by Len Lear
Bill McKinley, the 72-year-old owner of Chestnut Hill Audio, doesn’t mind being told he’s “old school.”
Moreover, he says, he is not the only one.
“Record players have made a comeback and are more popular today than ever,” he told the Local. “Vinyl and records are making people listen again.”
McKinley has operated the store on Germantown Avenue between West Abington and Willow Grove Avenue since 2016, when he purchased it from previous owner John Adams, who founded the then-Community Audio company in 1982 selling electronic equipment out of his home in Mt. Airy.
In 1987, Adams moved his business to the building next door, 8020 Germantown Ave., where it remained until his retirement in 2016. Today, he lives in the West Chester area with his wife, Elena Maria Aldrete, a talented artist born in Peru.
McKinley, who still uses a cane and has a visible limp from a head-on collision with his Volkswagen bus on I-95 in Bridgeport, Connecticut on July 17, 1977, financed the start of his business with the proceeds from the insurance settlement from that accident.
“The other guy was in the fast lane and driving the wrong way,” McKinley said. “I was bedridden for two years and had three surgeries. I was in the hospital three times for two weeks each. I had a full body cast and have been limping ever since.”
McKinley is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, but lived in upstate New York, New Jersey, and Illinois during his childhood because his father, the owner of a publishing company, moved frequently. After graduating from Swarthmore High School in 1970, McKinley attended Allegheny College, 27 miles south of Erie, majoring in English and spent the 1970s in the area, working as a dishwasher to pay for his education.
“I’ve always had an eye for audio stuff,” he said last week. “My brother left me a great audio system when he moved to Switzerland. I got a CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) scholarship to learn sound engineering and built a soundproof room for an orchestra.”
In 1980, McKinley used his insurance proceeds to purchase TPR Sound in Wallingford, where he sold audio equipment until 1984.
“At some point I got tired of dealing with club owners, venues and banks,” he said. “There was always something wrong.”
So he moved to Mt. Airy and started working at Sound Works in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where he stayed until 1991.
He then decided to pursue the gardening business and lived in Chestnut Hill and Wyndmoor during those years. But by 1995 he was back in the clay business, working for Adams.
“John Adams had a really burgeoning business in the 1990s installing audio and video systems – Samsung, 2G and Sony – in big houses,” McKinley said. “We even put a $30,000 projector in a horse barn.”
McKinley, who had worked for Adams since 1995, bought the business when Adams retired and moved it to the building next door six months later.
And business continues to go well.
“Video is really a good business for consumers today. It’s funded by Netflix and Amazon Prime and sold relatively cheaply. You put a speaker in the kitchen and a disc player in the basement,” he said. “With streaming, it’s easier now than ever. These things talk to each other. You can put an amplifier up in the ceiling. You don’t have to run cables everywhere.”
Most of his clients are local, he said, and update their system about every five years. In total, he has about 2,000 names in his database, almost all within a nine-mile radius.
And they are all serious audiophiles, he said. His shop is not for amateurs.
“Some people will say, ‘I’ve walked past here for 15 years and never come in,'” he said.
And as for the “kids,” he said, “they don’t even know what this stuff is.” According to McKinley, young people today want to make their music on the computer.
“I had a Texas Instruments computer in 1980,” he said, “but since then performance has really gone downhill. We developed a computer mixer. Now all you have to do is know which app to download. No wonder nobody learns anything. And AI is even worse. I’ve always experimented and tried to see things from an engineer’s point of view.”
Eric Corson, a longtime customer and Germantown resident, described McKinley as “a rare old-school prospect.”
“Bill even makes house calls,” Corson said. “He came to my house to fix my stereo. The CD player I bought from him is top-notch, fabulous. It’s Bill. It’s stores like his that make Chestnut Hill unique.”
For more information, call 215-242-4080. Len Lear can be reached at [email protected].