Oooh, this brings up the Sleaziest Sales Techniques thread, I suppose.
I can recall having speakers A/B demoed to me before when channel A was
a modest home stereo amp driving the pair of speakers I came to look at
and channel B was something the sales people were trying to push on me
being driven by a rack of gear into a thousand watts or so of high
current power.
Heh...I remember the old McIntosh dealer in Tampa, though. That was the
best, IMO. Her name was Joanna Wood, if I remember right. Before she'd
demo her Mac stuff for you she made you take her "audiophile class"
where she taught you all the reasons McIntosh gear was the stuff for
you. I remember sitting through it one afternoon and at one stage she
flipped on an amp that was hissing like crazy. She started talking
about how the noise floor of McIntosh systems were inaudible to the
human ear and she flipped off the noisy amp and flipped on a McIntosh
so we could hear the difference. It was a lot quieter, but it was still
hissing. She said, "Crystal clear silence." I said, "Uh, I can hear it
hissing, actually." She kept telling me I must be imagining it until my
friends all agreed with me and we eventually moved on to the next phase
of the demonstration. I dunno about anyone else, but I'd much rather
buy a used car than high-end audio equipment. Both professions seem to
attract snake-oil salesmen, but at least with car salesmen there's some
readily quantifiable argument you can engage in. With hi-fi you end up
discussing the thickness of the silence between album tracks as
reproduced by the latest audio-vibratory physiomolecular transport
device.
On Mar 6, 2004, at 11:28 PM, Gordon J. Ross wrote:
> One of the things to note is that in most demos (if the dealer has a
> brain)
> the amp is probably 10 to 20 times the power of what we would use in
> our
> home (500 to 1000 watts in my day.). To try and duplicate a response
> in your
> home is tough at best, but pushing the envelope of a 50 to 200 watt
> amp
> wont help. As someone else mentioned -my 2 cents.
>
> Gord
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