John Barnes

John Barnes, a local dealer (Audio Unlimited), passed away unexpectedly last week.

John ran a high-end audio dealership out of a house in the middle of Denver, and was our unwitting inspiration for starting Audio Federation. Audio Unlimited was our primary [only] competitor in the Denver ultra high-end audio market [less so in recent years] but John was always friendly, down to earth, and good-natured about it all.

I would run into John at shows, all the RMAFs and sometimes CES, and he’d always make a few jokes about the number of photos I was taking or whatever and a few jokes about the magazine coverage of these shows [he did pretty darn well at this… harrumph], the state of the Denver market [nobody is happy about it, let’s just say], and other things that made us relative newbies [not so much anymore, this is our 10th year] feel comfortable and welcome.

Thanks, John.