Reviving this old thread after spotting a pair of Playback speakers out in the wild today. I had never heard of Playback, so I deduced that they must be a "house brand" and passed on them but, that said, they did look quite nice. They had walnut cabinets, similar in size and design to a JBL L100, with an interesting folded fabric grille. Inside was a 10" woofer, a horn mid and a sort of cheap looking tweeter. It was called the Playback Model IV with no indication where it was manufactured.
Anyone ever hear of an electronic store chain called Playback?
- Thread starter Brian McGowa
- Start date
quoted from another post by Larry regarding Project 1 gear:
http://audiokarma.org/forums/index....ne-mark-ivb-what-is-this.231590/#post-9209616
http://audiokarma.org/forums/index....ne-mark-ivb-what-is-this.231590/#post-9209616
My encounter with Playback was during 1981 at a store in Lansing, Michigan. I was a medical student at MSU and an avid stereo nut. When I went in, they had already pared down most of their regular gear and inventory. The place had a lot of room, and much of it was now fairly empty. I spotted a couple of slightly dusty turntables on a shelf, they said they were trade ins or returns, something like that. I asked if they would take $150 for the pair of them, even though they didn't have dustcovers. Guy looked at me, then looked at his fellow salesman, then said with a big grin "Sure! We'll do it, what the hell." So that's how I ended up loading a Thorens TD165 and Thorens TD166 mk. II into my little Corolla fastback and took them back to the house I was staying at.
In retrospect, I should have also made a deal on any of the cartridges they still had too. About 2 weeks later, I drove by, and the place was bare and shuttered.
Reminds me also of going into a Service Merchandise in Grand Rapids, Mi. a year or two later and looking at a new pair Rogers LS3/5a speakers in teak, could have picked those up for about $500/pr.
In retrospect, I should have also made a deal on any of the cartridges they still had too. About 2 weeks later, I drove by, and the place was bare and shuttered.
Reminds me also of going into a Service Merchandise in Grand Rapids, Mi. a year or two later and looking at a new pair Rogers LS3/5a speakers in teak, could have picked those up for about $500/pr.
Back in the day about 5 miles away from my house in Chicago in the suburb "Oak Park" there was a Musicraft, Midwest Stereo and a Playback store all on one block. I did plenty of stereo shop hopping there in the seventies, it was paradise!! 
Playback Info
I was an assistant store manager for Playback from 1976 until the store closed in 1981.
Playback was headquartered in Oakbrook, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. It was founded and owned by Shelby Young, a former executive for Allied Radio before Allied was purchased in 1970 by Tandy (parent company of Radio Shack).
Playback carried major Hi-Fi brands like Fisher, Electrovoice, and Scott, that were huge names in the early days of hi-fi, along with Pioneer, Sansui, Sanyo, Technics (Panasonic's Hi-Fi line), Teac, Phillips, and Marantz. Our main speaker lines were Pioneer, Marantz, Altec-Lansing, EPI, and Cerwin-Vega.
Cerwin-Vega sold best to hip-hop and rock listeners, while EPI was the speaker of choice for jazz and classical listeners, with a demonstrably flatter frequency response. I always wanted a pair of EPI 100 speakers (their bookshelf model) for myself, but never got them before the store closed.
Our discount electronics line (that might be considered about equivalent to today's Emerson brand in quality) was Kingsway. We stopped selling that brand about 1977.
We also sold car stereo--Pioneer, Sanyo, Clarion, and our house brand, Skanda, which we also stopped selling about 1977-78. In addition, we carrried Jensen speakers (the original coaxial/triaxials), as well as Midland and Cobra CB Radios (this was the height of the CB craze, good buddy)
Our "esoteric" line was Phase Linear (The first amplifier company that Bob Carver founded). Some stores also sold Klipsch speakers.
We also sometimes took trade-ins and sold used equipment.
Our major house brand for hi-fi was Project One which had specs that compared very favorably with all the major brands--I bought a Project One turntable, receiver, cassette deck and speakers in 1981. The tape deck stopped working about 15 years later, and the almost 30 year old speakers are wearing out, but everything else still works great.
