In certain markets there may well be customers who acquire a high-end audio system the same way they acquire fancy watches, cars or clothes. But you can’t rely on those customers to keep the audio industry alive. The only genuine justification for the prices being asked for today’s high-end audio equipment is performance. The problem with extravagant premises and fancy décor is that they impact directly on business overhead, eating into margins – which is another reason (besides the pressure to discount) that explains dealers’ constant demands for higher margins. The bottom line is that something has to give. All too often, that’s service and set-up. Qualified employees cost a lot of money and the more time they expend on each customer or install, the more their cost impacts profitability.
Buyer beware…
It’s a perfect storm. As unit costs rise and equipment becomes more complex and critical of set-up, dealer competence has become even more important to the end results achieved. Whether it’s the depth and range of configuration and system matching built into CH Precision’s products, the DWC and interface adjustments on a Wadax, the choice of tubes being used in an SJS amplifier or the choice of cartridge to match both tonearm and phono-stage, the end results rely on a depth of knowledge and direct, hands-on experience that extends way past journeyman standards. That’s why who you buy from has become even more important – while at the same time, the in-store demonstration has become less and less useful or informative. The industry as a whole is, in a customer led move, belatedly acknowledging the importance of speaker set-up. But the same care and attention to detail applies to the entire system and its infrastructure. Given the sheer complexity of modern, high-end systems and the vagaries of set-up, it’s simply not possible to mimic the performance of a customer’s system in a store demo room. Even if you can source exactly the same equipment, cables and racks, the AC supply, the speaker set-up and the acoustics are unlikely to be even close.
Once the gold-standard for buying decisions, in-store demos are now no-more than course grade filters, good for establishing broad differences between a range of products. Comparing even compact speakers under store conditions is far from straightforward. Differences in support, set-up or time in system muddy the waters when it comes to the finer distinctions between competing electronics – let alone hooking them up with mix and match cables. The bottom line is that in any in-store listening, what matters is the ability to demonstrate and hear differences – sorting products before final assessment in your own system. The simple fact is that the right person can do that in a hotel room – as the experience of active demonstrations at audio shows tells us. At the same time, audio shows also demonstrate the massive range of abilities when it comes to system set-up, further underlining just how compromised in-store demonstrations are when it comes to making any kind of absolute assessment – even if they do boast an acoustically optimised listening space. The results are almost entirely down to the individual running the process and, whilst a swanky studio doesn’t make a meaningful experience impossible, it certainly doesn’t offer any guarantees either.
