Most serious dealers have demonstration equipment which is basically brand new equipment set up in their stores for people to listen. I know the market is slow right now for many reasons. price that some people feels is wayy too high is one reason. So, allowing customers that are serious to take a piece home for a week or so to demo in their home is a great idea. Again, this is for serious customers. To prevent looky loos, charge a nominal fee for such service if necessary. For your regular customer that you know are good, serious customers, this isn't an issue. For high priced equipment, even for used equipment, my favorite store allows me and others to take demonstration equipment or used equipment home for in-home audition. this is a direct quote from my salesperson to a friend of mine in the store. "He said that he heard that (my first name) "I'm not spending anymore money" Minorl was in the store over the weekend." this is an inside joke because I tell him every time I visit that I have no intention of spending money and many times I walk away with something. Anyway, without such brick and motar stores to provide this much needed service, people would purchage on-line, have the equipment delivered to only find out that it really doesn't work well in their system, and they made a serious mistake. In the past many "high end" stores carried upper mid fi, lower high end and high end equipment to give people choices. Many times manufactures would insist that if you wanted to carry my stupidly expensive high end stuff, you also had to carry my crap equipment. Now this has changed, where the store can dictate many times what level of a certain manufacturer's equipment they want to carry and they also transistioned over to really popular home theater equipment to cover that market and stay in business. There are many high end stores in the Los Angeles area, however, over the years I have had tried them and found that traveling to San Diego is fun for me and the store I frequent there is much more accomodating and friendly.
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