Relatively few Memphians know about EgglestonWorks, which makes and sells high-end music speakers around the world for $4,500 to $155,000 a pair.

The company has operated for the past 16 years at the far end of a Binghampton warehouse, hidden away between two railroad tracks and a Summer Avenue overpass.

The eight full-time and two part-time employees work meticulously, taking four weeks to custom-make each set of speakers.

“I understand that what we’re doing is, to some people, really baffling,” owner Jim Thompson said. “The idea you could spend this kind of money on speakers probably does not seem sensible to some people maybe. I don’t really mind that people don’t know we’re back here. It’s OK.”

EgglestonWorks each year sells an average of 250 pairs of speakers through 10 U.S. dealers and distributors in 36 countries.

Those nations' flags hang from the ceiling of the 10,000-square-foot shop, enlivened also by a basketball goal, big whirring fans and a barking dog. She’s Thompson’s pet, Zoe.

The plant’s most exotic space is its “listening room,” ideally designed for hearing the $40,000 Viginti speakers that face a brown-leather couch and white chair. The room sits on a rubber base so that the trains don’t shake it. Eighteen-inch walls insulate the room, which is proportioned for optimal acoustics.

Thompson uses the listening room to test and demonstrate speakers.

EgglestonWorks’ 10 speaker models, with other names like Nico, Emma, Andra and The Ivy Signature, won’t be found among the mass-produced speakers at a Best Buy or Target. The closest EgglestonWorks dealer to Memphis is in Chicago.

During a Daily Memphian visit, a tractor-trailer backed up to the dock to pick up a pallet of new speakers. “We’ve got a shipment going out today to Korea,” Thompson said as the forklift moved the products.

Just 10 to 15 Memphians own a pair of EgglestonWorks speakers, Thompson estimates.

That Memphis is a widely recognized taproot to so much music does not hurt EgglestonWorks’ credibility among the world’s audiophiles and music lovers.

"Most of our sales are overseas," Thompson said. "... We seem to be more popular especially throughout the Asian countries." The company opened an office in Shanghai about four years ago. 

“I always say we talk more about being from Memphis than Memphis has ever talked about us being from Memphis,” Thompson said.

That may change this fall with the opening of Central Station Hotel. The finishing touches on the renovation and conversion of the historic train-station office/apartment building are taking place at 545 S. Main St.

EgglestonWorks is carrying out for the hotel developers an unusual project.

“I truly believe this is super-unique,” said Central Station Hotel co-developer McLean Wilson, grandson of Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson. “Don’t really know of any other place (like it). Definitely not in America.”

A sound hotel

Hotels can do a lot to differentiate themselves. Think marching ducks, great architecture, impressive artwork, and lavish pools to name a few ways.

The Central Station Hotel aspires not only to offer a music sound system unmatched by any other hotel, but to actively program the playing of Memphis-related music from 40,000 songs. Hotel developers led by Wilson turned to EgglestonWorks to make it happen.

A lot of hotels provide live music for guests, said hotel consultant Chuck Pinkowski of Pinkowski & Company. “But I’ve never seen a hotel that has focused the reputation, the technology of (a company) and made it an integral component of the hotel” the way developers have done with Central Station Hotel, he said.

Pinkowski, principal with Memphis-based Pinkowski & Company, said when Central Station Hotel opens “and people experience this and understand who and what it is, I think it’s going to add to the ‘wow’ and why you want to come there.”

Thompson recalled being at a Crosstown Arts exhibit opening more than three years ago when Crosstown Arts co-director Chris Miner approached him with a question.

“He said something like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a bar and it had your speakers in it and there was the best Memphis music playing and we just transported what you do in your listening room into a bar? Wouldn’t that be great?’"

“I said, ‘Yeah, that would be great.’ And he goes, ‘OK, we have to sit down and let me show you this PowerPoint,’” Thompson said.

The “we” includes the brain trust at Crosstown Concourse, which has strong connections to Central Station Hotel. Wilson, also the co-leader in the development of Crosstown Concourse, enlisted Miner, Concourse leader Todd Richardson and Concourse marketing consultant Michael Carpenter of Loaded For Bear to help create the hotel concepts.

After seeing their vision, Thompson said, “I was hooked. And it was basically the framework for Central Station Hotel.”

Hotel speakers

EgglestonWorks has been custom-making small speakers — nearly a foot tall —to be mounted in all 123 Central Station guestrooms.

The company also has custom-made a massive speaker for the bar, as well as pendant speakers to hang from the bar ceiling.

That big speaker — it appears to be about 8 feet long by 3 feet high — will be set into the giant bar wall of shelves where vinyl records containing about 40,000 Memphis-related songs will be displayed and played by a deejay.

EgglestonWorks has converted an old, wood church organ to hold the deejay turntables at the front of the bar’s lounge area.

The company will install more of its speakers in the hotel lobby and outdoor terrace.

EgglestonWorks also has made a monumental piece of art to mount on a wall in the hotel lobby. Dozens of old speakers — most of them bought at a St. Louis flea market — are joined together to form a unit measuring 22 feet long by 11 feet high.

Hotel listening room

Of all the features in the hotel’s elaborate soundscape, the crowning feature may be a 16-foot-by-25-foot room behind the bar. 

The space with a low ceiling will be the hotel’s listening room with maybe a half-dozen seats. It will be the space inspired by the listening room in the EgglestonWorks shop.

A pair of the EgglestonWorks Viginti loudspeakers — each 4-foot-2-inches tall and weighing 255 pounds — will provide the sound. EgglestonWorks created the model in honor of the 20th anniversary of its signature Andra speaker, named 1997 Loudspeaker of the Year by Stereophile magazine.

Visitors will use the touch-screen controls. 

Already recorded are the first five, podcast-like presentations for the room. Each features a musician or topic with a Memphis connection: songwriter and musician Don Nix; singer/songwriter Rufus Thomas; contemporary Memphis hip-hop; musician and record producer Willie Mitchell; and blues guitarist, songwriter and vocalist Sleepy John Estes.

“Each podcast has three soundtracks, so there will be 15 things to choose from when you go in there,” Thompson said.

‘Dream job’

Over the past three years in Memphis and on his travels, Thompson has been scouring records shops, estate sales, flea markets and specialty websites searching for Memphis-connected music that can be played at Central Station Hotel.

“My friends that do this for fun, they can’t believe somebody would have you go and buy records every weekend,” Thompson said. “That sounds like a dream job.”

The results: 40,000 songs; 2,500 LPs; 1,000 45s; 15,000 digital songs; and “a bunch of little odds and ends like tape,” Thompson said.

The music will be played in the bar and piped to the rest of the hotel, including the guestrooms. Instead of a morning newspaper outside their door, guests will wake up to the day’s playlist.

Spotlight and mirror

The extraordinary effort and investment has two goals: Shine the spotlight on Memphis for tourists; and hold a mirror up for Memphians, Thompson said.

“Whatever you think you know about Memphis music, here is all this music and here are all these great things we’ve put together and here is their influence. Here’s why they are important,” said Thompson, whose love of music traces to his late father’s profession as a seller of musical instruments.

From the deejay’s daily shows to the listening room to the guestrooms, the Memphis-connected music will convey what was hardly taught in schools, he said, adding, “But people should know the depth of Memphis music.

“That’s what we hope to really shine the light on: What Memphis really means to popular music.”