David Boykin has spent the majority of his life surrounded by piles of high-end audio equipment in various states of repair.
When he was growing up in the early ‘70s, his dad started a DJ company right as the disco craze was sweeping the nation. At the time, Billboard magazine could only reliably get data about the genre’s popularity in New York and LA, due largely to disco’s status as a club format rather than one over the airwaves. In order to figure out the particulars of who was dancing to what and which records were hitting, each week they’d send music to DJs around the country — including Jim Boykin in El Paso, Texas — and request that they play them and report back as to the reaction.
Armed with a decade’s worth of free records, the elder Boykin was able to grow his company to the point that on any given Saturday he’d have DJs working at 6 to 12 different gigs. An electrician, Jim Boykin would do the repair work on any of his broken equipment himself — meaning young David’s home life was punctuated by a whole lot of high-end gear.
“Just having grown up in it and being around it all my life, it was natural to me,” he explains. “And then my brother was a DJ for a long time. He worked in high-end audio stores and he kind of helped me become an audiophile.”
In 2018, David Boykin’s career in the financial services industry brought him to St. Louis. Last month, the 50-year-old opened his own high-end audio shop, Frenchtown Audio (1624 South Broadway, 314-630-1163), across the street from DB’s Sports Bar in the Kosciusko neighborhood. The shop joins Frenchtown Records, Antiques & More (941 Park Avenue, 314-630-1163) and a permanent display at the Soulard Farmers’ Market in Boykin’s growing empire.
Boykin has teamed up with Bill Huber, an electronics technician who specializes in speakers and turntables, to purchase and repair old equipment. Boykin then sells the refurbished equipment to both burgeoning audiophiles and seasoned veterans of the scene.
Boykin calls Huber “the Repair da Vinci.”
“He’s one of the best in the country,” Boykin says. “Bill and I were a good partnership because he’d never met anybody with more broken shit, and he knew how to fix it. That was a match made in heaven.”
In keeping, Frenchtown Audio’s 2,000-square-foot showroom is filled with vintage treasures, with amps and receivers both tube and solid state, record players both belt-driven and direct drive, and speakers both quaint and massive filling the space. The back room boasts another 2,000 square feet, with three workbenches and audio equipment stacked literally to the rafters. Brand names include such well-respected companies as Pioneer, TEAC, Marantz, Onkyo, Sony, Integra and more. Boykin is especially proud of the multiple McIntosh pieces that dot the space, which he notes is a brand his dad often used.
“McIntosh is the Cadillac of high-end receivers,” Boykin explains. “They’re a pretty big brand, but their new stuff is very pricey.”
A good new McIntosh amp, he says, will run you between $10,000 and $20,000. Most people can’t afford that, so they turn to the secondhand market.
“Let me tell you, these vintage ones, they are no joke,” he says, showing off a McIntosh MA230 tube amp priced at $2,300. “They sound ridiculous, especially if they’re reconditioned like this one here is. … That thing sounds as good, if not better, than it did when it rolled off the factory.”
In addition to the vintage gear, Boykin has a selection of new equipment in stock, and is a licensed dealer of Klipsch speakers and Crosley turntables. Asked about the latter’s reputation for treating records unkindly due to their inferior needles, Boykin bristles.
“A lot of people say, ‘Oh, that’ll hurt your vinyl.’ No, they do not,” he says. “I know that because I spoke to the engineer. He gave me all the specs on it. It’s a good needle. It’s not a high-end needle, but it’s a good needle. That needle will not hurt anything.
“It’s not gonna sound like the expensive ones, but for $50 to $75 it’s not supposed to,” he adds.
Boykin notes that the recent vinyl resurgence has prompted a secondary resurgence of people seeking out machines that can play their newly purchased records. In keeping, he stocks the store with more affordable gear than a monied audiophile might demand. The Crosleys in particular fill that gap, and a customer can easily walk out of the store less than $100 lighter with everything they need to get going. If they want to move up in quality, Boykin recommends the TEAC turntables, which he says generally run between $300 and $700. Beyond that, he says NAD turntables are really popular and often outperform more expensive equipment.
“NAD is the ultimate budget audiophile name,” he says. “Any NAD product will compete with things three times its price. That’s how they’re built.”
It’s clear from the way Boykin speaks about audio equipment that his own home system must be a doozy. It’s equally clear that one could very easily spend a near-unlimited amount of money chasing the dragon that is high-quality audio reproduction. Boykin notes that he primarily deals with less expensive items in order to up the accessibility of the audiophile world, but on the second day the shop was open he did sell a pair of new Klipsch La Scala speakers — just the speakers! — for more than $10,000. The shop also offers repairs, so those hoping to hold on to their existing gear can put it in the capable hands of Huber and know that it will be treated right.
One thing the shop does not offer, though, is online ordering. The only way to get your hands on its wares is to head down South Broadway and step into the store. Boykin even offers demonstrations of the gear by appointment. He’s got a well-stocked bar toward the back of the showroom, and he’s not shy about offering guests a drink as he plays music and waxes on about the magical world of high-end audio.
Boykin points out a McIntosh 240, one of the rarest of its kind, that he says is the type of amp that is capable of making a serious audiophile cry tears of joy. He has it priced at $3,650, and he says that if he did put it online it would sell within an hour. But he has no intention of doing such a thing. He wants it to end up in the hands of someone in St. Louis.
“It means something to me to keep it local, in St. Louis. If it’s in St. Louis, it might come back to me, you know, and then we can move it around again,” he says. “But St. Louis is such a mecca for music and equipment and amps and guitars and things like that, that the whole country — there’s this pipeline of stuff leaving St. Louis and going to New York or to LA, all our good stuff. It’s been happening with antiques for 25 years, because this used to be a money town.
“All this stuff just pipes out of St. Louis,” he laments. “I’m just trying to keep as much of it here as I can.”
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