The next generation

RE-TALES

- JULIE MULLINS

A few audio retailers have recently closed their doors due to pandemic-related hardship or retirement—Lyric Hi-Fi in NYC is a landmark case. So it’s refreshing to hear about a longstanding bricks-and-mortar dealership that has avoided that fate: House of Stereo in Jacksonville, Florida.

Jacksonville is unusually well-served for a city its population size. It is home to three audio dealerships, all started in the 1960s: House of Stereo, Hoyt Stereo, and Behrens. The three owners “grew old together,” Joe Parvey, the business’s new owner, told me in a telephone interview.

Bill Gibson founded House of Stereo in 1969 and ran it for almost 50 years. When, in 2018, he decided to retire, the store’s future was in doubt.

Parvey was a local kid who grew up visiting House of Stereo with his father, who is friends with Gibson. Parvey became interested in reproduced music: first home theater and then, when he hit his 30s, two-channel audio. He attended the Fox School at Temple University and studied international business and then established a career as a data center and operations specialist. By the time he left that industry, he was a “disaster recovery/cloud infrastructure architect.” Meanwhile, he started to dabble in audio servers—a different kind of data center, you might say, on a smaller scale. Around 2013, he began taking server prototypes to House of Stereo to test them with Gibson’s high-end systems. A couple of years later, he started up his own company: Wolf Audio Systems.