History of GoodCans.com

We have Retired! After nearly 30 years of reviewing, stocking and selling higher quality headphones and accessories, (20 of those years On-Line), we have hung up our headphones.

Headphone Timeline:

• ​1987-89  Bill & Denise opened up Digital Sounds CD Store in Roseburg, Oregon.  Began selling Koss headphones in 1988.
• 1991-1998  Bill & Denise opened up Listening Station CD's in Boise, Idaho (Specializing in Jazz, Classical and New Age Music).  Again sold Koss headphones then discovered audiophile quality headphones and began stocking Sennheiser and Grado Cans in approx. 1996 under the moniker of Headphones Too!  Bill began writing a few headphone reviews to help guide interested customers.
• 1998  Experimented with selling headphones over the internet and made first internet sale in October.
• 1999  Closed the CD store as Bill began writing more extensive reviews and selling headphones full time over the internet still using the Listening Station business name.
• 2000-2019  Sales took off, and GoodCans.com was conceived.  GoodCans was dedicated to providing headphone reviews and comparisons.  Listening Station stocked and sold dozens of headphone brands and hundreds of headphone and headphone related products.
  
• As the internet matured, we began selling headphones and accessories thru Amazon.
• Semi-Retired in 2018 and closed up shop and retired in 2019.

Who is Bill K and why was he into headphones?

For eight years I owned a small specialty CD store in Boise, Idaho and had been in the music business since 1987. My first CD store was located in Roseburg, Oregon where we sold the full line of Koss headphones. At that time I discovered how good their Porta-Pro headphones were and purchased one to use with my first discman. A couple of years later, the opportunity to move to Boise came up and soon thereafter opened up Listening Station CD's. In order to place headphones at our listening stations, we again began selling some Koss headphones, but I didn't really get serious about them until 1996. At that time I had been doing some research into upgrading my stereo system and in the process, came across some interesting articles on high quality headphones. I had long been familiar with Sennheiser which was being touted in several articles for their more expensive headphones, (I purchased a Senn HD414 back in 1976), but I was not familiar with Grado Labs which was also being praised for their high quality headphones. Not finding a good source for either brand of headphones in Boise, I contacted Sennheiser and Grado and was pleased to discover both were willing to enlist us as a dealer. As I compared various models including several from Koss, I became aware of how much different each headphone sounded. Based on customer comments after a session at one of our listening stations, I have long known most people feel they hear more detail from headphones than they do from their speakers. But I have also discovered very few people ever even consider the possibility that they could buy better headphones than those pre-packaged cheapies found in the average department store. In my extensive comparisons, I was disappointed with the quality both sound wise and construction wise of the cheaper headphones from the well known mass merchandised companies. In contrast, I was bowled over by the high quality sound I heard from the Grado's!

Headphones Too! was then conceived and we began selling high quality headphones in our CD store. We even had a dedicated listening room where customers could sit and listen to quality headphones connected to a high quality headphone amp! Though we encountered some initial success with Sennheiser and Koss due to name recognition, our enthusiasm for the affordable audiophile level Grado headphones seemed to pass on to our customers and the Grado's quickly became our best selling Cans, ("Cans" is insider lingo for headphones).

Transition to the Internet

In the Fall of 1998, we began experimenting with placing my reviews on the Internet for all of you to read. The response has was wonderful and we evolved into a full fledged headphone specialty store on the web. GoodCans.com was the result! Using a secure order site, we strived to ship out headphones quickly and treat our customers right. The hundreds of positive E-mails we received back from our customers made us proud of what we accomplished.  As we evolved, around 2012 we noticed some of our potential customers reading reviews and heading off to Amazon to purchase.  So at that time, in addition to maintaining our web site, we also began selling headphones and accessories at Amazon.

As we contemplated retirement in the latter part of the decade, we slowly started to make our exit.  Reviewing and selling Good Cans was fun and rewarding.  We were blessed to be in the headphone biz for two whole decades!

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Continued Good Listening..... Bill K.