To all that worked in audio salons.


What albums or CDs did you have on hand to demo equipment? Was it popular music or some obscure recordings that were well engineered. Im trying to find a pattern here. In the 70's I saw a lot of Dire Straits, Rikki Lee Jones and Al Dimiola on hand at dealerships. Was there any recordings that would be the one that helped sell the equipment? An old faithful or reliable.
128x128blueranger
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-
I worked for a large mid-fi, some high end stuff like KEF. Monitor Audio, Ariston etc as a part-timer in the early 80"s in Germany.

Steeley Dan's Aja was IT ! "The Wall" a distant second.
I carried a Schubert cassette in my pocket and used it when boss wasn't around . Worked for me.