Crooks, thieves and con artists.

[stickman]

I came across this old thread and want to set a few things straight about the demise of the Rogersound Labs audio/video chain in Southern California in 1992. RSL began with the original owner building monitors and pro speakers in his garage and selling them via word of mouth. Soon afterwards a retail location was opened to increase sales volume of the speakers and when customers kept wanting to buy the driving electronics as well the store began to stock receivers, integrated amps, tuners, tuntables etc. Over the years the chain expanded in the number of stores and the range of products it carried becoming one of the first big screen TV and home theater specialists in SoCal. Besides offering its own excellent line of speakers RSL also stocked brands like Infinity, KEF, Mission, Triad, Yamaha and others. They featured the excellent Yamaha NS-1000M's for example while it was in production.

By the late 1980's, after many years of solid growth, the original owner grew weary of running the enterprise and decided to sell the company and retire young to spend time with his wife and children. In about 1989 the company was sold to an investor group which used a leveraged buy-out that saddled RSL with a heap of bank debt and depleted it of its cash reserves. At this same time the overall economy was slowing and The Good Guys were moving into the LA area market to offer direct competition in both product lines and level of service. In the midst of this financial stress the investor group hired a mid-western Silo regional manager to run RSL. This arrogant pip-squeak of a man (who shall remain nameless) would not listen to any ideas from any of the long time RSL managers, who began to bail out right after the new President was brought in. All the new leader would talk about was "entry level product" and he started bringing in low quality cheap crap products to attract a larger, downscale customer base (like Silo). All of the long time RSL employees knew this jackass would destroy the company quickly and began taking bets on how much longer the company would last. Just a couple of years later bankruptcy was declared in 1992 and RSL was finished. The saddest part was many people had placed deposits on gear and had store credit coming, and all these folks had to file claims with the bankruptcy court and got pennies on the dollar. RSL's former sterling reputation was forever tarnished by the investor group and their poor judgement in selecting an unsuitable and incompetent President who ran the company into the ground.....

Other tidbits: The Upscale Audio store within the main Canoga Park headquarters store was run by Michael Harvey and sold a good quantity of top quality gear. Customers were urged to make appointments so that they would be undisturbed during their listening / evaluation sessions. Although many brands were stocked most customers left with Audio Research electronics and Martin Logan speakers (long before they became a widely known brand). An interesting variety of turntables, cartridges, and CD players were stocked as well based upon their sonic virtue far more than specifications. I believe that former RSL salesperson Kevin Deal continued the name in a store he opened. While Michael Harvey was very serious and looked like an engineer, Kevin was a very outgoing sort in comparsion.

The RSL computer speakers that were sold a couple of years ago on the internet were being sold by RSL's original owner who came out of retirement to get back in the game on a small scale. The original owner had purchased a large lot of good sounding computer speakers for a low price. I'm sure he's been trying to locate a similar deal since the original batch sold out but hasn't been able to offer anything else yet.

The 70's were a great time for home electronics stores here in Southern California. I used to visit Pacific Stereo (owned by CBS), Cal Stereo (based in my hometown of Torrance), University Stereo, The Federated Group, Adray's, LA Tronics, Rogersound Labs (of course), and later Silo (they sucked). In recent times Comp USA purchased The Good Guys then pulled the plug (brilliant), and the Tweeter chain recently declared bankruptcy. The small boutique shops specializing in higher end gear have pretty much all disappeared as well. Best Buy / Magnolia, Costco, Fry's Electronics, and Circuit City have sadly displaced all the cool stores. Progress......