Nowhere to hear speakers and amps anymore!

You should be able to tell that we [audio lovers] are a small market.  Consider how many of your friends and relatives are interested in your rig.  And the smaller populated areas suffer more than metro areas.  I am 2.5 hours away from any sort of high end retailer, and even then they are limited in selection.

I feel bad for anyone who isn't near a major city.  The mid-market shops are gone.  I hope the big market showroom don't go the way of internal combustion car engines and manual transmissions.  

As an employee of such a store I can tell you that the vast variety of merchandise and easy access to information and opinions about it on the internet, and the ease with which consumers can cross shop, or worse, "showroom*" has made running a B&M store very, very challenging. The gear is costly to maintain for demo, retail square footage is costly, employing motivated knowledgeable people is costly, and everyone thinks they deserve a discount! The growth of direct-to-consumer (cutting out middle man profit) marketing with 14-30 day free home trials and free shipping, etc. has distorted the "value proposition" of traditional retail. No dealer can offer all that without a robust volume of sales and strong margins, and there just isn’t that large a market in any but the biggest cities...or the opposite...where real estate is cheaper, but customer density is low.

*Showroom...the practice of visiting stores to audition merchandise, but following up shopping for the lowest price among outlets not offering showroom facilities.

@grislybutter 

I think there has always been one or another in/near Harvard Sq. The best two suburban ones are still there, going on 50 years. I should have had a bumper-sticker: My car and my money go to Natural Sound.

Yes, buying stuff online and sending it back sucks. On the bright side, I found a cool candy store on the convoluted route to FedEx.

@bob70 

To be fair, I had no knowledge of all of them in the 90s, but I was pretty happy with the store on Boylston. There also used to be Tweeter etc. and I am always amazed how many audio companies started in the Boston area. The acoustic energy is tangible!