In the late 1970s we picked up a few new items. First, a brand new technology called a video cassette recorder. We sold Sony BetaMax, and VHS systems by JVC, Phillips (Magnavox) and Quasar (a sister company to Panasonic under the Matsushita umbrella). The first VCRs were huge machines about 18 inches wide and a foot high, and were top-load instead of front load (pressing eject would lift a video cassette carrier out of the top of the machine for tape insertion/removal). In 1980 we also started selling the Pioneer VP1000 laserdisk (the original disk-based video). This was about 15 years before DVDs were invented.
The store I worked in was staffed by a store manager, an assisant manager, and 2-5 part-time (20-30 hours/week) sales people. Stores in larger cities could have more sales people and perhaps another assistant manager.
The sales people earned spiffs for selling certain items (the company called it a "SUB" - Sell Up Bonus) The way it worked is they would advertise, say, a $399 Pioneer receiver for $299 (which was probably about our cost). If the customer absolutely wanted the Pioneer, no problem, we would sell it to them, but if we could get them to buy a unit that we made more profit on, the sales person would make a bonus. In those days Pioneer was the king of the upper-mid stereo market and they knew it--so the company earned very little money selling it.
(Note that while Pioneer was often used as a "loss leader" (an item that leads the ad but that we made very little profit on, used to draw the customer into the store) this was not "Bait and Switch" -- we always had the advertised item available if that is what the customer wanted, unless there was truly a mistake in ordering/shipping; our job was simply to point out other options that would meet the customers needs just as well, such as better specs, same price, or same specs lower price, but that we would make more profit on.)
A sales person might for example make a $10-$30 SUB by selling a receiver, depending on brand and price. The cool thing about SUBs in those days, was that until about 1977-78 they were paid immediately, right out of the cash register. I often earned my lunch money by selling a piece of equipment, and paid for many a date by selling a system. The company started to get nervous about employees taking cash out of the drawer and putting it in their pocket, so SUBs started to come on our paycheck as a separate line item. I understood the reasoning, but I think having cash in hand that day was much more of a performance incentive than getting it two weeks later in a paycheck.
The sales person had a little bit of discretion on discounting, but not much. The gross margin (the percentage of the sales price that is left after paying the manufacturer for the item) on a typical item if we sold it at full retail was usually about 40%, which may sound like a lot but is nothing compared to the mark up that is in other retail items such as clothing.
The store manager would set a gross margin limit like 35% and until further notice the sales person could discount down to that limit and still earn the SUB. There were no quotas per se, but salespeople were compared to one another for overall sales level, so sometimes we would forego the SUB and discount the items to get the sale.
Toward the end of the chain's existence things started falling apart a bit. There was much dissension over a move that Shelby Young made that cost the sales people money. He finally got Pioneer to sell him one item that he could use as an advertised special that was actually profitable--for him. It was a turntable that retailed for about $299 and he would advertise for between $159 - $199. I think he was paying about $99-$129 cost for them. The problem was that he left the "book cost" that out SUBs were based on at about $239. So as far as the sales person's bonus was concerned every one of those items that went out the door, we were losing $40 - $80 each. Customers would want to put that turntable into a system, and it would drag the profit margin down for the whole sale to the point where we could not make a SUB no matter what we sold it with.
One of the managers I worked for was a great salesperson and great at training and motivating the sales staff, but he was horrible at paperwork. When our store's performance earned him a promotion to store manager at the largest store in our district, the company, as it always did sent in a company auditor to review the books so if there were any problems the new manager would not be blamed for an inherited situation. We earned a 19 score out of 100 on that audit.
The auditor, who also was one of the VPs for the company, struck terror into most employees' hearts because he was an all-business person who did not like to be joked with, and spending one moment having fun on the job was a moment not selling. He took me aside after his audit and said, "I know the person who was running the store so I you didn't have anything to do with this mess, but it has to be fixed and has to be fixed now."
