Would you pay to audition speakers

Taters, I was sounding off before carefully reading your post.

I guess this dealer is so busy tallying their sales slips in these robust economic times that they don't have time for mere "shoppers". If they were working at the shoe counter at Nordstroms and you wanted to try every pair "for fun", on a Saturday, I could see where you could be stretching their Customer First policy. But this dealer must be selling big buck boxes if they think $500 is an appropriate ante to get in their door, and I would think they would be kissing your rear to even darken the entrance these days.

I might be a chronic tire kicker and so perhaps a target for this kind of "really great service", but I continue to buy gear in brick and mortar shops. Since I travel a fair bit, I also go to stores in different towns that carry equipment I don't have access to hear in my home town, or even combination's of gear I have not heard together before. I always state whether or not I am actually in the market to buy something. Sometimes I am, sometimes not. I value the shopkeepers opinions since they usually know much more than me and are enthusiastic about their products and my interest. But I do not value their insights to the tune of 5 "C" notes.

Adding to what Theo said, I would want that model to be handing me $50 glasses of wine with my demo. Maybe if I drank enough I would actually buy something from them...

Quite a few years ago I was looking for some video gear and entered a high end video/audio retailer here in NYC to see what they had. The owner informed me it was a $50 fee (good towards any purchases) to demo.

I didn't go ahead with it, since most or all of the gear would have been out of my price range at the time. But especially on video gear, I could see so many people getting his recommendation, then buying mail order. I think now I would gladly pay $50 for guidance through a complex purchase, and to be able to see state of the art gear.

That being said I have recently made my foray into being a dealer for a select few pieces of gear. Luckily this is not my main source of income, so I suspect that I will be dealing with many of the challenges outlined here retailers face.

it might be worth it to pay for an audition in your stereo system, to avoid a serious mistake. the cost of an audition may be less than the loss accruing from resale of an expensive component.

I kind of equate this to a car dealer asking to check your credit before giving a test drive. As a retailer be it car sales, high end audio or whatever you accept the fact that you will work really hard on a deal and not get it. When that happens no matter how unfair it is you have to put a smile on your face and move on to the next prospect.

I have a similar great experience with a salesman who was at a tweeter in chicago (suburbs). I went in to the store to buy some cheap head phones and ended up spending a couple hours in their hearing all kinds of different set ups. At the time I only had a Denon avr 3200(which I was pretty proud of,lol) but he showed me some serious stuff and opened up a few new worlds to me and raised the bar for me. In a nut shell after that anything I could buy from him I did at full asking price, which I was happy to pay since its hard to find sales people of his caliber. Now I was still pretty small potatoes compared to many of his customers but I did my part.

Now however thanks partly to him I can only afford to buy the equipment I want used here or through other sources. But the point is his free demo for a 20.00 head phone customer earned him thousands in sales.

In retrospect, I can think of one instance in which it might be fair to charge for an audition: If one is asking a dealer to either order something from a line that he doesn't ordinarily carry or bring in an expensive reference piece from a line he does carry but will have to front the money himself, then I can understand his being concerned that if the sale doesn't go through, he might have to offer the item at a heavy discount in order to move it.