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| - Hi Fi should be fun and sound good. This store sounds really bad. The room they put all the equipment in is huge and is acoustically terrible. Walk on the floor and it will bounce like a drum -- boom boom boom.
It looks nice, but it sounds terrible. How can you evaluate audio in an echo chamber with a weird echo-bounce floor?
The staff are mainly young hipsters who don't know anything about the products or audio in general.
I asked them really basic questions like "how low (Hz) does this monitor speaker go" -- they did not know at all. I asked them the functional differences between the different Harbeth speakers (they said the bigger one plays louder, cleaner and lower and that's it....).
I asked them why the room sounded so bad and they said the room sounds GREAT (total emperor has no clothes) and has been carefully acoustically prepared. This is not so at all. The room is just raw brick walls, no absorbtion, no reflection, terrible central placement of their highest end system, ooooh just go there and listen and laugh). The equipment they have is good, but the room it's in is so terrible it turns an 8/10 system into a 2/10 system. A Bose wave radio sounds better in my bathroom than their 50k+ system in this store.
One staff member was very friendly and smiles but knew almost nothing. I asked what kind of bearing did turntable x use (no clue), what are the differences in the cartridges they sell (the more expensive ones sound better ... (seriously, this is what they told me)).
It seems this store tries to sell 'lifestyle' mini-systems. They have some good gear but it's either all super-close to the wall (where the speakers should be out more and sound better) or central in this giant poor-sounding room.
This remaining location (there used to be two in Toronto) sounds a bit better than the old (closed) one. That one had a huge concrete echo chamber that sounded like a bathroom or highschool gym. The new location still sounds awful.
I suggest to the owner:
- Train your staff, or demand they minimally learn the product line they sell.
- Do something with your terrible room -- you will sell more if people can hear the gear.
Once when I was in this store (I've been there a few times so this is an aggregate review), they let me use an ipod/pad to play different tracks. They hovered around me and kept retrieving the ipad so I couldn't hold on to it -- it's like they were afraid I'd steal their ipad or something. Like seconds after I selected a single track they would snatch the device back and walk away -- I'd have to call them over to hear a different track. And I was the only customer in the store (the staff were chatting with each other).
Weird hipster store that is more about image than quality of sound.
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