Thursday night about two dozen members of the Klipsch Heritage Museum Association met—19 in-person and four by remote connection—with Chair Roy Delgado presiding. He credited Secretary of the Board of Trustees Denise Cooper, sitting at the head table to his right, with keeping him in line as he managed the proceedings in a fashion that would be impossible to imitate but seemed a part of the jocular corporate culture Paul W. Klipsch, founder of Klipsch and Associates, the world-renowned manufacturer of speakers that he started here in Hope, created. 

By 7:00 p.m. in the meeting room of the Klipsch Heritage Museum Visitor Center located at 403 W Division Street, members had filled all but one chair and a few stood as Delgado presided.  The KHMA Chair and Principal Engineer with Klipsch and Associates worked his way through an agenda over the next hour that included his own comments. In these he praised Klipsch, whose birthday is being observed late this week and up to Saturday night with four days of activities, for teaching Delgado acoustics after he had completed an electrical engineering degree at University of Texas in Austin and for his educational techniques with his engineers. Klipsch was fond of answering questions with questions, Delgado said. 

Delgado reported on the hiring of Ginny Sanders as managing director of the KHMA. She was the candidate already under the KHMA’s nose as a volunteer during the search for a new executive director, he said. The members applauded Sanders’ appointment. 

He also reported on the use of a grant to purchase speakers for use in the newly built outdoor stage, praised KHMA’s volunteers and talked of fundraising for the next year, asking trustees to “give or get” $2,000. The membership, Delgado said, doubled compared to last year. Citing Klipsch’s statement that “the area expands with every doubling,” he asked for an effort to double membership again before next year’s meeting. He also cited the staff of KHMA for involving more of the current employees of Klipsch, called associates. 

Bricks can be bought that will go on the Visitors’ Center grounds that credit the donors and allow space for a message. Four-by-eight-inch bricks are $100 and afford three lines. Eight by eight bricks are $250 for four lines. So far, Delgado reported, $9,350 has been raised through this effort. 

The Visitor Center is now authorized to sell Klipsch speakers. Past visitors had told the staff there this would be a welcome feature.

The Treasurer’s Report was given for finances up to the end of December of 2023 which included the news that $42,000 had been raised. 

KHMA Curator Jim Hunter listed items that had been acquired because of donations. The most sizable of these was a 400-pound six-foot-tall 50s-era King Horn speaker occupying a corner of the Visitors’ Center’s 50s room. On the other hand, he said there was need to move the extensive paper archives of Klipsch and Associates to a climate-controlled space. Five percent of the collection has been digitally archived by Hunter himself. Air conditioning where the papers are currently stored at the Hope Municipal Airport would cost $500 a month, a prohibitive expense right now.

An idea was suggested by one of the members for donors being able to sign over unwanted cars or other items to the organization to sell and keep the proceeds. 

After the meeting, members lingered in and outside the visitor’s center, enjoying the vegetable platter and listening to Fleetwood Mac’s recently released Rumours Live album play on a phonograph through a pair of Klipsch speakers, catching up with one another and talking engineering. 

Delgado told us about the subject of his class, scheduled to start Saturday March 9th at 10:00 a.m. at the Klipsch Factory on 137 Hempstead 278, just north of Hope. He described the state of the digital processing of sound as now reaching the point of it being impossible to detect the difference between analog recordings (made using magnetic tape) and digital ones (made with microphones that feed directly into a computer that renders the sound into data). The intended audience is his fellow sound engineers who no doubt look forward to hearing what Klipsch and Associates’ Principal Engineer has been working on. 

Roy Delgado speaks to two colleagues after the meeting.