelves a few rooms over when my parents were away haha. 

I've always been a bit of a self starter and learn best by diving in head first and breaking things then learning to fix them. I've since learned to take things more slowly but this served me well as a teenager and I was fortunate enough to have resources like AudioKarma and other forums to look up common issues and learn a bit about each piece of gear that I picked up. I spent hundreds of hours on that forum and others absorbing info and learning/asking questions and still recommend them as some of the best resources for learning that are available.

A quick side bar - It's a pet peeve of mine when people say I am self taught because as much as I did put the effort in to learning, I was essentially an apprentice to the much smarter people on the internet. Learning a skill like this is not something you just figure out by doing it enough without having any outside input. I am a student of the hundreds of people who have contributed to the resources online that are available for learning and I encourage you to be the same. This really is a community effort to keep these old machines alive and that's one of the best parts about it. Don't expect people to hold your hand the whole way, but once you've put in obvious effort to learn, people will see that and you're likely to make some friends and find a mentor or two along the way. 

Around 16-17 I hosted my first AudioKarma meetup and a dozen or so people came to show off various pieces of gear and chat about it all. I didn't advertise it very well so there was also a lot of gear for sale but I don't think much of it sold haha. I remember it being me and a bunch of 40+ year old dudes which was also a laughing point. I'm happy to see more and more younger people interested in physical media, tinkering, and old stereos as time has gone on. 

By 19 I had moved on from repairing electronics and had other plans for my life so I started selling/giving away all of the equipment that I had acquired. It funded the next part of my life but looking back on it, there are a few pieces I wish that I had kept. Thankfully, one of the friends that I gave some gear to kept the Nikko NA 690 integrated amplifier that I gave him; because a few years later at 25, I got married and while looking for furniture at an antique store stumbled across a set of speakers that I had always wanted for a good deal: Tannoy Monitor Golds! I got a good deal on them and that reignited my passion for the hobby. The friend gave me back the Nikko and I dove into trying to find gear again.

Within a couple of years I pieced together a few stereos for friends and one of them suggested that I make videos about the stuff. At the time, I was working full time in marketing was thinking of the stereos as my fun hobby that I didn't want to ruin by turning into a side hustle so I said no but after a few months of thinking about it my friend and I had another conversation and I decided to give it a go so on February 24, 2023 I posted my first stereo related video on YouTube: https://youtube.com/shorts/2lMAaNHFGCE?feature=share

As an adult, I would say that I have a lot more follow through and commitment than I did as a teenager. In high school I did some tinkering and learned how to refoam woofers, clean controls, and do some basic component replacement but troubleshooting circuits and using test equipment was something I wanted to do but never committed to. At 25-26 I was much more interested in that sort of in-depth work and thought that I could use the videos as a way to document me learning to repair gear and maybe make some money. A year and a half or so into making videos, I had somebody ask if I could fix their stereo and that was when I thought that maybe with the service work, I could transition into this full time at some point. 

February 6th, 2025 was the last day at my marketing job. It was a big day. I'd worked at the same company for over 8 years and had a lot of memories there. It was a scary decision to go full time but I had a 6 month long repair queue and couldn't sustain the business on my weekends only anymore. As I write this a few months over a year later, I am really grateful I made that leap. It's been a very stressful 16 months but it's been very rewarding to build something and learn a skill that I love along the way. As it grows I find better habits and systems (like making a website finally haha) that reduce the strain on me and make the process more enjoyable. 

As my skills continue to progress I would really like to focus more on making educational resources to condense down the information into a more easily digestible format for learning. I'd also like to learn more about circuit design and eventually maybe sell some amplifier and speaker kits of my own. Right now though, I'm really enjoying what I get to do for work so I'll keep things steady. 

Thanks for reading this far! ❤️