I spent the next six months in the office, missing sales bonuses, going over every sale, every day's business, every bank deposit for the previous 18 months. In the old manager's desk drawer I found a bank deposit from several months earlier that had never been taken to the bank, and I discovered the cause of our store's inventory coming up $75,000 short on merchandise. (It turned out to be an accounting error, not actual missing merchandise--ironically, the error was made by our old manager, but at his new store. He mistakenly recorded on the books a transfer of a truckload of merchandise from his new store to our store, but that actually was physically delivered to another store--they had a $75,000 overage on their inventory, more actually in the store than they had on their books).
Anyway, after six months of work I improved that audit score from 19% to 96%. The VP congratulated me and told I'd done an amazing piece of work fixing all the problems and I felt great about my future with the company--until two weeks later when the company announced they were going out of business. I stayed until the bitter end and I was the person who locked the front door on our final day of existence, and with some sadness handed my store and alarm keys over the store manager.
I met some good friends working there, one of whom, my last store manager, I still have contact with now, 30 years later.
AudioLarry....who manufactured the Project One gear? There is a lot of confusion over this issue, but hopefully that since you worked for Playback, you can dispell all the myths!!!
I don't know if those speakers were the same as most of the Playback line, but most were made by Utah. If you dare, remove the woofer and the name should be stamped on the frame, or there might be a sticker on the magnet. I was an Asst Manager of a Playback store in Lansing, MI in 1975/76.
Was Jack the District Manager? If so, he came in my store one night after closing...DRUNK, DRUNK, DRUNK. He took my store keys and anounced that everyone was fired. We all got 10 months of unemployment! (We had a party because we all hated the guy)
I called all the staff that night and told them what had happened. We all met the next morning at the unemployment office at 8 AM and filed for benefits. Playback in Chi-town tried to fight it until they found out the District Mngr had been drunk and he had fired us illegally. They gave up and we all got our checks after that. Four days later a skeleton crew from the Saginaw store re-opened the Lansing store.
I was an Asst Mngr of a Playback store in Lansing, MI in 1975/76. We didn't have a guy in our store to do repairs , but rather, a guy came once a week in a van and did all the warranty work. We did have a work bench in the back near the rear exit. We had a couple of sales people who were electronics students at MSU and they would fix the simpler things, like stuff that needed to be re-soldered. I know that after you take off the walnut case, you can see that most Project One gear were made by Matsushita, but a few were made by Sansui. I just figured that Matsushita had been the primary supplier and Sansui was the secondary supplier.
I was the Asst. Mngr. of that store in 1975/76. We had some tasty top end stuff in there...Ohm F's, McIntosh, Klipse, Phase Linear, EV Voice of the Theater, EV Interface 1's. We had supplied GrandMothers bar with 12 pair of Bose 901's We also carried Akai reel to reel decks, Revox, and others. Turntables ranged from Garrard and BSR to Shure SME. We used to put toghter a "Back to School" system for MSU freshmen of a Project One reciever, BSR turntable (with whatever cheap ceramic cart came in them) and a pair of Utah Model 7 (8" 2-way?) bookshelves for $199. We sold HUNDREDS the first months of school.
I remember that we had a terrarium in the center listening area for decoration but the funny part was we grew pot there! No one ever noticed because we never let it get more than a few inches tall! It was fun to point it out to some of the "Heads AKA Stoners" that came in. The people from corporate never knew.
mhinsda
Active Member
Playback Info
I was an assistant store manager for Playback from 1976 until the store closed in 1981.
Playback was headquartered in Oakbrook, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. It was founded and owned by Shelby Young, a former executive for Allied Radio before Allied was purchased in 1970 by Tandy (parent company of Radio Shack).
Playback carried major Hi-Fi brands like Fisher, Electrovoice, and Scott, that were huge names in the early days of hi-fi, along with Pioneer, Sansui, Sanyo, Technics (Panasonic's Hi-Fi line), Teac, Phillips, and Marantz. Our main speaker lines were Pioneer, Marantz, Altec-Lansing, EPI, and Cerwin-Vega.
Cerwin-Vega sold best to hip-hop and rock listeners, while EPI was the speaker of choice for jazz and classical listeners, with a demonstrably flatter frequency response. I always wanted a pair of EPI 100 speakers (their bookshelf model) for myself, but never got them before the store closed.
