Visitors stop in to discuss and audition our products. That’s great! We invite you to do so.
We are not aggressive car salesmen trying to CLOSE YOU. We love the hobby as much as you do and feel the most informed customer is our best client and future advertisement. We hope you’ll buy from us. We won’t try to strong arm you into a purchase.
Some of our visitors leave {after a most impressive demo!} and comment, “I have to do more research.”
That’s fine. We get it. Yet the most important “research” is what you’ve just done, which is to audition a product in the flesh, and talk to people who know about it.
You might wonder if our advice is valuable compared to commentary you’ll read on a hundred different forums or ezines. It is!
Of course we have a dog in the hunt. We sell gear. We want you to buy our gear. Yes we make some money on the sale. The same goes for anything else you buy.
I SELECTED our gear. Nobody bought it and threw it in the store and said, you have to sell this. I go through the same “research’ process that you do. And, along the way I get to audition products in the flesh. I get to know the manufacturers. Who is honorable and will take care of you?
Does the product regularly perform as advertised? I vet these companies for you.
I’m like the GM of a baseball team. I will change the roster when players don’t perform as well as better players I could bring in. I don’t just sit on the same lines forever. If companies don’t measure up, I’ll replace them. Many companies get acquired by larger ones. Rarely does the tender loving care of an owner operator transfer to the new acquiring outfit.
Every reviewer (from a notable source) gets treated like a VIP. Products are personally QC’d and usually hand delivered. If there was a problem with a STOCK piece right out of the box or a confusing set up protocol, the reviewer didn’t have to deal with it. So he, the reviewer, doesn’t get what YOU GET- a production piece that may or may not work properly out of the box- or be a grizzly bear to set up.
Stories
As the song says, you don’t always get what you want (or pay for).
Tables
In the late 70s we picked up the gorgeous new Oracle Delphi turntable. I had a love/hate (OK, more hate) relationship with Linn. I was dying to move on. Linn was so jiggly and touchy that eventually I would happily sell a Rega any day of the week vs dealing with the LP12 bag of cats.
Oracle had a much superior spring suspension to Linn. You could adjust springs on the fly without fiddle fudging with the stinkin’ table, turning it upside down in the gol dang jig- etc.
One of Oracle’s claims was that they machined their bearings to within so many ten thousandths of a gnat’s fanny. Well, Mike, one of our customers, was a machinist. He had loads of experience with bearings and said, “I don’t believe that claim. That’s ultra precision work.”
I didn’t think Oracle would fib, so I said, here, borrow a table. Test it out. Mike did. Guess what? The bearing tolerance wasn’t even close. Mike was right. I called up Jacques at Oracle who wasn’t pleased to hear it. I told J, you’re promising this tolerance. You have to do it, or change your claim. They went to their vendor to duke it out. I heard the solution cost Oracle about $20k.
Oracle closed in a couple of years and Jacques told me it was due to a plethora of problems like this, “that each cost $20,000 to try to fix.”
Phono Preamps
Both ARC and Acoustat had well thought of solid state preamps back in the day. Magazines recommended them. The problem was that both had MC sections that hissed like a snake. There was also the emerging outboard phono preamp from Marcof. Just as bad. They were all literally unusable in MC. But the mags wrote well of them. I couldn’t believe it. I knew of these problems. Why didn’t the reviewers comment on them?
I was patient with the manufacturers as they tried to solve the noise problem. But they didn’t, or couldn’t. I suspect THEY didn’t have the $20K (or whatever) to dive deep and figure it out.
When Threshold came out with preamps with dead silent MC sections, I was thrilled. Audire came out with the Poco phono section- quiet as a mouse. Both were game changers. Problem solved.
