About the Shop

Hello!

My name is Henry Kohen. I run this small shop with my partner, Joan, out of our home in North Loop.

Since 2017, I’ve been repairing all sorts of machines that amplify, record, generate and shape sounds.

I worked as a repair technician at Tapehead Electronics here in Austin, Texas for 6 years. Prior to that, I had experience repairing solid state and tube guitar amplifiers (along with building and designing tube amps) at Black Volt Amplification in Los Angeles, California.

I’ve been fortunate to work with so many different formats of media from different eras including wire recorders, vinyl record players, cassette decks, elcaset decks, micro-cassette recorders, reel-to-reels, CD players, and more. Getting to learn about the origin and evolution of these formats while having hands-on access to such a wide variety of units is a really rewarding experience and I feel privileged to be able to hear customers’ stories of personal attachment and history with their equipment. 

I began my own stereo and electronics repair business with the goal of offering services that are high quality, affordable, inclusive, and accessible to all types of people so that everyone can have the opportunity to explore and enjoy building and maintaining a stereo system and, experiencing music through various physical formats.

I would also like to use this website to offer resources, myself included, for people to learn more about the appliances and machines we interact with. It is my hope that together, we can reduce the amount of stereo (and any other kind) equipment that ends up in dumpsters, buried in family storage spaces, or sitting functionless on a shelf at a thrift store.

The name Space Baby Audio is a reference to one of our favorite Kurt Vonnegut Books- Sirens of Titan. The story features a dog, Kazak, who is caught in a celestial event wile traveling space with his owner. Kazak is a mastiff. The dog on the logo is our dog Tenoch, a Xoloitzcuintle. He loves getting to see so many new faces come through the shop each week.