Our discount electronics line (that might be considered about equivalent to today's Emerson brand in quality) was Kingsway. We stopped selling that brand about 1977.
We also sold car stereo--Pioneer, Sanyo, Clarion, and our house brand, Skanda, which we also stopped selling about 1977-78. In addition, we carrried Jensen speakers (the original coaxial/triaxials), as well as Midland and Cobra CB Radios (this was the height of the CB craze, good buddy)
Our "esoteric" line was Phase Linear (The first amplifier company that Bob Carver founded). Some stores also sold Klipsch speakers.
We also sometimes took trade-ins and sold used equipment.
Our major house brand for hi-fi was Project One which had specs that compared very favorably with all the major brands--I bought a Project One turntable, receiver, cassette deck and speakers in 1981. The tape deck stopped working about 15 years later, and the almost 30 year old speakers are wearing out, but everything else still works great.
In the late 1970s we picked up a few new items. First, a brand new technology called a video cassette recorder. We sold Sony BetaMax, and VHS systems by JVC, Phillips (Magnavox) and Quasar (a sister company to Panasonic under the Matsushita umbrella). The first VCRs were huge machines about 18 inches wide and a foot high, and were top-load instead of front load (pressing eject would lift a video cassette carrier out of the top of the machine for tape insertion/removal). In 1980 we also started selling the Pioneer VP1000 laserdisk (the original disk-based video). This was about 15 years before DVDs were invented.
The store I worked in was staffed by a store manager, an assisant manager, and 2-5 part-time (20-30 hours/week) sales people. Stores in larger cities could have more sales people and perhaps another assistant manager.
The sales people earned spiffs for selling certain items (the company called it a "SUB" - Sell Up Bonus) The way it worked is they would advertise, say, a $399 Pioneer receiver for $299 (which was probably about our cost). If the customer absolutely wanted the Pioneer, no problem, we would sell it to them, but if we could get them to buy a unit that we made more profit on, the sales person would make a bonus. In those days Pioneer was the king of the upper-mid stereo market and they knew it--so the company earned very little money selling it.
(Note that while Pioneer was often used as a "loss leader" (an item that leads the ad but that we made very little profit on, used to draw the customer into the store) this was not "Bait and Switch" -- we always had the advertised item available if that is what the customer wanted, unless there was truly a mistake in ordering/shipping; our job was simply to point out other options that would meet the customers needs just as well, such as better specs, same price, or same specs lower price, but that we would make more profit on.)
A sales person might for example make a $10-$30 SUB by selling a receiver, depending on brand and price. The cool thing about SUBs in those days, was that until about 1977-78 they were paid immediately, right out of the cash register. I often earned my lunch money by selling a piece of equipment, and paid for many a date by selling a system. The company started to get nervous about employees taking cash out of the drawer and putting it in their pocket, so SUBs started to come on our paycheck as a separate line item. I understood the reasoning, but I think having cash in hand that day was much more of a performance incentive than getting it two weeks later in a paycheck.
The sales person had a little bit of discretion on discounting, but not much. The gross margin (the percentage of the sales price that is left after paying the manufacturer for the item) on a typical item if we sold it at full retail was usually about 40%, which may sound like a lot but is nothing compared to the mark up that is in other retail items such as clothing.
The store manager would set a gross margin limit like 35% and until further notice the sales person could discount down to that limit and still earn the SUB. There were no quotas per se, but salespeople were compared to one another for overall sales level, so sometimes we would forego the SUB and discount the items to get the sale.
Toward the end of the chain's existence things started falling apart a bit. There was much dissension over a move that Shelby Young made that cost the sales people money. He finally got Pioneer to sell him one item that he could use as an advertised special that was actually profitable--for him. It was a turntable that retailed for about $299 and he would advertise for between $159 - $199. I think he was paying about $99-$129 cost for them. The problem was that he left the "book cost" that out SUBs were based on at about $239. So as far as the sales person's bonus was concerned every one of those items that went out the door, we were losing $40 - $80 each. Customers would want to put that turntable into a system, and it would drag the profit margin down for the whole sale to the point where we could not make a SUB no matter what we sold it with.
