For Walt Stinson, who co-founded the groundbreaking…
…Denver-based audio-video retailer ListenUp with Steven Weiner and MaryKay Stinson, his wife, receiving the Colorado Music Hall of Fame’s Community Impact Award was doubly important. The honor both acknowledged the major role ListenUp played in the state’s music scene and allowed future generations to better know and understand its journey.
“When we heard about the award, we were, of course, super-excited,” Stinson said, “because the historical record is really important for a company like ours. I think even a lot of our employees haven’t heard our story.”
“It’s very gratifying to be recognized, but that wasn’t our goal,” Weiner added. “Our goal was to provide our customers with the best sound. That’s all we really cared about — and everything else just fell into place.”
Weiner and the Stinsons met at Knox College…
…in Galesburg, Illinois, but their bond solidified after graduation, when Walt and Steven landed jobs at the same local electronics shop. After a mishap involving the sound system for a college film series Weiner oversaw, even after matriculating, they realized that they had a shared mission: to use the most modern technology to improve sound reproduction in homes and commercial settings. And to do so, they needed to start their own business.
Uncertain where to put down stakes, Walt and Steven embarked on a months-long tour of American cities in 1972 — and they chose Denver after discovering that the city didn’t have any outlets that could deliver what they envisioned. The project they dubbed ListenUp wasn’t an immediate success; the first shop, a 400-square-foot space on Pearl Street, was tiny, and the twenty-somethings became de facto vegetarians because that’s the only kind of food they could afford. But a corner was turned when Walt heard a poor-quality broadcast of a live concert on area radio station KFML and suggested to general manager Don Zucker that ListenUp could radically improve the sonics.
This wasn’t an empty boast.
Even as ListenUp continued to gain momentum as a premium retail outlet for the general public, the store’s personnel branched out to offer related services for commercial use.
A prime example: Beginning at Ebbets Field, a club managed by Colorado Music Hall of Famer and co-founder Chuck Morris, ListenUp revolutionized the quality of live-music broadcasting not just in Colorado but nationwide. Sets by many of the 1970s’ greatest artists (e.g., Tom Waits, Willie Nelson, John Prine, Muddy Waters, Little Feat) fill ListenUp’s archives, which the store maintains as part of the period’s historical record. A quartet of Live From Ebbets Fieldrecordings were released as well. Additionally, ListenUp engineered live radio broadcasts for KBCO, KBPI, KVOD and other Colorado outlets.
Meanwhile, the crew formed a partnership with inductee Barry Fey that made the slogan “Sound by ListenUp” the mark of excellence for Colorado concerts. The firm also helped to create state-of-the-art sound systems for venues such as the Rainbow Music Hall, the Boulder Theater and Fiddler’s Green.
Another significant benchmark happened in the early 1980s
…when ListenUp took up the cause of a new music format, compact discs. Stinson introduced CDs to the area by way of a Rainbow Music Hall concert starring Grubstake, led by Colorado Music Hall of Fame inductee Harry Tuft. Mid-show, the band’s sound was slowly replaced by a pristine CD recording — a trick so mind-blowing at the time that the incident is featured in the 2010 book Perfecting Sound Forever: The Aural History of Recorded Music.
Innovations like this one kept ListenUp at the technological forefront and helped the brand expand to four stores on the Front Range, including a Denver flagship whose 30,000 square-foot space dwarfs the original shop, plus an outpost in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Thanks to ListenUp, the sound in Colorado and beyond just keeps getting better.
By Michael Roberts
