Sound advice is Harms’ way, soon at new location

FORT COLLINS — A business that has been building attractively encased audio speakers for nearly a half-century is moving from its Old Town Square location onto College Avenue in downtown Fort Collins.

Harms Labs will close its location at 1 Old Town Square, Suite 104, on Wednesday and then open Nov. 1 inside All Sales Vinyl, a record store at 120 S. College Ave. that also has a location in Longmont.

“He’s open twice as many hours, and he’ll be helping show my speakers,” said owner Steve Harms, adding that “I’m moving my repair shop up to my home north of Laporte.”

Harms, 70, began building speakers “back in Chicago when I was 14,” he said. “I had an uncle who had a woodshop, and I learned about how to build speakers. I took courses in electrical engineering but dropped out after three years and went back to building speakers.”

He moved to Colorado at age 17 and opened Harms Labs in 1974 in a house he bought for $23,000 about a mile from downtown Fort Collins.

“At one point, we had 30 employees and built a 9,000-square-foot building that went underwater in the flood of 1997,” Harms said. “I’ve had nine locations, and I’ve been in this location for seven.”

When Harms first opened in Old Town, he said, “90% of the people were from Fort Collins. Now less than half. They’re all tourists. We’re having a much bigger influx of tourism. It helps me because I can sell my speakers to people and I can ship them. But we also had an influx of homeless people. The homeless issue has gotten worse down here. Everybody I talk to says it’s an issue everywhere in Fort Collins, and I guess it’s worse in Denver. But that’s a factor.

“I think moving on College Avenue, we’ll get more exposure,” Harms said. “This location is a lot quieter than it was when I moved in seven years ago. Ever since COVID, it changed the dynamics of people going out, I think. Being on College, you get a lot more people who stick their nose in. Here, people stare in at my store, and I admit it’s not the neatest place in the world, and get kind of freaked out by it.”

Still, “most of our business is out of this store,” Harms said. “A guy came yesterday visiting from Santa Barbara and said ‘I’ve got some old JBLs from 1980. They’re wonderful. I don’t need new speakers.’ Within seven minutes, he ordered a pair of speakers that I’m shipping to him because he heard what ours sounded like and he said, ‘You’re right, your speakers sound a lot better.’ They’re smaller, so his wife liked that, and they look like furniture because they’re covered with linen.”

His speaker-design philosophy may be less than politically correct, but it works for him.

“I build them to look like furniture so I can get them into women’s houses,” Harms said. “A lot of stereo equipment’s ugly, and women want something that looks cute in their house. Guys just care what it sounds like. Girls care what it sounds like and what it looks like. That’s why I’ve had a woman running my woodshop for the past seven years, and that’s why we really have expanded so much.”

He said he can encase speakers in any color and any material.

“We’re going to start going around the country showing our product at trade shows, because I think people are going to be blown away,” he said. “That’s a $750 pair of speakers. I compete with speakers in the $3,000 to $4,000 range because I build it and I sell it. I don’t have to make all the extra markup. You buy something at Best Buy, it was designed in the U.S., made in China, shipped over here, they have to pay shipping, they have to pay manufacturing, and they have to pay Best Buy to sell it. I don’t.”

Harms said he embraces some technological advances and rejects others.

“I have a small computer-controlled cutter. You basically say ‘I want a hole this deep on this piece of wood’ and it does it,” he said. For speaker design, however, he added, “as far as the digital stuff, no, but the digital stuff isn’t where the best sound comes from.”

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