I don’t remember the exact day, but sometime in the late 80’s, I received my first ever mail order catalog from a little-known place called Parts Express. Little did I realize then that that catalog would be the catalyst for a new hobby, a love for speakers, subwoofers, stereos and DIY speaker building, that would span nearly four decades. As a teenager, getting the new Parts Express catalog each year was the highlight of my young adolescent life. Long before the days of the internet, I’d scour every page looking for what I thought might make good driver pairings for my next speaker project. For years Christmas consisted of me getting woofers and tweeters and crossover parts so I could build another pair of speakers. My brothers and sisters would ask with excitement, “what did you get”? “I got a 1.5 mH inductor!”, I’d exclaim with more excitement that one should have for a coil of copper wire. My bedroom was just one big wall of some of the most random speakers one could come by. And almost everything I bought came from Parts Express. They had a massive selection of woofers, subwoofers, mids and tweeters, ports and terminal cups, they really were, and still are to this day, your one-stop shop for all things DIY speaker building.
But enough reminiscing, last year we made a trip out to Ohio from Arizona (about 1,800 miles) and so when I looked at the map of our route, I realized that with only a slight 30-minute detour, we could pass right by Springboro Ohio and actually visit Parts Express, I knew I couldn’t pass up this opportunity.
So this is me at Parts Express back in September of 2025. I wandered the store for a bit, I guess they just call the whole store a showroom, but I also checked out the small speaker showroom where you could audition some of the speakers, mostly Dayton Audio stuff. There wasn’t as many raw speaker drives on display as I imagined there would be. There was a wall behind the counter that had several woofers mounted backwards that I think was more just for show than for anything else. I know Parts Express is really more of a warehouse anyway and by its location you can tell, it its sort of in the middle of kind of an industrial park area. It was very reminiscent of an old Radio Shack, it just had this kind of lost-in-time sort of feel, like the store probably hadn’t changed much since 1985. I chatted with one of the employees at the counter for a little bit, told him how much I loved Parts Express and had been buying speakers from there since I was kid. He shared a similar sentiment saying he also was a fan over the decades. He gave me a bunch of stickers and I bought a red Speaker Builder t-shirt.
And so that was it, it really was a unique bucket list sort-of-thing to visit Parts Express and to my astonishment I just found out that they actually closed the whole showroom down just about 6 months ago. So you can no longer visit Parts Express. The warehouse is definitely still there but the showroom is no more. So I was actually super lucky to be able to visit there since basically 6 months later they closed it up. Well thank you Parts Express for all the memories, all the fun catalogs, all the great deals on speakers and speaker parts, and mostly for enabling a love of speaker building in me that has endured almost half a century.
Click here to visit Parts Express’s web site
www.parts-express.com
