The Incredible Stereo Hunt
I hadn’t realized the retail hi-fi market was such a jungle until I went shopping recently with a friend. He was confused and needed a guide to help him hack through the thicket of information and misinformation presented by hi-fi manufacturers and dealers.
“Listen, buddy, can you take some time out this week to go shopping with me? I want to get a new stereo system and don’t know where to start,” he said over the phone one Monday. He knew I’d been writing about audio equipment and the hi-fi market for four years and figured having an “expert” along would make his job a lot easier.
“Sure,” I said, thinking it would be simple. I mean, I do know a great deal about hi-fi products and the people who make them. Besides, he promised to buy me dinner, and he has expensive taste. We set a date for Wednesday and I went back to my typewriter.
On Wednesday, my friend and I set out for the bank. He was eager to get something that day, so he wanted to pay cash. Now this guy does quite well for himself. He’s a bartender in a posh restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where gratuities nearly always top the twenty-five-percent mark and sometimes soar to the lofty reaches of 200 to 500 percent. He drew out $850, believing that would just about cover it.
From here on, the story gets pretty bizarre. Not a single merchant tried to sell my friend a hi-fi system. Oh sure, they presented some products and demonstrated some speakers, but they also confused him so badly that by four o’clock we were sitting in a local gin mill having a couple of beers and talking about which restaurants were about to close.
That’s when I got the idea for this story. It’s a jungle out there, and you do need a guide to help show the way to a satisfying sound system. The painful realization is that it’s really a simple proposition. But to accomplish your goal, you have to know what to expect in a retail store, what kinds of salesmen you’re likely to encounter and what advance knowledge you need to be an “educated” consumer. So this is it. The hunt for the perfect stereo system.
Our first stop was a local warehouse operation that proclaims daily in its ads: Check These Prices, They Simply Can’t Be Beat. Under that headline is usually a laundry list of names, model numbers and prices. My friend wasn’t sure what he wanted, but he figured we could go to the place, listen to a few products he had in mind and walk away with a real bargain. What we found when we got to the fifth floor of the dingy downtown office building was a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot room piled high with cardboard cartons. Only a few hi-fi components were on display.
“Can we play with any of this?” my friend asked the man in charge.
“It’s not plugged in,” came the curt reply. Well, so much for that place. Our first rule for buying a hi-fi: don’t go to a warehouse unless you’re absolutely sure what you want and just need to pick it up. Such stores offer no help, and few, if any, offer demonstrations. The next stop on our safari was uptown in a store that specializes in appliances, television sets and audio equipment. This shop, located in a fashionable neighborhood, is equipped with two sound rooms, which would enable my friend to get his hands on a few products in his price range.
It’s usually a good idea to begin by choosing which speakers you like, because they offer the greatest differences in sound of all the components you’re going to buy. Once you’ve chosen them, you have the basic sound you’re going to end up with. Our salesman, sort of halfhearted in his attempts to serve us, agreed to cue up a tape and audition some speakers. Nothing we heard knocked my friend’s socks off, and he commented on a shrillness he heard in one set of speakers. Then, without saying a word, the salesman switched to a pair with an even thinner sound, then back to the originals. Amazing. That first pair now sounded warm and rich by comparison.
The Incredible Stereo Hunt, Page 1 of 3