One of the managers I worked for was a great salesperson and great at training and motivating the sales staff, but he was horrible at paperwork. When our store's performance earned him a promotion to store manager at the largest store in our district, the company, as it always did sent in a company auditor to review the books so if there were any problems the new manager would not be blamed for an inherited situation. We earned a 19 score out of 100 on that audit.
The auditor, who also was one of the VPs for the company, struck terror into most employees' hearts because he was an all-business person who did not like to be joked with, and spending one moment having fun on the job was a moment not selling. He took me aside after his audit and said, "I know the person who was running the store so I you didn't have anything to do with this mess, but it has to be fixed and has to be fixed now."
I spent the next six months in the office, missing sales bonuses, going over every sale, every day's business, every bank deposit for the previous 18 months. In the old manager's desk drawer I found a bank deposit from several months earlier that had never been taken to the bank, and I discovered the cause of our store's inventory coming up $75,000 short on merchandise. (It turned out to be an accounting error, not actual missing merchandise--ironically, the error was made by our old manager, but at his new store. He mistakenly recorded on the books a transfer of a truckload of merchandise from his new store to our store, but that actually was physically delivered to another store--they had a $75,000 overage on their inventory, more actually in the store than they had on their books).
Anyway, after six months of work I improved that audit score from 19% to 96%. The VP congratulated me and told I'd done an amazing piece of work fixing all the problems and I felt great about my future with the company--until two weeks later when the company announced they were going out of business. I stayed until the bitter end and I was the person who locked the front door on our final day of existence, and with some sadness handed my store and alarm keys over the store manager.
I met some good friends working there, one of whom, my last store manager, I still have contact with now, 30 years later.
Playback TJ
New Member
The first thing people need to understand about Stereo Retail Sales back in the day is that it was the hidden third leg of the tripod that was the music industry. No record sales without record player sales! (Stereo sales)
Playback was in business up until late summer 1981. I worked there until the very last day. I was at the store in Schaumburg, IL. There were a total of 64 stores at its peak. They grew to fast, bought into a huge mainframe computer system to track merchandise sales that never worked the way it was intended and bought into video products when top loading VCRs were over $1000.00.
It got too big too fast and needed cash flow badly. They started having huge sales (Like Loopfest and the Pioneer Truckload Sale) and huge amounts of gear was getting damaged or stolen when packing out.
Their marketing was top notch but management was weak. Sales training was mostly focused on Home Stereo sales and things like Car Stereo (my dept) and Video suffered. I finally got a few of my stores top salesmen to embrace car stereo sales and they made bank once they “got it”.
we were also the top concert promoter in Chicago at the time. Add for stadium show concerts always mention Playback as the “Sponsor”.
Still the best time I ever had working somewhere! Coke habit and all! LoL
Picture doesn't show.
I was able to open the link in another window but it is hard to navigate.
https://videttearchive.ilstu.edu/?a....1&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-playback------
https://videttearchive.ilstu.edu/?a....1&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-playback------
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matsellah
Musicoholic
I know. I can't figure it out. I keep getting an error trying to upload saying the file is too big (928kb).
I was able to clip this link off of the site. There are a lot of interesting ads and articles on that site but it is nearly impossible to navigate. A lot of cool gear . . . miss those days!
https://videttearchive.ilstu.edu/?a...ne&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-playback------
https://videttearchive.ilstu.edu/?a...none&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-stereo------
https://videttearchive.ilstu.edu/?a...os=7&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-stereo------
I saw "The All Star Frogs" many times in Chicago in the very early 70's . . .
https://videttearchive.ilstu.edu/?a...ne&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-playback------
https://videttearchive.ilstu.edu/?a...ne&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-playback------
https://videttearchive.ilstu.edu/?a...none&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-stereo------
https://videttearchive.ilstu.edu/?a...os=7&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-stereo------
I saw "The All Star Frogs" many times in Chicago in the very early 70's . . .
https://videttearchive.ilstu.edu/?a...ne&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-playback------
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