About Me

A Path Less Traveled

Hi, my name is Bing and I am Simplicity In Sound.  This page is meant to shed a little more light on who I am, how I got here, and perhaps give you a little more insight into the way I think about and approach the field of car audio. 

The path that took me to where I am today is definitely pretty circuitous, a route less traveled compared to the industry norm but in my opinion directly correlated to how I operate.   It’s a pretty long journey so here is the abridged version.

I was born in Beijing, China and lived there until I was 14.  In 1991, I moved to the United States and settled down in a semi-rural town in outside of New York City.   For me, growing up in Sparta, New Jersey as perhaps the only Asian kid in town really opened my eyes to things that may have otherwise eluded me had I lived in a more Asian-rich neighborhood.  By the end of high school, my hobbies included basketball and skiing, as well as the more locally flavored off-roading and modding trucks.

After high school I attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.  Soon, three passions emerged to define my college life and continue to shape my path to this very day.

Ever since I was a little kid, I had been fascinated with history.  After taking a few college level courses, I was hooked.  Within a year, I switched my major from Mechanical Engineering to History and Policy and got my Bachelor Degree in 2000.  It is still my ultimate goal in life to get a PhD in history, get published, and teach at a college level.

The second interest that surfaced was multicultural relations.  CMU was a very diverse place, packed with people of all social, racial and economic backgrounds.   How people interacted; the complex relationships that were formed; and how it directly translated into local, national and international policies became a key attraction for me.  After being accepted into the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management in 1999, I began my graduate studies in the self-created discipline of Multicultural Relations Policy. 

After college, this drive to promote understanding and harmony between different groups of people led me to take a position as Outreach Director at the Pittsburgh Council for International Visitors (PCIV).  For two years, I worked to not only foster stronger bonds between different social ethnic groups in the City, but also to keep the international students that attend schools here in the region after graduation.  I was also in charge of starting a web-based resource for international students – www.globalpittsburgh.org , a site that is still running strong today.

The third and final passion was obviously mobile electronics.  Ever since helping a friend install some speakers from Crutchfield in high school, I had picked up car audio as a hobby.  It remained somewhat sidelined until web-based forums and resources became available in the late 1990s.  From then on, I became somewhat obsessed in learning the tricks of the trade.  I started going through different systems in my own cars at an alarming rate, and soon graduated to installing gear in friends’ cars.   Throughout the last year of graduate school and the two subsequent years of working at PCIV, my appetite for everything 12 volt steadily grew, eventually reaching a point to directly compete with my nine to five career.

After 9/11, I felt that the region suddenly became less receptive with the idea of international talent retention, and as a result, my job became more and more frustrating.  Eventually, after two years on the job, I decided to take a leap of faith and leave the non-profit sector and focus my attention on car audio. 

At the time, it could be said that being CMU alumni and building cars is a bit of a waste.  But to me, perhaps the most important lesson that I learned in college was that if we are truly passionate about something, then we should not be scared to pursue it; and the old adage of “if you love what you do, then you don’t work a day in your life” is unquestionably a lesson to live by.

Using the money I saved up, I opened a small shop in 2003.  But barely a year and a half later, I was already frustrated and ready to give up on the whole idea.  The main reason for my unhappiness was linked directly to the demographic of the region.  Pittsburgh is a very blue collar town, the vast majority of clients I encountered had little desire and means available to pursue the type of projects that truly sparked my interests.  After months of doing “Deck and Four” installs, the excitement was pretty much gone.

By then I had been in Pittsburgh for 10 years, which was almost twice as long as I have stayed anywhere else; a change of venue was desperately needed.  So in the summer of 2005, I took a second leap of faith and moved with my wife to Northern California, albeit with zero intention of getting back into car audio. 

Purely by chance, I agreed to build a system as a favor for a friend (with nothing more than a jigsaw and basic hand tools).  He posted the finished work on a website, and within a week, I received over a dozen emails from people asking about working on their car.  After speaking to a few of them in detail, I realized that I had finally found a place where people had the desire and the means to allow me to do the type of work I have always dreamed of doing.  I stopped sending out resumes and within a few days, bought all the major tools I needed for building car audio systems. The rest is history…well, I guess you can say the rest is what you see on this website.

Wow, this is a lot of verbiage.  Maybe not quite the abridged version I was hoping for. J I have always claimed that I install car audio because I truly am passionate about it, and I hope that in reading this, you can see this statement as more than mere lip service but the simple truth.  I truly believe that my social and educational background allows me to view the industry from a slightly different angle and build a rapport with my clients on a deeper, more personal basis. 

Thank you once again for taking the time to read this.

Cheers!

Bing