|
General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
|
|
|
General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
|
In Reply to: The problem with Hi-Fi dealers (long) posted by mcody on July 19, 2000 at 18:46:10:
Yeah, my first forays into Hi-End shopping were, to coin a phrase, nasty brutish and short. First place I went the guy working the floor pointedly stared at me, then down at my clothes, then back up at me, then down at my clothes again before even speaking to me, then he snapped out a few monosyllabic answers to my opening questions in a way that suggested we would not grow to become good friends over time.
That was high hi-end. Second place featured sort of low to mid price stuff with a seperate Krell room in the back for high rollers. The staff seemed vaguely interested in helping us until another couple came in wearing upscale clothes and lots of jewelry. After they left one salesman came back and helped us (we were the only people in the store by then). He was willing to let us play different cds we had brought, which was really all we cared about, but the more things we played the more insulting he got about the music we were listening to, saying things like "My, aren't we eclectic," and "we're getting pretty obscure here, aren't we?". Now, my wife and I can be pretty single-minded when we need to be, so we were doing a good job of tuning this guy out while doing the crucial listening we needed to do, but the vibe here finally got to us and we left sooner far sooner than we would have under other circumstances. A friend we had brought with us who went off and browsed on his own told us afterward that two of the other staff people were openly making fun of our music in front of him---probably because it was, you know, foreign and stuff. Finally, the third place we tried had people who definitely put the hard sell on big time the minute we walked in the door, but once they surgically probed our budget and our determination not to go over it , they settled down and spent a long and thorough afternoon trying out different stuff for us and letting us listen on our own. We heard a couple of things that really stood out for us and ended up taking them home that day. Now, we might have ended up getting exactly those pieces from that exact shop after doing a lot more comparison shopping, but we had come to the conclusion by then that the asshole factor seemed to be running very high in this particular little corner of the retail landscape. We were, as you may have guessed, hi-end virgins, and I only learned later that bad dealer karma is a not infrequent feature of the hi-end experience. At the time, however, we were really baffled by the whole thing, with my wife pointing out quite reasonably that even used car salespeople pretend to like you, and it did not escape either of us that the place that did what retail places are supposed to do, i.e. figure out what we wanted and sell it to us, was also going to be our first chice for any additional shopping, and the other places were going to be our first chioces for places we would cheerfully see burning in hell, brightly and for a long time. Actually, as it has developed, I've become very interested in tube gear, and there are a couple of boutique companies making highly regarded stufff in our general vicinity, and I'm now planning to check them out in person and very probably buy direct from the factory, something I never would have considered doing before these experiences. I have heard a lot of good things about another dealer not too far from us which we didn't know about before, and they've been recommended by a couple of dealer-phobic audiophiles I've gotten friendly with, so I'm not writing off the whole business, but i'm certainly in much less of a hurry to check these kinds of places out than when I first got interested in the hobby.
Good news and good night,
Zapper
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
Follow Ups
- Re: Big long problem with Hi-Fi dealers - Zapper 07/19/0023:22:13 07/19/00 (0)
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
