Steve Irby and the $300 Speaker He Never Bought

Steve Irby arrived at a Stillwater record shop in March 2026 with something rather more portable than a speaker cabinet. He had brought an album. On its cover: Moses Live, the 1974 recording of the band in which he played keyboards. He signed a copy for Henry Ramsay, the owner of Velvet Fudge. Here was the founder of KICKER, back among records, passing along a piece of his own musical past.

It is a pleasing way to meet him. The corporate titles can wait a moment. Before the subwoofers, before the dealer network, before the logo became familiar on car windows, there was somebody trying to hear his keyboard over a drummer. Anyone who has shared a rehearsal room with an enthusiastic percussionist will recognize the difficulty. The volume knob runs out. The drummer generally does not.

A $300 question, answered with a book

The Beatles supplied the encouragement. Irby remembered being in ninth grade when they toured America in 1964; he and his friends formed a band. Playing required equipment, and the speaker he wanted cost $300. His father, an Oklahoma State University professor accustomed to making things, offered a different route to the same result. “He asked if that was something we could build,” Irby recalled.

A library book supplied plans for a speaker enclosure. A used amplifier supplied another part of the solution. Father and son built the equipment, and the teenager acquired a second interest alongside playing music: making the machinery that carried it. A purchase would have settled the immediate question. Building the thing left him with another question to try, and then another.

Irby had classical piano training before his rock-band years. When he later described the project to business students, he remembered his father as a habitual builder whose projects included their house, furniture and go-carts. Making a speaker belonged to a familiar family activity: work out how something works, then see whether you can put one together yourself.

His early education in sound therefore had two classrooms. One contained books and components. The other contained musicians who could tell quite quickly whether the results were any good. A band is a demanding customer, even when it consists of your friends. It wants the equipment ready for the next time it plays.

The garage had customers before it had glamour

In 1973, Irby started Stillwater Designs with a roommate. The operation occupied a single-car garage and built professional speaker systems. Churches, performers and auditoriums needed sound; these were practical jobs with practical constraints. The ambition could be heard in the equipment long before it could be seen in the premises.

The beginnings required patience at home as well as work in the shop. His wife taught school. Irby remembered the business making a little money in its fourth year. He bought out his original partner after roughly three years. Those details give the garage story its proper weight. Starting small can sound picturesque once a company survives. During the early years, small also describes the household margin for error.

There was another change behind the company. Irby left graduate school, and his Christian faith became central to how he understood his work. He described reading the New Testament and finding a technical book, Loudspeakers and Enclosures, at the OSU library. One addressed his beliefs; the other gave him knowledge he had been looking for. He has spoken about trying to conduct business according to those beliefs.

“The journey is your life, it's every day.”

Steve Irby, speaking to business students in 2016

The pickup changed the set list

Irby did not begin with a grand enthusiasm for car stereos. He was building PA equipment, and the small systems in vehicles seemed a less interesting proposition. A customer request in 1980 changed the work. Could he make a speaker that would fit behind a pickup seat?

That space was an unusually persuasive design brief. It had fixed dimensions, a listener very close by and no sympathy for a cabinet built for a stage. The oil business had put plenty of pickups on Oklahoma roads. Their owners wanted more from their music. Irby brought his experience with larger speakers to a smaller enclosure, and the Original KICKER became the company's route into vehicle audio.

The name came from the response. Listeners felt the bass through their truck seats and said the box really kicked. A customer had supplied both a problem and, collectively with other customers, the vocabulary to sell its solution. Advertising departments have spent substantial sums trying to arrange something that convenient.

He later described entering car audio reluctantly. That reluctance is useful to remember. The opportunity arrived through people who wanted something he knew how to build. Paying attention to them mattered more than preserving his original idea of what a speaker business ought to make.

Make room for the music

The awkward space behind a seat remained a recurring theme in Irby's design work. His Solo-Baric concept pursued bass from a smaller enclosure. Later, the square L7 offered more cone area than a comparably sized round driver. The shape was memorable, but the underlying problem was familiar: the listener wanted sound and still needed room for everything else in the vehicle.

Digital processing brought a different kind of crowding. Equipment could offer enough adjustments to occupy a devoted enthusiast for hours. Many customers simply wanted it to sound right. Irby described the development of KICKER's KEY products around automatic setup, leaving more detailed adjustment to products intended for people who wanted that work.

There is a recognizable musician's impatience here. Adjusting equipment can be enjoyable. So can getting on with the song. His design choices have repeatedly acknowledged both customers, including the one who has no intention of turning an evening's listening into an evening's homework.

The band grew; the relationships stayed

A company built around sound attracted people from the same musical circles. Bob Spencer knew Irby through the local music scene and began building KICKER enclosures by hand in 1982. He went on to lead research and development before announcing his retirement after 41 years. That is a considerable journey from making boxes to managing the people who decide what goes inside them.

Charlie Schultz arrived through a mutual friend and pastor in 1984. With musical experience and a management background, he became KICKER's first national sales manager. His work took the company out onto the road. Irby's story contains those individual arrivals: people bringing a skill the founder needed, then staying long enough to help change the scale of the business.

In 2021, Irby presented service awards to 55 employees. Kim Wright and Lance Noble were recognized at the 30-year mark. The rituals were tangible: a pin after one year, a watch after three, a ring after five. A business devoted to electronic equipment had found decidedly traditional ways to mark time.

By 2025, a workforce account reported an average tenure of 14 years. Trainers John Myers and Aaron Malin described a company where the founder still came to headquarters. There is no need to turn longevity into a management formula. It does establish that, for many of the people around Irby, this has been a substantial portion of a working life.

A boat presents a fresh set of objections

Marine audio offered an adjacent field: boats also use 12-volt systems. The surroundings, however, introduced water, salt and sun. KICKER launched its marine line in 2006. Familiar electrical knowledge could travel; the company still had to learn what the new environment would demand.

Inside the Stillwater operation, development includes endurance testing and salt-and-fog exposure. Near the end of the process comes a listening room, where Irby evaluates products himself. The keyboard player remains involved in deciding whether the sound is ready. Measurements carry a product a long way; somebody still has to sit down and listen.

That continuing involvement helps explain why the work has held his attention. A different vehicle, a new material or a smaller available space supplies another problem. The task that began beside his father keeps producing variations.

The business he wants to keep

In late 2025, Irby reported modest sales gains across several parts of KICKER. He also remembered a more difficult period: the bankruptcies of Circuit City and Chrysler during the 2008-09 downturn. Long experience had given him a comparison for the latest business conditions, rather than an excuse to ignore them.

Asked about private equity, he was direct: “I'm not interested in selling out.” He described the company as a community of around 200 employee families. That answer places a particular obligation beside ownership. The people who helped build the business are part of what he wants to preserve.

His 50th-anniversary letter had already offered a smaller measure of satisfaction. People recognized his KICKER shirt and told him about speakers they had loved in high school. Decades later, they still remembered the equipment. For Irby, those encounters were part of the reward of designing it.

And then there is that record-shop photograph. Irby is holding an album, standing beside somebody else's young business. The music came first. After more than five decades of making equipment to play it, he still has a record worth bringing round.