Supporting Local Audio Stores are we?

Stereos will always be stereos.
High end racing sail boats sunset as fast or faster than high end (performance) audio gear and at a price that is many times that of audio.

I happen to think that higher-end sports and/or luxury cars are a very valid comparison to high end audio. Manufacturers lure you with great perceived "build-quality", fancy chassis, great sound sometimes, and dealers are occasionally snooty to most people, and almost certainly snooty to the unshaven guy in sweats who walks in on Saturday morning, but will be obsequious beyond belief to the guy who drives up in a Rolls. Most luxury cars are 96% the same as their rivals, and most sports cars measure their 0-60 speed within about a second of each other, and all are spec-ed out much better than most people could possibly make use of (lack of driving skills in cars, lack of room treatments in audio). And if you want absolutely the fastest thing out there (0-60 in the low 3-handle), you either buy from Bugatti Veyron for $1.5mil+, or you buy a weird car - an Ariel- the equivalent of the small mfr making an over-achieving amp cloaked in 'normal amp' looks. According to the dealer, the car is the be-all-and-end-all, and the buyer will be set for life, and blah-blah-blah. It costs far more than what is needed to be absolutely functional as a ride to work, and a couple of years later, there will be a Mark II, or a different model, and the only 'upgrade path' is to sell the older one and buy the newer one.

Tvad, Ferraris only "increase in value" when you drive them off the lot if they are the long-hyped new, new thing and there is a waiting list. A 5-year-old Ferrari is in only rare cases more expensive than it was retail. Something like a Ferrari Testarossa, 456GT, or older 355s now go for less than a third of original retail (I also happen to think that all three are fabulous cars for the current used price). After a certain point, well-cared-for examples become 'vintage' cars or 'classic cars' and start to appreciate again (witness the uptick in pricing for 308s and 328s), or occasionally they become stars and continue to appreciate above and beyond their inflation-adjusted original price (like the Ferrari 365GTB4).

I am feeling quite sea sick with all this boat talk.

But back on topic... My feeling is that it is a small market, and there are too many manufacturers. This means that dealers cannot carry enough brands for knowledgeable people, and carry too many to appropriately serve the people just starting out (lack of choice is a blessing sometimes).

We Audiogon habitues are 'bad customers' for B&M stores because we know what we want and in many cases we may have more experience, and more invested in what we really like, than the dealer, and certainly more than Lrsky's $10/hr college student. As people who do this because we like it, we spend more of our own money and time searching for information than is probably reasonable.

I might suggest that the model for metropolitan areas might be different than what we are used to... The model might be for manufacturers to supply demo equipment to a couple of dealers who split a listening room site. Dealers split up a large-ish factory building and outfit it with a dozen rooms with sound-proofing between them, Ikea furniture in most, and some nicer furniture in others (that can be sourced from local high-end estate auctions). Customers would be free to bring in their own equipment, and set it up on rolling racks prior to using the room. The rack(s) would be rolled in, stabilized, plugged in, and set in the first few minutes. Dealership staff would hook up the piece to be auditioned. If the rooms were set up well beforehand, speaker placement would likely be a snap, and concentric placement rectangles would be set up on the floor. Because the site is communal, rooms would be rented at some hourly rate in order to cover the cost of the site (maybe $10-20 an hour). Dealers would offer auditions of products they sponsor, along with customers' own equipment, for free if they want by putting their own money into the pot if they wanted to bring the customer in without him/her paying. There would be another set of rooms which allowed full dealer set-ups of 'recommended systems' at certain price ranges and those rooms would have rolling racks of equipment.

Rooms could be reserved (and pre-paid?) by internet. Rooms which had time-contiguous rentals would have a buzzer go off 5mins before the end.

Such a dealership set-up could act as a used equipment dealer as well I expect, with a place to audition if you wanted.

In return for the customer paying his audition fee, MSRP would no longer be sacrosanct on new products.

I obviously have too much time on my hands...