Speakers
A fellow came in with an Epos bookshelf speaker he had read about. He said he read such “great comments” that he had to buy it. As he brought it in he had his hand on the rear port. He literally pulled the cheesy plastic port right out of the back of the speaker- revealing a cardboard toilet paper style tube for a port. The same thing happened with his other speaker. He stuffed the parts back in and we listened. As you might infer, they were nothing special and sounded particularly hollow. Given how they were built- no surprise. Yet he had read nothing but raves. It was built as cheaply as any speaker I’ve ever seen.
We ordered some Kef LS50 Metas for a customer. Similar situation – where the back port is
a plastic push fit- and pops right out of the speaker if you happen to grab it.
These components need to be solidly affixed to control performance and extraneous resonances!
We brought in the new Andrew Jones Elacs when they came out a decade ago- nice sound for the money. When customers popped the odd tweeter it was another fist fight to get them replaced under warranty. When a company is cooperative in sales but not in service, that’s all you need to know. Bye bye.
Quad brought out some new stats in 2016 ish. They sounded quite clear and open. Within a few months one of our demos started to make a popping static noise. I asked for replacements. “Ah, no, we can’t do THAT.” OK, I’ll ship it in for repair. Three months later it still hadn’t been fixed and that’s when I dropped the gloves and started swinging. It’s an expensive way to learn, but I DID.
Electronics
A decade ago Anthem came out with a line of surround sound receivers. It’s within the Paradigm family and the people there said it was vetted and gonna be great. We sold 18 in the first summer and they all broke in a short time frame. Thanks a lot you skunks. Nobody had vetted these. They hired a vendor in S Korea to build the line for them and used dealers as guinea pigs. This was a horrific experience as it unfolded! We tried some exchanges and repairs. We ended up replacing most of them with Marantz units on my dime. What a nightmare!
More
Being in biz since 1977 I could tell you dozens more stories about:
-Woofers that pop and toast when you hit em a bit , and the vendor says too bad (Rogers)
-Sub amps that die in 2-3 years if you work them at all (Velodyne/M&K)
-Surround Prepros that had issues and didn’t set up right (Emo/Anthem)
-Projectors that broke and were not repairable (virtually all of them pre 2010)
-CD players that couldn’t track their way outta wet paper bags
-Cantilevers that broke if you sneezed at ‘em, Sonus
-Tube vendors who broke right and left (ARC/CJ/Cary)
-Tape decks that broke like mad: Revox and Nak, “Who us? That’s rare.” NOT!
With Audio Emporium
In each of these cases and many more, Audio Emporium has been our customer’s advocate.
I have routinely dropped the gloves with manufacturers, when necessary, to get solutions to problems. I have made these guys cover products under warranty when they were technically OUT. I have made them replace units when they fought not to. You’d be surprised and disappointed how companies would like to dodge culpability. They all want to save money.
You could research till the cows came home, and NEVER find this info out there. You have to experience it, or trust someone who has. I have.
It’s worth doing biz with Audio Emporium because we sell great gear and vet the companies who make it. If they don’t want to step up to take care of a problem under warranty, or close to it, I’ll make them do it!
By all means, go nuts! Read prolifically about music and gear. It’s fun. But it’s a stretch in most cases to call this “research” because the source has no back story or experience. It’s usually a one off experience and often with no context of what else is competitive.
Opinions
A lot of what you read or see online is profuse opinion, period. And often false.
*Company A says you can only make speakers with first order crossovers. Company B in the same magazine opines exactly why first order crossovers “don’t work.”
*Company A says you have to connect subwoofers with speaker wires from your amp to subwoofer speaker level inputs. Virtually every other company says this is ridiculous and dramatically limits subwoofer performance for a dozen reasons.
*Company A says you need a full range driver. Virtually every other company spells out why one driver can’t possibly do it all.
*Company A says you have to run point to point wiring- it’s just better. Many competitors point out how bad a decision that is by running wires around and over component parts- which pick up RFI
and require hundreds of precise solder joints. It definitely is NOT just better!
Bottom Line
There’s a lot to our great hobby. We’ll help you DO THE RESEARCH and guide you through it and help if you encounter curve balls from any products we sell.