To all that worked in audio salons.

I worked at Lafayette Radio, TEch Hifi and Radio Shack at various points in my early years.

Here are teh recordings that I found most successful in selling systems back then:

1) JEff Wayne's "War of the Worlds". Most successful demo record overall. I used this on a system in front of the Radio Shack mall store playing into the mall area on the best system I could set up there and it attracted customers like flies.

2) Kraftwerk's "The Man Machine" also a big customer attraction

3) At TEch Hifi, we got the most mileage out of Steely Dan's Aja and Pink FLoyd's "The Wall".

4) At Lafayette, I used Spinozza by David Spinozza, Eric Clapton's Slowhand, Misfits by The Kinks, Grease and Saturday Night Fever soundtracks, and Octave by The Moody BLues to good effect.

It's funny, but I also recall that "Audio Alchemy", "The Hunter" and "Fresh Aire" (three of the first names mentioned here) were omnipresent demo discs at the hi-fi stores that I (always on the buy side) visited. Also Angela Bofill and, somewhat later, Rachelle Ferrell (sic?) were very common choices. I'll file this thread under Memory Lane, since demos at Audio salons have largely become things of the past.

I have an early Audio Alchemy CD. Nice recording! Music is not bad when in the right mood. A little bland for the masses though.

Audio Alchemy....what a perfect thing to demo with in a high end audio salon......where audio alchemy often rules!!

I lived in DC when I got started in this mess (mid 1980s) and I remember going to Excaliber in Alexandria with a freshly printed copy of Jennifer Warnes "Famous Blue Raincoat" LP to hear a CJ PV7 I had the hots for. The salesperson, who had never seen the album before, thought it sounded so bad he wanted to take it off the turntable and put on some "audiophile" music instead. I left scratching my head wondering why we perceived the sound quality of the recording so differently. A few months later FBR was one of the most popular LPs the salons were playing to demo their gear.

I worked at Audio Assoc. and AudioKrafters in the late 70s, early 80s. We used a lot of Telarc discs, Sheffields, Nautilus, and even a Yamaha demo disc. The Yamaha disc was surprisingly good.

Some "popular" music we used was Dan Fogelberg and Tim Weisberg's "Twin Sons of Different Mothers", Steely Dan's "Aja" and "Countdown to Ecstasy", MFSL's "DSOTM", Virgil Fox organ discs, "Jazz At The Pawnshop" (yawn!), and MFSL's Al Stewart "Year Of The Cat". Also Poco's "Legend" sounded very good...

-RW-