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Sandy Ruby, Co-Founder of Tech Hifi, Dies at 67
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: November 26, 2008
NY Times
Sandy Ruby, a mathematician turned entrepreneur who, with a partner,
founded a business in a dorm room and built it into Tech Hifi, a popular
electronics retailer, died on Saturday in Boston. He was 67 and lived
in Charlestown, Mass. The cause was complications of diabetes, said
his brother, Michael.
Tech Hifi was born amid a fever for stereo equipment among college
students in the 1960s as recordings multiplied and the technology to
play them improved. In 1964, John Strohbeen, an audiophile and M.I.T.
undergraduate, discovered that stereo systems in Manhattan were selling
at a 20 percent discount from their prices in nearby Boston. Hoping
to earn enough to buy a sound system of his own, he began a business
with the idea of buying in New York and selling on the Cambridge campus
of M.I.T.
Mr. Ruby, four years older, arrived at M.I.T. as a graduate tutor in
Mr. Strohbeens dorm and as the possessor of a nifty stereo system that
he received as a gift when he graduated from Harvard. As a result, Mr.
Strohbeen said in an interview on Monday, Sandy became the dorm audiophile
maven. They eventually became partners.
The business was successful enough that local merchants complained that
Mr. Strohbeen, without having to pay rent, was stealing their business,
so he rented a storefront in an armory on the corner of Massachusetts
Avenue and Vassar Street in Cambridge, and Tech Hifi was born.
Its hallmark knowledgeable salespeople who could satisfy the comparison-shopping
stereo connoisseur helped propel its growth until it became one of the
nations largest purveyors of consumer electronics, with more than 80
stores, mostly in the Northeast, including more than a dozen in and
around New York City. A recession and competition from discount retailers
forced it out of business in the mid-1980s.
Electronics retailers felt better about themselves than they should
have, Mr. Ruby told Fortune magazine in 1987, commenting on how the
businesss boom days of the 1970s transformed to the bust days of the
1980s. In the glory days of audio, we were modestly successful businessmen
buoyed by a tidal wave.
Sandow Sacks Ruby was born in Orange, N.J., on July 23, 1941, the son
of Myron Ruby, a lawyer who was a United States Army officer in World
War II, and Leonore Sacks, whose family ran an iron foundry in Newark.
He spent his earliest years on army bases, but he grew up mostly in
the towns of Essex Fells and South Orange.
After graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., he studied
mathematics at Harvard, where, according to family lore, he also built
motorcycles in his room at Lowell House. At M.I.T., he completed all
the requirements for a doctorate except a dissertation; instead he concentrated
on Tech Hifi.
Mr. Rubys first marriage, to Ruth Richards, ended in divorce. In addition
to his brother, who lives in Brooklyn, he is survived by his wife, Gretchen
Carter, whom he married in 1998; a daughter, Lauren Jo Richards-Ruby
of Oakland, Calif.; and three sisters, Elizabeth Lyden of Omaha, Kathryn
Ruby of Manhattan, and Alice Germond of Charles Town, W. Va., who is
secretary of the Democratic National Committee.
In 1979, Mr. Ruby founded another electronics retailer, Computer City,
and after Tech Hifi went out of business, he ran the retail operations
for Cambridge SoundWorks, a maker of speakers, radios and other audio
equipment. Mr. Strohbeen, who left Tech Hifi in the late 1970s for the
Ohm Acoustics Corporation in Brooklyn, of which he is now the president,
recalled a moment from the early days of his partnership with Mr. Ruby.
He was building a switch box for our second store, Mr. Strohbeen said.
It took him two days, and at the end, he discovered hed made a consistent
error, and he had to redo the whole thing. He threw it on the floor
and he jumped up and down on it for about five minutes. Then he said,
Well, thats a relief, and he started over.
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