Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
He left his place in Farmington to go get a permit at the county courthouse in Colfax.
“What kind of farm equipment shed do you want to build?” they asked.
It wasn’t a farm equipment shed he wanted to build.
“What kind of farm building is it?”
He explained it wasn’t a farm building.
“What kind of farming do you do?”
He wasn’t a farmer, he said.
“So what do you do?”
He ran an audio component business, he said.
“She was looking at me like a cow looking at a new gate,” said Mark Hellinger, the man who was hoping for a building permit that day.
He did get it and in 2003 constructed a 7,000 square foot warehouse next to his home in Farmington.
This was the second decade of Audiopile, the music component business Hellinger started in 1976 and moved to Farmington in the mid-‘90s. The company sells musicians’ traveling rack cases and audio cables.
On Tuesday, Hellinger was out at the warehouse unloading a container of supplies from Gaungzhou, China.
The cases are assembled there now, due to a deal Hellinger made in 2002 after spending 26 years making cases himself using panels of plywood and formica laminate.
The cases now account for half of Audiopile’s business, along with what was the company’s first product – cables.
Selling over the internet and by simple word of mouth and a business card, Hellinger and wife Liz ship their wares all over the United States and Canada.
From performers to schools, churches and government agencies ranging from the Army to the CIA and ATF, Audiopile’s list of clients is vast.
Earlier this year, Carnival Cruise Lines bought several rack cases for a new ship to be launched.
According to U.P.S, Audiopile is among the biggest shippers between Spokane and Moscow.
Bass player’s idea
Hellinger grew up near Potlatch and started playing in garage bands in high school.
The seed of Audiopile began as he kept playing.
“It started with me being a mediocre, non-singing bass player and farm kid,” Hellinger said.
He soon noticed something.
“If I owned the band’s P.A. system and a pickup to haul it around in, that’s extremely marketable,” said Hellinger.
He graduated from Potlatch High School in 1974 and started building his first equipment two years later.
“I have two hands and a toolbox, I can build cables cheaper,” he said.
He bought coils of cable and connectors and put them together.
“Like making cookies,” he said. “You don’t really make cookies, you assemble them.”
By the early ‘80s, after a time as an electrical engineering and radio and television student at University of Idaho, Hellinger started getting requests for the sound and light rigs he set up for the bands he played in.
Soon he was setting up shows for other people.
By the mid-‘90s, Hellinger said, there was more and more of a demand to build cables and rack up components to make them “turn-key,” the term for ready to go.
At the time, on the side, Hellinger and wife Liz ran a fertilizer application business. Their biggest client was a division of Alcoa, which required e-mail communication.
In the process of setting this up, Hellinger “ran into some computer people” and put a website together in 1997. Soon he was promoting Audiopile products on the new Ebay.
Audiopile.net sold microphone cables, new cases and refurbished ones bought from “bone rooms,” which are the surplus and damaged cases Hellinger learned about through acquaintances in the industry.
“There’s a niche market out there for somewhat specialized cabling,” said Hellinger.
He and Liz kept assembling the cables themselves -- items that were a special-order product at traditional music stores.
Expansion
All of this time, Hellinger still made rack cases. Then, in 2000, he met South Korea’s Cabco Lee, founder of E.W.I cables, at a trade show and worked out a deal to be the exclusive U.S. seller of Lee’s cabling.
Two years later, in a similar deal, Audiopile became the exclusive U.S. distributor for E.W.I. Tourcases – rack and speaker cases.
The Hellingers still assemble their own cables. The assembly and custom case work is done by three employees at their shop next to the Hellingers house in Farmington. One of the employees is the lead singer of Moscow-based The Fabulous Kingpins.
About every three weeks is a shipment day, when supplies come in on pallets. Cables arrive from Incheon, South Korea along with connectors from Lichtenstein.
The pallets come in at the Port of Tacoma or Seattle and are delivered to the Palouse by truck.
All together, in a life that has taken him many directions, Hellinger said this is the place he wants to be.
“Oh yeah, both Liz and I strongly believe it was what we were meant to do,” Hellinger said.
One of the directions of Hellinger’s life was an operator of a video game parlor in Moscow called Mr. Bill’s. It was the early ‘80s, and Liz worked late shifts at a Circle K on Mark’s way home from the parlor. He stopped there one night, and then another. She then came into the video game place one day.
They were married in 1987 and lived on land between Garfield and Potlatch moving to Farmington in 1995.
Up until 2004, husband and wife were the only employees of Audiopile.
The varied music-related endeavors of Hellinger’s life came together at Farmington’s Harvest Festival in September. Hellinger’s offer to provide the entertainment led to the inaugural event.
He set up the stage and lighting, got the Fabulous Kingpins to headline, and played bass with his own band, The Intentions.
“The Farmington Harvest Festival is one of the highlights of my career,” said Hellinger. “That felt like a real accomplishment.”
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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